His devotion to bothering me has been very strong today pic.twitter.com/iqBr2iaT67
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) July 10, 2023
ICYMI:
So just to summarize today's news:
-Trump appointed US Atty says GOP IRS Hunter Biden "whistleblower's" claims are completely BS
-The other "whistleblower" who claimed that Biden was taken payments from foreign countries was literally a Chinese spy.Banner day for the GOP! https://t.co/Xh1THyKzqQ
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) July 11, 2023
Counterpoint: this is the perfect scam to run. You can convince the rubes that this spy is actually a brave whistleblower being persecuted and if only you vote R in 2024, Joe and Hunter might go to jail. In the meantime, though, you can do nothing bc of the very mean FBI. https://t.co/RyV9FO6ykf
— River_Tam (@RiverTamYDN) July 10, 2023
With no little assistance from Our Failed Major Media…
There's a unified effort by these gossip journalists for their drivel equating cursing leaders to staff who came up short of their performance as a character flaw. Beyond irresponsible. pic.twitter.com/fX3wp0BjUG
— KAMALA NATION (@KamalaNation) July 10, 2023
this is just slightly goofy but perfectly comprehensible https://t.co/gUqbu0iM7d
— rev. howard arson (@revhowardarson) July 9, 2023
kamala harris is a bad candidate but not due to anything under her control and it's shitty that she's just the whipping boy for every guy in the media who has ever barely escaped getting fired for sexual harassment
— rev. howard arson (@revhowardarson) July 9, 2023
I’m tired of the fantasy presidential tickets people keep posting on here#BidenHarris is the ticket
Why are people wasting ink writing op-eds about POTUS stepping down or taking MVP off the ticket?
Take that same energy and write about all the WORK they are doing
Be useful
— Qondi (@QondiNtini) July 8, 2023
On The Road – Uncle Ebeneezer – Yucatan Adventure Part 4 (of 8) – Uayma & Espita
Baud
We are all Amy Klobacher now.
Kay
I do think it’s bad that Biden and Harris staff are running off to complain to the gossip columnists. I imagine it’s a super stressful job and people should think about cycling out after 3 or 4 years, certainly before the second term and especially if they’re running around trashing the President and Vice President to Politico. Maybe working for a President in the White House is supposed to be a short stint job – two years or so.
OzarkHillbilly
A piece of advice that would apply to most people from time to time.
JPL
Some of the staffers should take a leave of absence and watch Veep. Who would have thought that taking a stressful job would be stressful.
Nelle
@Kay: Both have a long time in govt service. Funny that these stories come out now. The same week. I don’t trust the sources..
And meanwhile,, there is ketchup throwing on the other side. But that’s just who he is. Chuckle, chuckle. Why aren’t the Dems more perfect than perfect???
Baud
@Nelle:
Like me!
Kay
@Nelle:
I think the White House might be uniquely demanding though, for employees. They should take care of themselves instead of running off to the NYTimes/Politico gossip columnists. By its nature it’s a short term job. You see the top people in admnistrations cycle out – they’re probably burned out. The lower level people should do the same.
Sanjeevs
NYT has no mention of the news of the GOP whistleblower’s arrest.
Wall to wall coverage of their bullshit hearings, crickets when the truth comes out.
eclare
@Kay:
Ron Klain, Chief of Staff, served almost exactly two years, which must have been grueling given all that Biden accomplished in those two years.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: Yeah, no stress at all, like “You have 4 years to stop a depression, fight a war you can’t be involved in, turn half your country away from white nationalism, guide 300 million plus people thru a once in a lifetime pandemic, (etc etc etc) all while the GOP tries to obstruct you at every turn (not to mention a SC that is totally in the bag for a few wealthy patrons), and IF you are lucky, you’ll get 4 more years of exactly the same.
JR
Yelling at your staff is shitty, but ultimately, so what?
Baud
@Sanjeevs:
As much as I detest the NYT, that’s genuinely shocking.
Baud
I get tired just reading about all of the Biden administration’s work.
Tony Jay
So, just to be clear.
The super-secret ‘whistleblower’ Comer has been banking everything on was indicted for buying influence on behalf of China BEFORE he ‘suddenly remembered’ that he had the bones of a Biden Cash bestseller in him?
And Comer didn’t know/didn’t reveal this to the Media? And the Media are okay with this because otherwise the whole Bidengate nonsense goes away and they have to write stories about MAGOP Congressmen being dim-bulb liars?
But, hey, did you know that Biden and Harris take their jobs very seriously and are sometimes – we hear from anonymous sources – actually less than patient with people who don’t take theirs seriously enough? And this is a bad thing? Because something, something, something, Trump White House staff churn both sides wafflegarble let’s not be partisan about all this.
Most of the time I think your Media is better than ours, but sometimes your infotainers shift up a gear and it’s neck and neck again.
Kay
@eclare:
I’m sympathetic – I’m not a yeller and I don’t put up with yellers – but they also must know the job has brutally long hours, is very tough, and has a natural shelf life. If it were me and I were complaining to media three years in I would think about moving on. It’s not a normal job.
Balconesfault
One of the comments to the last tweet:
“Doing the easy and right thing — voting for the highly successful, progressive and professional ticket and political party — isn’t edgy, cynical and contrarian enough to give some people the confrontational high they so crave.”
This.
Kay
This is true IMO. Grim really exemplifies the gross, sexist Men of the Left to me. The Left should work on it- it’s a problem. A lot of their men are horrible people.
Baud
@Balconesfault:
Endorsed.
Baud
@Kay:
To be fair, a lot of men are horrible people. But we sort of are inured to it on the right.
Balconesfault
@Kay: “If it were me and I were complaining to media three years in I would think about moving on. It’s not a normal job.”
Wondering if part of the problem is that in the Biden Administration contracts are doled out to federal contractors based on competence and process, not on contacts and insider knowledge.
And thus the post WH staff job prospects aren’t as lucrative as under GOP Presidents.
There might be frustration that high 6 figure jobs aren’t suddenly opening up in the private sector for the current staffers the way they thought would happen.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
I think it’s important to keep in mind how large the President’s and Veep’s staff are, and not everyone in the staff is a close personal friend of Biden or Harris. Someone is going to end up disgruntled.
Kay
@Baud:
I don’t know – their weird obsessive hatred of Hillary Clinton seems to have moved naturally and easily to a weird obsessive hatred of Kamala Harris. True for all of political media too, obviously, but I think The Left consider themselves more evolved than that. They’re not.
satby
I’m pretty skeptical that these are staffer sources, or at least current ones. Smart people don’t trash their employers in any field unless they’re ready for a permanent vacation. And the Biden-Harris admin hires very smart people.
Edit: @Baud #23, pretty much what I think: disgruntled employees who are pretty low level, possibly no longer employed.
Kay
Weird that Mike Pence didn’t get any of the (wholly negative) scrutiny that Kamala Harris does.
I don’t think I read anything about Pence in 4 years other than he said he had a pet rabbit.
Nelle
I’m awake (have been since 3am), showered, and ready to go to the Capitol to get”run over” by the Republican legislature, eager to do our Karen guv’s bidding and pass abortion bans, in a one day special session. I don’t expect it to “be wild” but have hopes of a big turnout for the protest.
satby
@Nelle: 👍 stay strong and safe!
Baud
@satby:
The way things are these days, might not be a staffer at all but a Chinese spy pretending to be a staffer.
Baud
@Nelle:
Fingers crossed for a major blowback by voters.
satby
@Baud: after all, Tiger Beat on the Potomac* only cares what trash talk they spread, they’re not so picky about who spreads it.
* thanks Mr. Pierce!
Misspelling corrected. My kindle hates me, it didn’t highlight that.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … Olympic champion Caster Semenya wins testosterone ruling appeal
It’s a procedural ruling, but at least she’ll get a full appeal hearing.
Baby steps.
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@Nelle: 👊
JMG
After two years in the White House, a staffer, even a low-level one, is never going to have trouble finding a hob that’s both less intense and more lucrative. It’s funny, but I remember similar backstage stories about Obama in which aides insisted “oh, no, he loses his temper sometimes” to counter the stories’ inevitable “Obama too cool for school” theme.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Always a possibility. But I’ll go with the more likely scenario of a tired staffer whining into his/her beer and being overheard by one of the meatheads of the press.
It’s telling that the press haven’t bothered to report on Comer’s start witness actually being a Chinese spy — a truly substantive story (and a juicy one at that!). They may still, but c’mon man! this is the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes and movie rights!
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
There was that NYT reporter that lost a Pulitzer because he was so focused on proving that Biden did something shady in Ukraine that he missed the story about Trump shaking down Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Biden.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Nelle: We’re rooting for you. Take care.
Dorothy A. Winsor
If you’re weighing up your post-twitter social media options, Scalzi has a column about his experiences so far.
MomSense
Why are we frontpaging more VP bashing?
Frankensteinbeck
There is no pattern of leaks like this. I don’t have much faith in it as honest reporting.
MomSense
@Nelle:
Be safe! Keep Top Eye Open!
Kay
@Baud:
Lol. I forgot about that. I recall he had a big, dramatic appearance on cable accusing Biden right before the Trump/Ukraine story broke. Ooops!
Oh, well. Imagine all the news they missed doing 18 months of 24/7 but her emails coverage. I bet all sorts of shit happened in that year and a half.
MomSense
@Kay:
I think we learned that both the NYT and the NY FBI office were referencing that awful Jerome Corsi book.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
There’s a whole big chunk of our commentariat, mainstream, right, left, that automatically dumps on any powerful Dem woman. Hillary, Pelosi, Kamala, whoever. I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Warren, but I’m glad she wasn’t the nominee in 2020 because that media animosity would have been enough to cost us a few hundred thousand votes in those states that Biden won by low 5-figure margins.
I really wonder if it’s going to be possible for a Democratic woman to win the Presidency on her own, and I’m kinda hoping that Biden calls it quits after the 2026 midterms so that Harris can run as the incumbent in 2028.
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I am disappointed that Balloon Juice isn’t listed among the options.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Hillary almost pulled it off. Real setback for women that the haters prevailed. But I think the glass ceiling will crack some day. Maybe even 2028.
Kay
@MomSense:
And the Washington Post! Relied wholly on the same book. Good to see they’re all using independent judgment! Aren’t these people supposedly competitors? Why do they all do the same story over and over again? The media as a market is broken. It doesn’t reward merit.
Chris Christie makes half a million dollars a year blathering on CNN. That’s 7 local reporters at 70k a year, except they don’t make 70k a year, they make 40-50k. So really it’s 10. Full time.
Broken market.
RandomMonster
Some are disgruntled but most remain thoroughly gruntled.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Kos has an entertaining article about an argument between Virginia and Minnesota over a Confederate battle flag that MN regiment won from a VA regiment during the battle of Gettysburg. The flag is still in MN. VA wants it back.
NotMax
Off to snoop around Amazon for Prime Days (July 11 & 12) bargains.
Determined to not traverse down any rabbit holes, only looking for specials on items which I’ve previously passed over due to price reticence, the URLs for which I keep in a separate text file on the computer.
JML
@lowtechcyclist: are they constantly dumping on Harris because she’s a powerful woman or because she’s black? Is it the misogyny or the racism? (It’s probably both)
Of course, with Harris, they get cover from the scumbag left, who are still bitter that she got selected for VP after her presidential campaign flamed out, and they convinced themselves that their “Kamala is a Kop” push is the reason why she lost.
sigh.
Soprano2
@Kay: I think it’s a hatred of women who remind them of some woman in their past who scolded and/or controlled them – a mother, grandmother, stepmother, teacher, some woman held them to account and tried to control their bad behavior, and they hated it. I’ve heard that lots of men say Hillary reminded them of the mother-in-law they didn’t like. There are still lots of men who resent women being in charge because it reminds them of when they were young and their mother controlled their life.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The 1st Minnesota was the regiment that captured that flag. They paid a horrific cost in lives on both the second and third days of the battle. (The 1st Minnesota and the 140th New York saved the day for the Union on the second day at Gettysburg every bit as much as the more famous 20th Maine.) They have fucking earned that flag.
I love Virginia. I grew up there, and have lived more of my life there than anywhere else, even after a quarter-century in Maryland. But Virginia should STFU about this flag. They lost it, fair and square, 160 years and eight days ago. They don’t get to get it back.
Kay
@JML:
The Kamala is a Cop truancy attack was ridiculous. The California process for truancy involves 12 separate steps before the child is even truant. The parents have TWELVE STEPS of interventions and mediations and meetings before anyone sanctions them at all for not getting their kids to school and then the sanctions are a whole separate process. If you’re a parent in California and they are bringing you in because your kid is a truant you are making no effort at all to get that kid to school. Harris was absolutely right when she said it should be enforced.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thanks for that. I think his assessment is on target about most of them. I don’t intend to open a Threads account because I already see way too many ads elsewhere in Zuckworld. I also find Blue Sky to be enjoyable in the same way he does, and I pretty much split my time between it and Twitter.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:He once gave N Korea a steely eyed gaze. On yeah, another time he unloaded an empty box from a truck delivering emergency aid.
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
And which I REFUSE to follow!!!
Another Scott
@NotMax: Smart.
I use CamelCamelCamel.com to check Amazon price histories.
IIRC, last year the “Prime Days” prices weren’t any better on the things I looked at than the normal prices on normal days. Gotta be careful…
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
The truth is if Trump hadn’t picked him he was going to lose his re-elect. In Indiana. He couldn’t win Indiana. Whatever else Kamala Harris does or doesn’t do she’s already more successful than Mike Pence.
OzarkHillbilly
The same can be said of most corporations.
OzarkHillbilly
@Dorothy A. Winsor: “You can have it when you pry it from our cold, dead hands.”
eclare
@OzarkHillbilly:
Didn’t he also put his hand on some machine right next to a sign that said “DO NOT TOUCH”?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, from the “If you want it, come and take it” school of argument.
OzarkHillbilly
@SFAW: Me too. I’m retired.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: “The dumbest man in Congress.”
– I forget who
Another Scott
@eclare: Yes, yes he did.
Just astounding.
But not surprising.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@eclare: Oh yeah! That was an exhibit at an air and space museum. Too too too f’n funny.
Kay
I was in hotel rooms last week, in Cleveland again (I like Cleveland a lot so that is not a joke set up) and I caught some of Nikki Haley’s stump speeches and events on CSPAN. Wow. She’s full racist dog whistle now and vehemently amti immigrant. You forget how pervasive the quality decline on the Right is- they all suck. None of them talk about anything to do with government, ever. It’s just this cheap, griftery garbage. Trump truly destroyed them as a Party. I know they were headed this way anyway, but he just infected the whole crew like some kind of disease.
Another Scott
@OzarkHillbilly: No, it wasn’t at a museum.
Um, no. But of course, what else are they going to say??
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: My bad, at least I remembered it was associated with NASA tho!
Jeffro
Did Alex really say/write “My look at Biden’s fury“???
LOLOL
NotMax
@Kay
Bigly. Galloping staffylosuckus.
Mel
@Kay: This, exactly.
Those types of men are absolutely terrified of highly intelligent and competent women who don’t need them, would never have sex with them, and show other women that they can blaze their own paths.
Add to that the fact that these women refuse to drop off the face of the earth once past their childbearing years like the MAGOPS and crazy evangelicals and “Quiverfulls” think we should, and it’s a perfect storm for the batshit crazy misogyny.
Jeffro
You forgot “BABY FORMULA!!!! THE PRESIDENT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NATION’S BABY FORMULA SUPPLY!”
OzarkHillbilly
Broken sidewalks, crumbling houses: people evacuated as LA cliffside shifts
For some reason or other, this makes me think of Monty Python:
I have no idea of why. (I would be very surprised if their homeowners wasn’t canceled a long time ago.
Jeffro
@Dorothy A. Winsor: that’s funny!
I like the part about Virginia “asking for an inter-museum loan, as if anyone would fall for that” =)
waspuppet
@lowtechcyclist: What possible good reason is there for Virginia to want it?
And guys, let’s be clear: Comer’s “whistleblower” was not JUST arrested for spying for China. He was arrested in February. When Comer and the rest of the Hate America crowd said he was “missing” with sinister overtones, he was missing because he had JUMPED BAIL. He was just arrested again.
But hey—let’s all believe him! He MIGHT be telling the truth! Right?!
Maxim
@OzarkHillbilly:
If we are very, very lucky, yes. I’m not convinced we will be.
As for the “story,” It’s impressive that it’s taken this long for any of this kind of gossip to surface. Most administration staffers are clearly professionals in every sense.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mel: Those types of men are absolutely terrified of
highly intelligent and competentwomen who don’t need them, would never have sex with them,and show other women that they can blaze their own paths.FTFY.
Anyway
Geminid bait:
Hope no f-bombs were dropped or pearls will be clutched …
OzarkHillbilly
@Jeffro: I covered that under “etcetcetc”. Seriously, I can’t even begin to recall all they’ve done in 2 and 1/2 years all while fighting with the MAGAs who want to return us to the 18th, no, the 16th, nah, the 14th century. Every thing was just rosy back then with all those pockets full of posies!
Kent
Mother….are you there mother?
That was some weird creepy shit about his wife. I don’t remember when it came out though. On the other hand, Pence was boring as shit compared to Trump on any given day of his entire presidency.
Anyway
@MomSense:
That was the proverbial straw for me — FTFNYT whitewashed and conferred respectability on a book that was little more than thinly-sourced gossip. They didn’t do any independent verification nothing. Scurrilous rumors were front-paged for months. Oppo-research is ok but should still pass the stench-test..
ETA – wonder how long it will take for the scars of 2016 to heal …
Soprano2
I read this article this morning (gift link) and thought she had some interesting points. Many young men do seem to be adrift and uncertain about the best way to be, so they’re retreating into video games and the online world. It’s true that when you try to change what it means to be a man, and society can’t decide about what those changes should consist of (or even whether there should be any changes), it’s got to be confusing for young boys and men. I think they’re gross and repellent, but I can understand why confused young men would gravitate to assholes like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate – they offer easy answers, from the mouths of men, for how to become a man. I think the author of this piece (warning, it’s kind of long) is correct that the left needs to offer a positive idea about what it means to be a man that’s not just “be more like a woman”. Thoughts?
Kent
You know what a disaster they all are when they make Mitt fucking Romney look good.
OzarkHillbilly
@Anyway: Not until Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett are dead and moldering in the ground under piles of used kitty litter.
Kent
I read it. I’m a bit skeptical. The author is black but my sense as a HS teacher at a very diverse school is that this aimless INCEL stuff is mostly a white phenomenon. Black and Hispanic kids sure as hell aren’t into Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. They are more likely to want to be Zion Williamson or Kendrick Lamar or Kylian Mbappé or any of the bazillion Black and Hispanic athletes and stars who are on social media.
So my take is that this is yet another analysis that looks at something in white society and extrapolates it to everyone without thinking. Sort of how the whole media was/is wrapped up about how Democrats have lost the working class when nothing of the sort is true and Biden actually won handily among voters earning less than $50,000. He just lost among the white portion of the working class and then mostly just the men.
A lot of it is really about the decline in manual labor in a post-industrial society. Which means getting yourself educated.
sdhays
I think that gives them too much credit. They learned from an early age that women belong in a different world and have different “uses” and are, frankly, less important, and now broader society has rejected that (although, not enough) and it makes them uncomfortable. It’s not mommy issues.
OzarkHillbilly
@Soprano2: How does a man behave? He takes care of his responsibilities.
Ken
Perhaps this explains the fly incident.
prostratedragon
In tribute to those slick GQP ops: Dance no. 3, Liberian Suite, Duke Ellington.
Brachiator
@Baud:
RE: Why aren’t the Dems more perfect than perfect???
You’re confusing this with more pantless than pantless.
Tony Jay
Excerpt from a recent interview* given by A. G. Sulzberger to The Kolchak Report. Never aired due to the intervention of the NYT’s legal department and a temporary court injunction.
Q) “Thank you for joining us, Sir. Let me just jump straight in with a question I hear a lot, maybe you can answer it. Why does Vice-President Harris get reported on from a quite hostile “She’s not doing (well) enough” perspective compared to any male VP? For example, Mike Pence. I don’t recall any similar narrative that he wasn’t doing enough when he was in the post.”
A) “As you may have forgotten, Vice President Pence chose to comport himself in a much more traditional VP role, and we reported on him in alignment with that choice. Ms Harris, on the contrary, was quick to affirm that she would be much more action-orientated, and because she was clear that she was going to do certain things in office, we’re just doing our job by reporting on how well she’s meeting her own objectives.”
Q) “Really? By what standards? By all accounts Democrats seem pretty happy with her performance. They like her giving these issues attention and prominence and they appreciate the hard work she’s putting in, but your reporting seems to steer away from covering any of that in favour of, if you’ll forgive me here, bitching from anonymous ‘figures on the Left’ who always bash Democrats and publishing unchallenged quotes from Republicans who – shock, horror, gifs of amazement – tell you how disappointed they are. Is this a deliberate choice?”
A) “There’s a lot to unpick there, but let me just say that the work of serious professional journalists is a lot harder than some amateurs think, but, as long as voices on both extremes are unhappy with the lack of their preferred form of partisan bias in our product, we’re pretty confident we must be doing something right.”
Q) “That doesn’t really answer my question, though, does it? If you wanted to provide your readers with non-partisan, objective coverage on Vice President Harris’ work and what she’s achieved, surely it would consist of some kind of run-down of what she’s trying to do, why she’s trying to do it, and what or who the impediments standing in her way are, along with well-researched verdicts from a spread of experts on how she has or has not negotiated them. Instead, your readers are just told that “some people” think Vice-President Harris is doing too much, while “some other people” think she’s not doing enough, and that both of these groups of people agree that whatever it is she’s doing, it’s the wrong thing. What does that tell your readers other than “some people” don’t have anything nice to say about Vice President Harris, and that your editorial policy is to give them a platform from which to say it?”
A) “I’m afraid I don’t recognise that characterisation of our coverage. Our reporters win multiple industry awards for the quality and depth of their political reporting, and we’re rightfully proud of that, so I think it’s fair to say that they know what they’re doing better than “some people” who would rather we treated Ms Harris in a kinder, gentler fashion than her predecessors. Professional journalism doesn’t discriminate when it comes to asking the hard questions of those we report on, and, frankly, I don’t think we’d be doing anyone in this or any other Administration a favour by going easy on them just because they’re finding the going harder than they hoped.”
Q) “And do you have any closing comments for those people who hear that defence of your editorial policies and think that it’s not exactly apparent where those standards have been applied to Republicans when they’ve been in office?”
A) “No, I don’t think so. Our journalism stands and falls on its own merits. We’re content to maintain our high standards and answer to our readers and, in the end, to posterity, which is how it should be. If some people aren’t comfortable with that degree of professionalism, well, I hear there are any number of social media sites out there that cater to the biases of likeminded people. We’ll just stay in our lane and carry on winning awards.”
*Fake Newz!
Chris
@lowtechcyclist:
There’s a Liberal Lady Macbeth slot that as far as the mainstream media is concerned needs to be permanently occupied by whoever the most prominent woman in Democratic politics. (Usually meaning whichever one is likeliest to try to be President next).
It was Hillary Clinton for so long that there was some weird and darkly funny scrambling after 2016 to figure out who the new hate-object should be. There was the forlorn hope, lasting long after they should have known better, that Hillary might run again. There was some attempt, now largely forgotten, to make Kirsten Gillibrand the new hate-object, which faded eventually because no one but politics junkies knew who the fuck she was. Weirdest and nastiest of all, there was the attempt to make Chelsea Clinton the new hate-object, supported by the fact that, because she’d written a children’s book, she was clearly about to run for office.
Eventually things cleared and they settled on Elizabeth Warren as the new hate-object, but then she failed to win the primary, so they lost interest, and then Kamala Harris became VP. So now she’s the new hate-object, and will be for the foreseeable future.
(Incidentally, if you’ve ever watched 24, Sherry Palmer is a perfect example. Not the worst thing about the show by far, but the fact that one of the show’s most memorable villains was a power-hungry and duplicitous liberal First Lady, for which every effort was made to make her one of the most loathsome characters on the show, speaks to how deeply embedded the archetype is in the public consciousness).
Kay
@Soprano2:
I thought Obama was a good model. I think a lot of white people in Ohio connectedto (perhaps admired) his approach as a husband and (particularly, for men) a father. If liberals are looking for “a way to be a man” they couldn’t do better than him. I recall just being so grateful to him when he talked about contraception when the Catholic Church refused to cover it in their employee plans. He treats womens issues as if women are people– with dignity and agency. I was really interested in how it seemed different, better, than other male Dem pols. He also has a wildly successful wife and you just get no sense that it’s an issue.
Kent
And no doubt some part of it is because she is from the great Satan…California
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: That was an entertaining and useful take on the current state — thanks
@Baud: Vogel! For a while, I reminded him of that under every tweet. I hope it haunts him to his fucking grave.
JPL
@Anyway: That’s no fun!
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: It’s growing up with the message that you ought to be one of the kings of the world just based on what you are, with no effort on your part, then discovering that this isn’t the case. Black or Hispanic men were never told this to begin with, though they may have been told other damaging things.
Peterson and Tate have this strange toxic combination where they combine a “suck it up, little man, get to work” bluntness, that might actually be constructive in a different context, with horrible theories about the cabal that made everything wrong for them and equally horrible theories about what men should be striving for.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: Wow, where are these reporters earning 40-50k per year? *staring sadly at paycheck stubs*.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I’ll read it and as you know I see the sort of Lost Young White Men of the rustbelt on a daily basis so agree it’s a real thing, but I’m wary. So much of this commentary veers toward blaming young women for their success. It really isn’t their fault that they do better than men in school now.
I think it’s hard enough to live a decent and productive life and a lot of the lost young men seem to think they should be celebrities or millionaires. It irritates me. They maybe need to focus on the basics before becoming bitcoin investors? There’s a sort of lack of practicality that I have lost patience with. This is addition and subtraction- if they have children and they are not married they are going to be paying child support. If they make 19 an hour they cannot afford child support, rent and a truck payment. This is not existential. They can figure out this problem.
Chris
@Soprano2:
Conversely, Sarah Palin was perfect for them because she was everything they wanted in a woman. Pleasantly attractive, unthreateningly dumb, and constantly telling them that they’re the most perfect people in the world and everyone they hate is a big poopyhead.
I’ve always wondered what might have happened if she’d had a more conventional path to political stardom. The way it worked, she was plucked from total obscurity by the McCain campaign, selected to be Vice-President not President, and basically just stuck around for a few years as their main Obama-heckler before eventually fading into obscurity. She never had to spend a year in the public eye taking and giving punches with other Republican politicians who had their own fanbases; she never made her own grab for the presidency; she never did anything that might have triggered the Republican electorate’s “nasty woman”/”ambitious power-seeker” sensors.
And she was never going to because she’s a lazy asshole at heart, but if she’d tried, I can easily see the Republican base souring on her very quickly. (Sort of like how they all loved Herman Cain for fifteen minutes when he was spewing hair-raisingly racist and classist shit, but when he tried to make an issue of Rick Perry’s ranch name, and when it turned out that he might have slept with white women, they turned on him immediately. Republican primaries are not a forgiving environment if you’re something other than a white man).
Geminid
@Anyway: I expect Erdogan and Biden will have a cordial meeting. They both want 40 new-model F-16s for Turkiye, plus 80 upgrade packages for Turkiye’s existing fleet.
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez is the stumbling block here. His objections to the sale include Turkiye’s aggressive behavior towards Greece in the eastern Mediterranean as well as its adversarial relationship with the US military mission in Northeastern Syria. The last is a topic Biden will likely discuss with the Turkish President.
Fun F-16 facts: Turkiye already has about 300 of these fighters, most of them produced at a Turkish factory under license. The new F-16 version is more advanced and is considered a “Generation 4.5” fighter, which is why Turkiye wants them and the modernization packages so much.
The licensing agreement for Turkish F-16 production had an interesting condition. The planes were not delivered directly to Turkiye but rather flown to a U.S. Air Force base in Italy for a touch and go landing, and then delivered to the Turkish Air Force.
Kent
@Matt McIrvin: And to be clear. I’m not saying all is well with Black and Hispanic kids.
What I am saying is that this particular handwringing about all the “young aimless INCEL gamers” smells more like a take on a particular segment of white society that is automatically extrapolated to American men writ large in the same exact manner that the media has convinced itself that Democrats have lost the working class. It is a very bad habit in our media to identify specific white trends and extrapolate them.
And yes, I know that the author is Black. But she comes from a certain conservative religious mindset (evangelical converted to Catholicism) that perhaps isn’t representative either.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
I used to chat with the Toledo Blade reporters at political events- I’m interested. It was always funny to me because they, like me, are used to being in the driver’s seat in an interview. They’re uncomfortable answering questions because THEY ask the questions! Same for me!
The education reporter only made 30k, but I think that was always womens work and lower paid.
RaflW
D.C. is a viper pit of very ambitious (though not always very qualified) people. Madam Vice President Harris ‘churning through interns and low level staffers’ is probably not experiencing anything that every other powerful pol does.
For one thing, interns churn. That’s the f*ing point! Pop in, get experience and a resume hit, and move on before you go broke subsidizing the system with your unpaid labor!
And low level staffers never want to remain at that level. Six months in the veep’s office, and you get offered a higher slot for a Congresscritter? Hells to the yes, you’re gone. Sell that ‘access’ (even if you were, of course, low level).
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: This is true, but of course this is how any responsible adult behaves regardless of their gender. One reason I was attracted to my husband is that he didn’t have that “I have to prove that I’m a man” attitude. He didn’t feel that he needed to prove anything to anyone. Part of her article is that too many young men don’t have any good male role models in their lives, which is why they fall for the stuff assholes like Jordan Peterson are selling.
RaflW
@Kent: Being Republican means having one’s cognitive dissonance gene deeply suppressed, but even so, it’s wild that California is such a great Democrat satan, but St. Ronaldus de Bonzoburg hailed from there, as does the current Squeaker of the House.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Tate’s pitch is particularly grotesque–he starts by talking about how his viewers are all trapped in “The Matrix”, a fake reality created by malign forces in society… and then insists with maniacal fervor that the way out of The Matrix is to focus 100% of your efforts on accumulating money, and buy your way out. And that to escape from The Matrix is to live like a big baller and have private jets and honeys, etc. The Wachowskis must vomit whenever they see it.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I agree about Obama being notably great on women’s issues — not necessarily better on policy than other Dems but in the way he talked about it in terms of equality rather than protection. I am NOT complaining about Biden, who is also great on policy, but his manner is more paternalistic. Could be a generational thing. Could be because Obama, as a black man, had more insight into the importance of equality.
SFAW
@Tony Jay:
Do you ever bop over to LG&M? There’s a commenter there (“keta”) who, from time to time, does some long-form satire/snark, similar to what you just wrote. It’s usually pretty funny, as is yours.
I think you’d enjoy reading some of it. [Although lately, keta has done less satire, and more RWMF-directed rage.]
As far as A.G. “Pinche” Sulzberger is concerned: fuck him. I had hoped he would be different from his father (vis-a-vis hating on Dems and especially the Clintons), but I’m getting the sense he cranks it up to 11. FTFTF(*)NYT.
** The second “TF” stands for “Trump Fluffing,” by the way.
Kent
I’m a teacher and so I’m going to blame the past 50 years of conservative denigration of education, and especially college education, which has ramped up to a fever pitch in the past decade.
We life in a post-industrial economy. That union sawmill job your grandfather had just ain’t coming back. Educate yourself for the new economy. It is part and parcel with Nick Kristoff’s reporting on all the broken white working class folks in Yamhill County OR, which isn’t deepest Appalachia. It happens to be 20 min away from Beaverton/Hillsboro OR, the 2nd biggest tech engine in the Pacific Northwest after Bellevue/Redmond WA where endless jobs go unfilled: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html
Soprano2
@Kent: Thanks for the feedback. Even if it’s just a problem of young white men, it’s still a problem that I agree with her we need to address. Saying “just be more like a woman” isn’t an answer to a young man who is struggling with what it means to be a man.
It makes me think about the boys I went to school with. They all considered getting good grades to be “sissy”, and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. In my class of 30, all but one of the top ten students were girls. Even the smartest boys mostly made C’s. Their fathers mostly worked in factories and/or on the farm, so I think they believed men didn’t have much need for “book learnin'”. I have no idea how well they would fare today, but I think not well. I don’t think they fared that well even then.
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: I don’t know. How about “just act like a goddamn HUMAN BEING who isn’t automatically granted deference and affirmation”? Is that too difficult for some people to grasp? This whole “what it means to be a man” BS really grates on me. Maybe because I feel like I’ve had my nose rubbed in “whatever it means to be a woman, *you’re* doing it wrong!” my whole life.
Maybe because as I see more and more folks identifying as non-binary or transgender, the more convinced I feel that the sooner we could just separate gender identity from biological sex entirely, the better off we’re going to be as a society.
In my experience it’s the OLD men – my age and up – who have been the biggest fucking babies I’ve had to deal with lately. And yeah, the resentment of a strong capable woman is real with these assholes. The young ones don’t seem as bad, although admittedly I’m not seeing a large sample of them – younger women may have a different opinion.
RaflW
@Betty Cracker: Some of it may be generational, and some of it may be that Biden expresses a more protective energy because he’s suffered such catastrophic familial losses.
I’m not saying the Obamas haven’t had grief and difficulty. But I can see how Joe’s life experiences might lead to a different public presence around one’s spouse.
Kent
Looking at the electoral map from 1976 is like looking at a completely different planet. CA, OR, and WA and the rest of the west were all solidly Republican while the entire south including Texas went for Carter. https://www.270towin.com/1976_Election/
JPL
UhOh Just saw this on Mastodon @[email protected]
Federal Judge Aileen #Cannon has delayed Friday’s hearing in #Trump criminal case.
Until Tuesday, July 18
It’s the classified information procedures hearing
Hearing will remain in Fort Pierce, FL
Walt #Nauta sought delay due to lateness in hiring local counsel #legal #TrumpIndictment
rikyrah
@Kay:
The President has always seemed like a no-nonsense person.
The Vice President has to deal with Black Professional Sensibilities. She understands that her margin for error is nill. So, no, she doesn’t suffer incompetence either.
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: To be fair, I think the 1976 election was weird even at the time. It was a map out of the late 19th or early 20th century. If you go back to the 1960s you can see the forces that would dominate later starting to emerge, with the Democratic coalition splitting against civil rights in the South. But then 1976 is this throwback where the South goes massively for the Democrat.
Southern white evangelicals were starting to emerge as a political force but the first guy they bet on was Jimmy Carter.
Glidwrith
@Soprano2: I would venture young men are getting mixed signals from the homophobe/bigot/misogynists versus civilized human beings. I’m not sure why watching out for others, compassion or taking care of someone should be defined as “more like a woman”. A human being ought to behave regardless of gender/sex.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Will say it again…they hate the competency of the Biden Administration….the MSM.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2:
That sounds nothing like the schools I attended.
Soprano2
@Kay: I agree, I’ve always thought it’s ironic that Barack Obama is the kind of black man that conservatives are always saying black men should be, and look how they treated him! You hit on a key point – being a man means treating women as people in their own right, who have their own thoughts and ideas about what their lives should be like. My husband always told me he didn’t care whether I made more money than he did or not, and I believe him because it’s true. I think too many people (not just men) measure themselves by shallow measurements like how much money they have or where they live that can change quickly.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
HE WAS A SPY FOR CHINA.
BWA HA AH AH AHA HA HA HA
Kent
You put your finger on it. The problem isn’t that young men are being told to be more like women. I frankly don’t see that myself as a teacher. It is that young men (ESPECIALLY) working class boys are getting a message that denigrates education and a huge amount of it comes from their own families not wider society.
In a post-industrial age that is a recipe for failure frankly. Because those union mill jobs aren’t ever coming back.
I teach at two different high schools, one in an affluent area and one in a working class area. The difference in performance is striking. The kids of educated professional parents are busting their butts and just multiple grade levels ahead of the kids in working class areas. I don’t have a quick answer. It is an enormous problem.
Betty Cracker
I read somewhere that Ron DeSantis plans to speak to reporters outside the wingnut bubble soon — desperate times, desperate measures, etc. If so, I hope someone asks him about this:
If national inflation is Joe Biden’s fault, statewide inflation is the governor’s fault.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
They can’t ‘ both sides’, Dear.
Heaven forbid that they can’t ‘ both sides’.
Soprano2
It’s not just now, though – in my class the girls were always higher-achieving than the boys, even in grade school. The boys made it a point of pride to never make a grade higher than a C. This was in the 1970’s.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I do believe that we are pushing back, in real time, against those coming from the Vice President.
rikyrah
@Nelle:
Good luck on the protest.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Somebody on this blog years and years ago, I can’t remember who, talked about the issues with the redneck community vs other communities in their part of the country. The gist being that for the last hundred years every new group of migrants to the region, be they foreign immigrants or transplants from other places like black people in the Great Migration, arrives and starts off even lower on the totem pole than the local redneck community – for obvious reasons, they’re arriving with nothing and don’t even have any familiarity with the land. But after a couple generations, those communities have usually risen and are doing much better. The redneck community is the only one that stays static – because they believe status and wealth will or should just naturally accrue to them by virtue of who they are, which is a delusion nobody else has.
Betty Cracker
@RaflW: Maybe that’s part of it! FWIW, I wasn’t thinking about how they act toward their spouses; both seem to respect their wives as professionals and human beings, and as we saw when some nutcase rushed the stage during the primary, Jilly from Philly was the first to throw hands! I’m thinking more about how they speak about women’s issues more broadly. It’s kind of hard to pin down, but I know it when I hear it.
Juju
@Kay: I’m not familiar with Ryan Grimm beyond having heard of him, so I will take your word and the Rev. Arson’s as to Grimm being an asshole. I am disturbed by the fact that the Rev is calling VP Harris a bad candidate. I’ve heard that complaint before and I just don’t get it. She was my first choice for President and I was thrilled when she was chosen as VP by Biden. As far as I’m concerned she’s head and shoulders above VP Miracle Whip, or any other recent republican VP. Biden was a good VP and she compares very favorably to him.
Chris
@Kay:
It’s the whole toxic notion that you deserve to be, not just “doing well,” but “doing better than everybody else.”
It’s funny, because in a sense I relate to the frustration; I absolutely believe that I should have more than I currently do. But only in the sense that everybody should have more than I currently do. In a decent society, nobody should have to worry about food or shelter or health care, ever, regardless of their job situation or anything else. That much, the world does owe me, because it owes everybody that, much as it refuses to recognize it. What the world doesn’t owe me and will never owe me is a career in the field of my choice, at the top of the field of my choice, making billions and being a celebrity for it. Most people aren’t Bill Gates, most people are never going to be Bill Gates, and if people think they’re entitled to be Bill Gates and something’s gone terribly wrong if they haven’t, that’s a deeply unhealthy ideal to be holding.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: Yep. The reason he had mysteriously gone missing turned out to be that he’d gone on the lam while he was out on bail!
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: All I want at this point in my life is enough to retire in a timely fashion with a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. But that might be asking too much.
There’s a saying that goes around: “maybe you think $10 million would be enough, but if you think that way, you’ll never get the $10 million.” I’d be satisfied with much less than that but that probably means I won’t see that either.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: It probably isn’t. I went to a K-12 school where the average class size was 35 kids. It is rural, but only 25 minutes away from the 3rd largest city in MO, which is where most of the kids’ parents worked. My father used to tell me that the further south and east you went in MO, the less education was valued by the parents. He liked our school district because most of the parents did care whether their kids went to school.
Matt McIrvin
@Juju: What he’s saying amounts to a statement that any woman would be a bad candidate. If that’s true, it’s a terrible reflection on our society, but it might be true.
Soprano2
@Kent: My father (a lifetime educator, his last job was superintendent) always thought whether or not parents cared about their kids getting an education had a huge amount to do with the success of their kids in school. I can’t imagine trying to educate kids whose parents don’t care if they are educated or not.
CaseyL
@Kent: I was just thinking much the same – that there are big differences in response to “how to be a man?” among “lost” young white and non-white men.
ISTM, based on what I read, that POC still try to find a social answer, even if the answer is to join a gang. They are trying to find validation out in the world. They are engaged and active.
It’s the white boys who retreat into solitude, video games and online trolling, and eventually get recruited into fascism for real.
There’s a real difference in what happens with “Lost Boys” depending on race which I hope somebody somewhere is paying attention to.
Tony Jay
@SFAW:
Don’t they have threaded comments over there? In the great TC Wars of 2017/8 I joined up with the 3rd Jackal Dragoon Militia under Lt-Colonel Baud (before the dishonourable discharge led to the dishonourable discharge) and loyalty keeps me away. 8-)
The FTFNYT under Sulz is exactly the newspaper the FTFGuardian wants to grow up to be, which tells you everything you ever need to know about how appallingly evil their head honchos are.
@rikyrah:
“Some people say ‘spy’, some people say ‘brave undercover truth teller’, we don’t judge, we just say this is bad news for Biden.”
Brachiator
@Chris:
I loved that character in 24. I don’t recall that her being liberal was an issue.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
On the lam or hiding, Jason Bourne style, until he uncovered the evidence that would clear his name and blow the whole Biden – China – Covid tri-conspirapocalypse wide open? Eh? Eh?
You can’t prove he’s not The Fugitive, Lib! Checkmate!!
Kent
I have students (usually white students) who’s parents are openly HOSTILE to education. Their minds are poisoned by whatever right-wing idiocy they have been consuming all these years. It actually seems to be getting worse.
It is troubling. Talk about setting your kids up for failure.
Barbara
@Soprano2:
Is that what the left is doing? There are lots of questions to which no one seems to have ready answers, that being among them.
Look, a lot of things have changed, most of which are outside the control of women or “the left,” the major one being economic developments that have tended to emphasize the importance of education even for manual trades. So one might ask, what is the reaction in states that have been particularly affected by this development? How about being honest with boys and men about what is necessary to succeed? Rather than, say, moping and sulking about having to cultivate traits that are perceived to be “feminine,” which apparently, is the gravest kind of insult you can cast at a man. Forgive me for not being sympathetic with that view.
Railing against women and the left won’t change the underlying dynamic for what success requires AT ALL but maybe it feels good and deludes voters to cast blame elsewhere.
Brachiator
@CaseyL:
Being in a gang is not an answer for anyone.
Kay
@Juju:
I lke Harris a lot but I don’t think she’s a good speaker or interview. She’s somehow not easy with it in the way that good speakers always are. She’s working. It’s a rare thing to be a truly gifted politician. There just aren’t that many of them. She does a fine job substantively. Hillary Clinton wasn’t a good speaker either.
What Grimm is making fun of is different- he makes her out to be a California ditz. It’s a real problem for men on the Left, I think. I think it’s part of what attracts them to the Right, so we see the “horseshoe”. They’re really stuck in the 1990s when it comes to women.
Kent
A few years ago I had two girls in my class who were roughly equally capable. Both children of single mothers. One Asian, one White. I also happened to have met and knew both mothers. Coincidentally one worked at a hair salon at the local strip mall and one at the nail salon. Both had plans for their daughters. One told me she had a chair in the salon waiting for her daughter and she just needed to keep her from getting pregnant and her future was laid out. The other was picking my brain about SAT test prep programs that she was saving scarce $$$ for and wanted her daughter to go to Stanford and become a surgeon. (she didn’t get into Stanford but she did get into UW) You get one guess as to which was which.
Expectations…
We seem to have created a whole segment of society that doesn’t seem to expect BETTER for their kids if better means different. It is troubling.
Chip Daniels
@Soprano2:
I believe that misogyny is more prevalent than racism because while not everyone encounters ethnic minorities, everyone encounters females and in a very intimate role like a mother/daughter/wife.
Kay
@Barbara:
It’s what I do with my juvies and I think they respect it. I want them to succeed. I also want them to stop moping and blaming everyone else, but that’s just because it’s annoying :)
They can’t tell me they can’t get a good job and then refuse to take and pass Algebra One to get into an apprenticeship. I know they don’t want to! I don’t care. That’s the way to 40 bucks an hour. Minimum math proficiency and 5 years as an apprentice.
For Christ’s sake Obama had a program for rural (white) young men where they were given gas cards to get to technical school for training. I had to fucking talk them into it. Obama was the best thing that ever happened to them until Joe Biden, who is even better.
They have opportunity. It is just false to say they don’t.
geg6
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I like Virginia, which is unusual for me as I generally do not like the south. But VA can go fuck itself on this issue. No, they can’t have their traitor flag, captured at the cost of hundreds of MN lives, back. Fucking losers.
Mel
@OzarkHillbilly: I absolutely agree – all women are seen as damaged, less than, and chattel by the extreme right. This is the culture that was prevalent in the rural community where I grew up. “Good” women went to church, married young, had children when they were barely more than children themselves, and “knew their place”.
Many of them suffered in private from abuse of all sorts from spouses, parents, church authority figures, etc. , but the ones who toed the line were never the subject of the kind of blatant, highly vocal hatred and the coordinated and very public barrage of venom and shunning behaviors that the women who defied the expected norms received. There was a particularly terrifying kind of vengeful wrath to the treatment of women who stepped out of line that eclipsed even the awfulness of the daily abuses that so many women had been conditioned to see as normal and (horrifyingly) something that inexplicably they “deserved” because… Eve? Snakes? Skirts above the knee? Dinner ready fifteen minutes later than expected? Who knew what the excuse of the day would be, because you’re right, the real issue was not what the women had supposedly done, but, instead was preventing any woman from gaining the confidence or hope or knowledge that would lead to them questioning the status quo and breaking the cycle.
I think that is why the concerted public hatred unleashed towards highly visible, confident, successful (however that is defined in each individual case) women is so spectacular. They are the flies in the pudding – the living proof that there is another, better option possible. The few women from the evangelical community who were allowed “authority” were almost always charged with perpetuating the cycle. They taught Sunday school, or “counseled” (without any real training or education) young couples about “marriage in Christ”.
Kay
I actually think the Rust Belt crisis of young men is passing, which explains media discovering it with “solutions” :)
I think the Obama and Biden investments in areas like mine are paying off and you’ll see them rise here shortly. Some of the young men, however, will be left behind but honestly if they aren’t working now in this market they just aren’t going to work. And I don’t know what Biden or anyone else can do about that, because it isn’t because they couldn’t get manly jobs in manufacturing or trades- they really could have.
Kay
@geg6:
lol. You are great :)
Nelle
Really noisy here in Iowa’s Capitol. Don’t know how to post the video. But quietly, ruthlessly, they are banning abortion. We got here early and I got 10 minutes with the affable, presiding senator that insists that he saw the actual, formed heart beating on his daughter’s ultrasound of her fetus. I said, if it was at six week, you were looking at an embryo. He said that we disagreed because he was prolife. I said I’m prolife too and since guns are the leading cause of children death, will he work on gun regulation?
Then I ended up talking with Vivek Ramaswany, now in third in Iowa, for the GOP nomination for about fifteen minutes. We disagreed on most everything but all done with exquisite civility.
I’m overwhelmed by the echoing noise in the rotunda and am taking a little break.
The Thin Black Duke
From what I can remember, I have been called the N-word by white people only twice in my life. However, I’ve lost track on how many times I’ve been called a f*ggot by men of different races. I’m not gay, but it didn’t matter. Toxic masculinity is very much a thing, and while it fucks over women, it also fucks over men who deviates from their rigid definition of what it means.
Soprano2
@Kent: I’ve heard teachers talk about this. I had a friend who did a long-term substitute gig in a rural school. She had a promising 8th grade boy whose father pulled him out after 8th grade so he could go to work and earn money for the family. She said the father’s attitude was “Going to the 8th grade was good enough for me, it’s good enough for him. Any education after that is nothing but a waste of time”. You still see this attitude in rural areas, it’s troubling.
My father’s parents were pro-education – they were rural and poor, but made sure all 8 kids graduated from high school, which was unusual here in the 1950’s. Even the one girl who had to take a year off to help mom out when she broke her leg went back the next year and finished. My father believed that education was the way to success for everyone; it certainly was for him.
RaflW
@Nelle: Wow, nicely done!
IMO Ramaswamy may use civil tones, but his tech bro desired disruption of government is absurd and actually very dangerous.
“Fire everyone in civil service” is the bumper sticker for a flaming, fatal Tesla wreck.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I know exactly how you feel.
Mostly, I resent a society that tells me that I need to be getting the ten million dollar jobs in order to be doing okay. (Which, given what health care still costs in this place, might be hyperbole but not by much). And once I have that job, that I shouldn’t worry about all the people who weren’t able to get it, because clearly they’re just losers so they deserve it. Supposing for the sake of argument that they are just losers, which most of them aren’t, even losers deserve three square meals a day, a roof over their head, and medical care that isn’t going to cost them the two former things if they ever try to use it.
Baud
@Nelle:
Reminds me of this.
Blue Galangal
At this point shouldn’t we be considering Twitter a failed media experiment?
Barbara
@Kay: My mother thought that the problem was that most men had moved on, retrained, or what have you, but those who wouldn’t or couldn’t or didn’t think they should have to were exceptionally noisy. They were also the most likely to stay in a place rather than relocate to take advantage of other opportunities.
CaseyL
@Brachiator: My point was that their coping mechanism still involved going out and being with people, in the world.
You can build on that, maybe.
Boys who retreat into an online fantasy world don’t give you much to work with.
Chris
@Barbara:
That seems to be rural America’s problem in a nutshell. As the countryside increasingly empties, what’s left is increasingly just the loud, belligerent, and proudly ignorant assholes.
narya
@The Thin Black Duke:
This. My (60-something, white, cis, straight) friend has been around this toxic shit (e.g., played adult hockey), and he loathes it. On paper, and given his family, he “should” have absorbed a whole lot more of it, but it just pisses him off, particularly around the subject of guns. He’s a hunter, and his dad wore a gun to work (state cop), so he’s familiar with them, but he thinks the gun-fondling is a sign of weakness, not strength, and he absolutely loathes the manly-man posturing. I haven’t dragged him as far left as I am, but he does see that that toxicity affects everyone, including the people it is supposed to “benefit.”
The Moar You Know
@Soprano2: I’ve never seen “the left” offering that. Anywhere. Literally not one single place.
I think there is a desperate need for “the left” to come to a positive and constructive accommodation with men, young ones in particular, and give them reasons to “be left” – the numbers game alone makes that absolutely necessary – but nobody is suggesting that they be like women save for the fevered imagination of some psychotic righties.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: And it’s really not that different from Andrew Tate insisting that the path out of the Matrix that imprisons us is to become super-rich.
Geminid
@Blue Galangal: I don’t know. I’ve been on Twitter more the last few weeks than ever. It’s still a good place to follow foreign news, and I get a kick out of arguing or agreeing with people from other countries.. I’m signed in but never comment on my own account, just reply to others.
I suspect one reason I’ve turned to foreign news is that the political scene here is kind of static right now. A summer lull. But there has been a lot going overseas.
Gin & Tonic
Another RU general gets to the “find out” part of the story.
Brachiator
@CaseyL:
Being in a gang is a dead end. It’s not blandly being with people. It is typically being in an anti social, misogynistic environment.
Real guns are better than fantasy weaponry??
Do you equally advocate gang life for white people?
JPL
@Nelle: Wow! Good job.
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know: We don’t insist that there’s a need to be DIFFERENT from a woman, though, because why would you? There’s nothing wrong with women. What does the difference between men and women have to do with being a responsible adult or a good citizen? Nothing. That’s the whole point of feminism.
But it seems like there are people who actually need some kind of insistence on sharply defined gender roles, or else something is being taken away from them and they’ll spiral into insanity or criminality. I don’t know, I’m not sure the remedy makes sense.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Baud:
The class is always seeing things:
rikyrah
AFP News Agency (@AFP) tweeted at 8:50 PM on Mon, Jul 10, 2023:
VIDEO: Brazilian river polluted with toxic foam.
It looks like a snowy winter scene, but the Tiete river — in Sao Paulo state, Brazil — is actually covered in a toxic foam. During the dry season, sewage and waste water dumped into the river creates the foam, with much of it… https://t.co/AAckUhHFgk
(https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1678582514116628480?t=yI1jcS-EeHsPT7Hi2y9OXA&s=03)
rikyrah
The Black Wall Street Times (@TheBWSTimes) tweeted at 9:45 AM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
A suburban Detroit police officer who punched a young Black man in the face and slammed his head to the ground was charged Monday with a federal civil rights crime.
https://t.co/Hqss6jQtZr
(https://twitter.com/TheBWSTimes/status/1678777495267725314?t=DycI6oV6xRuPiOl4sUv-JA&s=03)
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: It sounds like a lot of other Russian officers were killed as well. Evidently they’d set up headquarters in a hotel in the occupied city of Berdyansk. It was an obvious target that locals say was completly demolished last night.
Observers say the strike was most likely made with a British-supplied “Stormshadow” cruise missile.
rikyrah
UH HUH
UH HUH
Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) tweeted at 10:18 AM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:
We are about to get a clue on whether Judge Aileen Cannon is illicitly working for Donald Trump or serving all of us Americans.
(https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1678785785561006085?t=IU49bEjD_BmoqpP_JKkOdA&s=03)
Kent
I have a whole lot of MAGA evangelical gun worshipers in my extended family. Something about gun worship literally makes people paranoid. These are dipshits who have convinced themselves that suburban Portland is a “no-go” zone and that they need to be armed to get a carton of eggs at Wal-Mart.
Never seen such a bunch of paranoid wimps in my whole life.
rikyrah
Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) tweeted at 10:18 AM on Tue, Jul 11, 2023:![]()
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AP News is perceived as the sole bastion of independent journalism that remains available to us.
BREAKING
Public colleges and universities have been strategically using visits by Supreme Court justices as occasions to cultivate donations. These institutions have organized… https://t.co/AroCUjJplP
(https://twitter.com/allenanalysis/status/1678785761737359362?t=iSbrafdRi6Q9GJ7-ShmkZw&s=03)
MisterForkbeard
@Omnes Omnibus: When I was in high school, many of the really smart and accomplished students were women. It was honestly about 50/50.
That said, it was cool for the boys to pretend to not care about getting good grades, and I knew several girls who were ludicrously smart but deliberately got bad grades and acted dumb because they thought it made them more attractive. And that was only 20 years ago, so a lot of those kids are now middle mamagement.
Chris
@The Moar You Know:
Yeah.
What is true is that “the left” generally argues that people would be better off if they embraced certain values, but that a lot of men reject these values as being coded feminine and therefore inappropriate for them, even though they’re values that apply to everyone.
But as with so many things they won’t actually come out and say that they’re the ones bringing gender into it, so instead they phrase it as “the left thinks we should all be like women.” And naturally the media cheerfully plays along.
Steeplejack
@Kay:
I thought I read that he was a pet rabbit. 🤔
UncleEbeneezer
@Soprano2: The answer is pretty simple. Ditch the misogony. That’s it. Be as muscular (or skinny) as you want. Dress in all-camo (or on flashy colors). Be passionate about farming or fashion design. Men (like Women and NB people and everyone else) should be allowed to explore all versions of being Men. Just don’t confine Masculinity only to actions/attitudes rooted in misogyny. There are plenty of great manly/masculine examples out there. Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, John Fetterman, Pedro Pasquale, Dwayne Wade, Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, The Rock, Jay-Z…all of them are masculine but also supportive of girls/women and LGBTQ people. They don’t run around pushing some Man-Of-The-House bullshit about their families. They don’t shame LGBTQ people. They don’t go around talking shit about men who wear pink or wear a skirt or whatever. Just don’t whine about efforts to uplift Women. Just stop doing all those bullshit behaviors and we (Boys/Men) can be anything we want to be. There are no policies punishing us. We are not oppressed in any way. There’s nothing “Feminine” about empathy. There’s nothing “Masculine” about lack-thereof. It’s always been a ruse rooted in Patriarchy. I think most of the problems boys/men struggle with now are of our own making because we just can’t abandon traditional thinking about gender. But that’s what we need to do.
Wapiti
@lowtechcyclist: And it took Virginia 150 years to take down their monuments to the
menfilthy traitors whose armies killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden.Come back in 150 years, Virginia.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Uh Huh
Uh Huh
rikyrah
@Mel:
never forget…
they told Hillary that she should just go home and knit…
while, they welcomed loser Willard into the Senate.
Jackie
deleted
Barbara
@Chris: Efforts to make high speed internet available nationwide might actually help to stabilize at least some rural communities, not that anyone will give Biden credit for galvanizing the effort.
Jackie
@Nelle: Watching “you” live on MSNBC! Huge crowd! Stay safe!
rikyrah
@Brachiator:
Lord, I loved me some Sherry Palmer :)
rikyrah
@Kay:
The path is there….do they want to take it?
This is the issue.
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid: A real shame.
VOR
@OzarkHillbilly: Along these lines, the Parable of The Bowls from The Wire. Mayor Carcetti talks to a former mayor about the demands of the job.
Kathleen
@Nelle: Good for you! Give ’em hell!
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: This strike on a Russian headquarters could have tangible, near-term results on the battlefront. Command and control has been impaired at a critical time. Plus a big factor now is the Russian Army’s will to fight, and this can’t help.
narya
@rikyrah: And, IMHO, that’s where the toxic internet/social media steps in: $40/hour sounds great, unless you think you “should” be able to make high six figures (with your barely-made-it-out-of-high school education and no discernible skills). It’s like they see a photoshopped/filtered version of a life, from people who don’t appear any smarter or more educated, and who don’t appear to work very hard, and they don’t realize that is not how life is for the vast majority of us.
Kathleen
@satby: Given how the media lie and omit salient information I would not put it past them to “invent” disgruntled staffers. I’m sure there are some, of course. But like Nelle I’m very suspicious of the “sources” and the fact that these particular hit pieces surface now after all the years Joe and Kamala have been in public life.
Kathleen
@Soprano2: I swear the media ghouls had horrible childhoods and think their job is to play out their mommy/daddy psycho dramas in the political “reporting”. They literally drool over Rethuglican Bully Daddies.
Kathleen
@Anyway: I remember Axis Maggie’s 2016 tweet: “Amy Chozick got her hands on Clinton Cash, y’all!”
UncleEbeneezer
@narya: Boys are immersed in a sense of entitlement that is really hard to shake. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my sister studied way harder than I did, as a kid. I didn’t feel like I had to. I could’ve been a much better student, but I definitely feel like being a white boy made me lackadaisical towards learning. One thing that needs to be fixed is that our society in general needs to redefine learning/education as something that isn’t nerdy or girly, if we ever really want boys/men to reach their potential. I know so many men who goofed off instead of studying not just because they were lazy, but also because they didn’t want to be viewed as nerds/geeks. “Teacher’s Pet” was an insult that was usually uttered by boys (at other boys). That needs to change.
Miss Bianca
@UncleEbeneezer:
Whole-heartedly agree. I think that’s what I was struggling to say up top, but you’ve expressed it much more pithily, thank’ee!
Kay
@Barbara:
I’m sympathetic to that for low and lower middle income people, though. It makes a lot of sense. They are constantly having crises because they live so close to the edge. That’s when family and friends are an absolutely essential safety net – a car battery, a utility bill payment, some free child care. It’s too hard to be both poor and alone. They won’t make it. We say in court that some of the family systems are like “redundencies” – so mom is operating at 50% or dad is operating at 25% but there is grandma and grandpa or aunts and uncles parttime and these groups “equal” two whole parents. You sort of cobble them together to make the equivalent of 2 adults. It’s why when you talk to poor children they have all these people they refer to- this aunt and that grandma provides or does this or that. I have to draw names and lines sometimes – “Karla”, paternal aunt, takes to school” – the collateral relatives play a much larger role than they do in middle or upper middle families.
Soprano2
@The Moar You Know: The writer suggested that this is some of the problem, and I don’t know if it is or not. She said liberals tell men to be nicer, which she interpreted as “be more like a woman”. Things like being nice shouldn’t have a gender, though. I think of it more as “don’t be an asshole”.
Juju
@Kay: I guess I’ve missed the interviews where she came across as a bad interview and speaker. There is a big part of me that thinks that opinion is a huge double standard. Other than Obama, tell me who’s a stellar interview or speaker? Bush? Trump? Cheney? Pence? Gore? Kerry? To me, and I know I’m not everyone, she comes across as a nice, thoughtful, intelligent human being. I’ve always thought that the woman who could make Bill Barr and Brett Cavanaugh hem and haw and nearly wet their pants in senate questioning is fine with me. As for Ryan Grimm, I couldn’t watch the video to see what his problem was, but if that’s his attitude, then he really is an asshole. He’s probably one of those men who doesn’t realize that women may express themselves differently from men because we’ve had different experiences and we are judged differently. Sometimes no matter how we express ourselves it will be criticized for being to bitchy or to ditzy or too cold or whatever bugs that person about women. Think Hillary Clinton.
UncleEbeneezer
@Miss Bianca: Well that’s a first, lol! (I’m not known for my economy of wording, to put it mildly)
The Lodger
@Nelle: Thanks for being there, Nelle. It must be heartbreaking seeing what happened to a formerly representative government.
Juju
@rikyrah: That really pissed me off. On the other hand, Hilary was in the senate before She was a candidate and long before Mitt.
UncleEbeneezer
It’s also notable that in that article on Masculinity there’s a concern about a version of Man/Masculinity that still gets respect but isn’t what Feminists and Liberals preach. The thing is you DO GET RESPECT by being Feminist, having empathy, supporting LGBTQ people etc., you just don’t get it from MAGA assholes. I suspect that that’s the problem for many of these men. They want a type of Masculinity that isn’t toxic but will also get them respect from their MAGA family/co-workers etc. But that’s impossible because anything that deviates too much from traditional Patriarchal Masculinity is never going to be respected by the Chuds. They just don’t want to admit that it’s their MAGA community that is/are the problem and a positive/healthy masculinity means saying “fuck those people” and giving up the expectation of their approval.
Also, can we please stop with the Boy-tears over “Men Are Trash/Dogs?” For fuck’s sake, it’s really not that hard to get the point, admit it’s collectively true and just go about your day without being any less of a man. It’s just a dumb fauxtrage that men use to try and pretend we are somehow the victims. I really wish the author didn’t treat it like a serious concern. It isn’t.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Mike Pence is Mr Milk Toast.
Soggy, brain of mush, personality of week old anything left out on the counter for a month. Afraid of his own shadow, all the humanity of, well, milk toast. SFB didn’t pick him because of his sterling personality, high intellect and force full demeanor. Oh wait, yes he did.
VP Harris is anything but that.
Ruckus
@JML:
It’s – E. All of the above.
satby
@Brachiator: You completely missed the point of what she’s saying.
And there are programs for redirecting gang vulnerable kids into more productive lives. The Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance is one.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
As a male child, raised by a mom who thought that she was in charge of HER children’s lives, not just as children but until our last breaths, and at a time when male/female rolls were changing (not the biology, the societal customs) rather drastically, being adrift should not be underrated as a result – of either gender. It’s a better world with gender equality, but it’s not a transition that was/is always welcomed or understood. It should be, it makes this a far better world.
Ruckus
@Kay:
They can figure out this problem.
I’m not sure they can. And I say this as one of the same gender. The world is a lot different than it was 60-70 yrs ago. It will likely be different in 60-70 yrs from now. When I was born it hadn’t changed significantly in a very long time. It seems that it’s changed more in the last 50 yrs than it did 150 yrs prior. There are a lot of reasons and those are part of why I think it will continue to change. First because it always does, and second because it can still be a lot better. And it will be a better place for more people than it was when I was a kid. It already is. It will improve, as long as humans continue to work at improving it, rather than just trying to profit financially.