I feel like time has just been screaming by the last month or so. Not sure what is provoking that- the changing seasons and earlier sunsets, the preoccupation of having anxiety attacks about the election coupled with the 2016 ptsd, the whirlwind week with Joelle in town, etc. Probably all that and more.
At any rate, I got back to the gym today for the first time in six days and it was rough. It is complete and total bullshit that it takes months of work to get to where you are and you can lose it in under a week. Some how or another I have also pulled a muscle in my calf by walking. Yay.
Just gotta get my fat ass up and go back tomorrow.
Once again, thank you, Tamara, and thank all of you for the surprise virtual engagement/wedding/whatthefuckever shower. Joelle was just tickled when I told her and we decided we are going to use it to pay off the ring.
I still haven’t read all the comments but I bookmarked the page to make sure I do. My mind keeps wandering when I start to read them because so many of you have mentioned places that were old haunts for me and then I go to the internet archive and then think of something else and then I’ve just lost an hour. So many laughs. So many good people no longer with us. So many smart people who were just random pseudonymous people but who knew more the 99% of the people on tv. I hadn’t thought about when I had written at Sgt Stryker’s Daily Briefing or Red State in years. Lot of good memories.
At any rate, thank you all again.
I am really trying to remain confident about the election and honestly do think we have a very good chance to win and a chance to win REALLY big. But there is always the “what if” lurking back there, like the monkey on a junkie’s back, just begging me to spiral into depression.
I’m really just exasperated at this point with people, and I think this is something solidly blue state people do not understand what it is like to be just absolutely surrounded by “them.” And it has been ten years and still, to this day, every now and then, I find out about someone new who I used to regard as a normal decent person but who has morphed into a Trump cultist. And it’s just as jarring and just as sad every time it happens, as I stand there and wonder what could possibly have gone wrong with them in their life to make them this way.
And some of you are thinking “just don’t think about it” or “take a break,” and I would love to. But when you are deep in the heart of one of the dumbest most Trumpiest states in the country, you can’t. There is no respite from it. Everywhere you look there is a flag or a decal or a sign. You walk into 2/3 of the businesses and it is on Fox News. It’s on the little tv terminal on the exercise bike at the gym so before you can even start to ride the bike you have to find the fucking remote to turn it off. It’s the two old dudes walking in the lane next to you on the track as you pass them. It’s people talking while standing in line or while eating at a restaurant.
It’s just in your face and nonstop and it drives you to fucking madness and you just want to scream and run home before you become a viral tiktok or youtube or spot on the 11 o’clock news. Non trumpers speak in hushed tones and use hand an arm signals. A woman walking through kroger saw my harris shirt and looked around before giving me a thumbs up. It’s just that fucking bad. The only upside is watching how excited some people get when they see someone actually wearing a Harris t-shirt or sticker on their car. They pull up next to you at the light and roll down the window and yell “I love your sticker.”
It’s fucking crazy and I don’t think many people appreciate how bad it is- or why I have so little patience for progressives or the white dudebro socialists trying to depress the Harris vote because she’s not progressive enough or bitching because she is not recoiling in horror and disgust at the Cheney endorsement or going after Republican votes. Motherfuckers do you not understand what is going to happen to women and minorities in blue states? Do you not understand how bad it is going to be for kids? For everyone?
I’m reposting this from Tamara’s thread just because it was so much fun and we need a change of tone after that little pity party above:
I wrote this cause it’s what I always wanted to say about Trump pretending to be a tough guy. But we got the amazing @DaveBautista to say it SO much better. Thanks Dave. #TrumpIsAWeakLittleBabyBitch pic.twitter.com/Mo4ZMpOPVH
— Jesse Joyce (@jessejoyce) October 17, 2024
I’m gonna go have some soup and watch Britbox. You kids be good to each other.
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, oh my!
TBone
Kyle Cheney xit:
7:47 PM · Oct 17, 2024
Hang in there!
Scout211
Awww! That makes me happy, Cole. We helped you pay off the ring! That just feels so special. 😊 ❤️
Added: way to go, all you generous jackals!
Sister Golden Bear
If it makes you feel any better, a federal judge just ruled DeSantis can’t prosecute media outlets for airing TV ads that support Florida’s abortion rights amendment, writing in his ruling:
frosty
Your description of WV matches my part of South PA. I don’t do yard signs in this neighborhood, or bumper stickers.
Meanwhile, the best thing I saw today on this Full Service Blog was this: Kamala to hecklers: “I think you’re at the wrong rally. You want the smaller one down the street.”
Nukular Biskits
I feel ya.
I was down a week due to a “stomach virus”. Lost 10 lbs. I had just gotten back to where I was running part of my 2.25 mile morning walk … and now? It’s like I’m starting from scratch again.
Nukular Biskits
Mississippi sez, “Hold mah beer!”
geg6
@TBone:
Excellent.
Ksmiami
At this point, I hope the Trumpers lose everything. I don’t care
CaseyL
That was a whirlwind of a week! Your daily updates were amazing: every day you seemed like a one-person army of cooking, catering, and cleaning. And seeing people. And distributing lawn signs. And mowing grassy swards. How can you have lost fitness when you never seemed to stand still??
I had the same “this sucks and is unfair!” reaction when I missed some time at the gym (years back, when I went to a gym) and found I’d lost so much ground. It does suck and it is unfair. (It may be some evolutionary holdover from primeval times: not being active signaled that winter had come, and it was time to bulk up against the cold.)
I’d love to give you some reassuring words about the election, but I seesaw myself between hope and dread. No way past but through, though, so hang in there. You have lots of company on the knife’s edge.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I am a white person in a blue state so I may not have any standing to say this, but your comment about being surrounded by Trumpist trash reminded me of how I imagine being black in America (outside of black neighborhoods etc.) must feel. Surrounded by people to whom you are “other”, with the threat of violence unspoken. I am a woman, so maybe I can extrapolate from being a woman surrounded by men (in certain situations). I have read that some people found the COVID lockdowns mentally soothing for various reasons, especially blacks who didn’t have to deal with micro aggressions from whites every fucking day.
Gvg
It’s the damn anti vax stuff from otherwise sane people that are currently driving me nuts. They are sure they know more than doctors and scientists. People who have health issues refusing to get flu shots. Those aren’t vaccines because you can still get the flu was todays argument that I had to ignore. People just don’t get what statistics mean. And so many people say they have bad reactions to this or that.
For 30 years I got the flu shot and went back to work after our benefits fair. No reaction. Never occurred to me that more than a few did, but now after the publicity of the Covid shot reactions, everyone says they have bad reactions. And they are scaring more people into not getting more shots.
I knew I was going to hate changing to cubical after having an office for so many years, but this wasn’t what I pictured.
The Audacity of Krope
@Sister Golden Bear: They really just challenge everything, everywhere. No facet of reality and certainly no government institution is off limits.
This is just such a plainly obvious fact of our system of government. How much taxpayer money went to adjudicate the obvious.
Bill Arnold
Re the Dave Bautista vid, Mr. Trump, who has postured as an alpha macho man all his adult life (and even as a teenager; I’ve heard second-hand stories), literally does not know, at the age of 78, how to make a fist. His “stage fist” would break if it hit anything solid, or the wrist would be sprained, or both. A well-trained 10 year old kid could down him out 20 times out of 20. I have seen precisely one image of him with a proper fist, when he was posing with a Tae Kwon Do master in what resembled (upper body at least) a fighting stance. And those guys do not tolerate weak fists. (I’ve corrected many a fist, assisting in classes.)
WikiHow – Make a Fist
mrmoshpotato
OT – fuck the fucking Yankees! Go Guardians!
HinTN
@The Audacity of Krope:
Nominated
bbleh
I definitely get the “surrounded” thing.” When I lived in WVstan, there was always a feeling of oppression, even if a lot of that was just in my head.
I didn’t pick fights, and I didn’t do stupid sh!t like run my mouth unprompted in a bar, but OTOH I didn’t hold my tongue all the time either, especially when someone started yapping at me, and it was surprising how many people gave not just surreptitious approval but active smiling “ain’t that the truth!” kinda stuff. There’s a lotta sensible people out there, even if they’re not the loudest, especially in certain places.
And there’s always BJ, Your Island Of Sanity™.
Baud
Holy crap, Cleveland!
Harrison Wesley
@Gvg: You just have no respect for science.
https://www.panaccindex.info/p/review-stanfords-pandemic-policy
Melancholy Jaques
@mrmoshpotato:
Big Christmas says, Not yet Yankees!
TS
@Sister Golden Bear:
That sure brought a smile and if I knew how to add smiles to a post I would do so – have to be content with ROFL
The Audacity of Krope
@HinTN: If we do that, please fix my punctuation failure.
And thank you.
wjca
Somehow Idaho was my first thought. I guess just because it’s much closer.
Villago Delenda Est
Nothing gets over Dave Bautista’s head.
Anoniminous
DA-ADDDDDD!!!!!!! Watergirl is hogging the remote and won’t let us put the game on!!!!
Hungry Joe
Cole’s environs are SO different from mine. Same country, but …
I’m way down in the lower-lower left-hand corner of the USA. Deep blue state, light blue city, deep blue neighborhood. We haven’t received a single piece of mail for the Presidential election, only one from our safe (and wonderful) Congresscritter Sarah Jacobs … and nothing from whatever sacrificial R is running against her. More and more Harris/Walz yard signs popping up, and not a one for Those Two. Saw a guy wearing a MAGA hat a few days ago and literally did a double-take.
Ten miles east of here — inland — and it’s MAGA Central. Just walking around, just BEING, must feel so different.
Baud
Do they not use the guy on second rule in extra innings in the playoffs?
bbleh
@The Audacity of Krope: and especially of the willingness of the authoritarians to ABUSE it.
The courts DO have ways of punishing this kind of abuse — penalties for contempt or frivolous filings for example — but they’re usually pretty reticent about using them except in obvious and extreme situations. I wonder whether that may change, if and as this kind of behavior by
assholesour esteemed fellow Americans continues.Starfish
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): There were a lot of kids who did not have to experience racism at school.
Starfish
@Gvg: In my family, we have reactions to shots, but most of those reactions are not SERIOUS reactions.
We get some swelling and redness due to certain shots that will subside within a day or two.
This is not people experiencing seizures or any other thing classified as a SERIOUS reaction.
Chet Murthy
I’ve lived in Blue areas all my adult life. But I grew up in TX, and when I visit my mom back there, I have that same feeling. It’s like a weight, I can’t breathe, I just don’t feel safe, I feel on edge all the time. I had that feeling visiting Orlando for a conference, everywhere except the conference. B/c Southern accents trigger me.
Raven
@Baud: Are there any rules changes from the regular season?
The regular-season rule in which an automatic runner is placed on second base at the start of extra innings is not used in the postseason.
wjca
Making it interesting. And giving their fans their money’s worth.
Steve Holmes
I live in the bright blue city of Durham, NC, but Inride my road bike in the mostly red Durham county. I don’t put too much stock in yard signs, in 2020 the county folk had huge Trump displays, they bought all the swag; signs, flags, posters, banners, it was garish. On my Sunday ride there are a few normal political signs, I saw three houses with small H frame Trump signs, and one with a big homemade erection, much less than 2020. I also saw one Robinson sign, WTF? These people are still voting for Trump but aren’t spending money on the swag.
our city is full of Harris signs, which makes me happy.
Baud
@Raven:
Thank you.
The Audacity of Krope
If the courts are looking for anywhere to set an example, a sitting Governor must look mighty tempting.
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Here’s video
Citizen Alan
@Nukular Biskits: Oh Jesus Christ, what have they done now!
Baud
Wow.
Hungry Joe
GUARDIANS!
TomB5
I live in a sorta blue state but in a county dominated by Trumpkins. Brother Cole I know exactly how you feel.
Citizen Alan
@Chet Murthy: I dread going back to Mississippi for Christmas, but I have to figure out how to persuade my sister to buy me out on the land we inherited (or allow me to sell my half to a cousin without her going into squalling hysterics over it). But I view it as being one notch above spending the holidays in some Third World country.
mrmoshpotato
Woo! Walk off homer for Cleveland!
Scout211
@HumboldtBlue: Oh my. That was awesome. And the crowd goes wild!
hitchhiker
Love this place and do not actually know how I’d be getting thru these weeks without it.
I live in a very blue part of a very blue state, so it’s pretty easy to take a breather from the potential of impending disaster. When I go to the gym (or anywhere else), no one is watching Fox. No one is wearing a red mark of doom hat. There are no flags waving from pickup trucks, and no giant yard signs reminding me to be angry and scared.
And still, I am angry and scared a lot. I share my country with 70 million people who are unthinkably easy to manipulate and another 100 million (at least )who are indifferent to things that ought to set their hair on fire. It’s why my hair is on fire.
I gotta address 50 postcards tonight, and when that’s done I’ll feel better.
Citizen Alan
@TomB5: I’m in Fresno, which is a fairly red part of California. Tom McClintock is my congressman (barf!) But it’s still Berkley compared to North Mississippi.
wjca
@Baud: I had the same question. But I think I saw it in a previous playoff game….
Spanky
Doesn’t anyone recognize the guy taking Bautista’s punches at the start of that video?
Chet Murthy
@hitchhiker: Same here on all counts. I could ignore it: I’m surrounded by enough LGBTQ, black, brown, and Asian folks that I could just bask in the safety. But …. like you, I can’t stop thinking of the danger and what might happen. I’ve stopped talking to my family and friends, not b/c they’re Trumpist (they’re not at all) but b/c, as they say, a fanatic is someone who won’t change the subject, and won’t change his mind, and I don’t want to be a fanatic. I hate that feeling of being a fanatic.
raven
@Citizen Alan: I have friends who are gay, married and they love it in Brandon.
Starfish
@Citizen Alan: I had these problems. I owned a plot of land with my sister, and the person who lived in a trailer on the plot died so someone wanted to buy us out. He was being a real jerk about it. I was like “chill dude, I just started a new job so I have to figure out where the UPS store is so I can get this notarized.”
UncleEbeneezer
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Every Black person I know/follow says that their day to day experience is exactly like you describe.
UncleEbeneezer
I live in deep blue city in deep blue CA, but had to visit Dallas pretty regularly and always counted the seconds until we could go home. I don’t know how ‘y’all do it in those deep red states. The vibes are just so nasty, everywhere you go.
Chris
Honestly, I live in as blue an environment as exists anywhere outside of certain college campuses, and I still get this feeling. Even here I chronically find people crammed to the gills with right wing talking points. There’s a crisis at the border. Inflation is out of control. A recession’s just around the corner. And such, and such, and such.
Trump, then Covid, the last four years of media blitz, and pretty much all of social media turning into right wing puke funnels have just broken people’s brains nationwide in a way that makes even ten years ago look good. I feel Cole’s exasperation loud and clear.
TBone
@geg6: Confirmation that this is indeed excellent as provided by a troll (bot?) at another blog:
😆 Cry harder, bitchez
Sister Golden Bear
@Citizen Alan:
Bakersfield is CA’s North Mississippi.
Quinerly
Well, I got a bit cranky today with one of my best friends out here. She’s in her 80’s and a solid Dem and Harris supporter.
Her youngest son is in his 40’s. Ex Airforce, SWAT, now early retired from Raleigh Police. He came out for a 2 week visit with her. I have been avoiding asking her if they discussed politics since I know he voted for Trump in 2016 (he worked security for both Trump and HRC rallies in 2016. “Trump was charismatic” and “HRC was anti police” and “too involved in BLM.”
She brought it up on the phone today….she did discuss politics with him. He’s not voting for president. Just can’t support Harris because of her “defund the police” position in 2020.
The conversation got a bit derailed when I got huffy and asked her if her son knew about all the ex Capitol Police from 1/6 who were supporting Harris. I get it…she loves her “baby” son….and she has been afraid he still was supporting Trump. She looks at it as a win since one less vote for Trump. But, damn, my birth state of NC needs every Harris vote. And, I wouldn’t be surprised if he is fibbing to his mom and actually voting for Trump.
That whole “defund the police” shit was one of the most stupid things the Dems did. I totally get what’s behind it and support it….just a piss poor slogan/marketing.
Captain C
@TBone: FTFNYT headline: “Trump disputes veracity of claimed evidence, continues with innovative campaign”
Scout211
TBone
@Captain C: I have no doubt their sanewashing will be an even worse piece of 💩 than your imaginative blurb!
Baud
Via reddit, Ohio.
The Audacity of Krope
@Scout211: The lawyer wouldn’t be doing their job otherwise, from my very lay perspective.
lamh47
Bullshit Brett…you knew what your people were doing…
Count me as someone who hated the idea of MVP going on Faux news, but TBH…it might just have been the BEST interview she’s done in this cycle, and the impact might be bigger than folks think it would be
ETA: 7.1 million people watche MVP interview on Faux news compared to 3 million who watched Chump the day before!
Baud
@lamh47:
Biggest interview of his career, and he makes a “mistake.”
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: “Worse than a crime – it was a blunder!”
lamh47
@Baud: Right.
The backlash must have been EPIC for him to be backpedaling like this.
Starfish
@Quinerly: Some police need to go to prison before cities go broke having to pay the families.
lamh47
@lamh47:
Jackie
I got my ballot yesterday, filled it out today, very very happy filling in the bubble for HARRIS/WALZ!!!
Held my nose for Dan Newhouse – but the least evil between him and MAGA Sessler. Also had to choose between Rethugs in two county seats 😡
Will drop off my ballot first thing tomorrow morning – 1st Day of Early Voting in WA!😍
dnfree
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I remember a quote from Arthur Ashe, the tennis player, that when he was inside his house he was just a man, but as soon as he left his house he was a black man.
Quinerly
@Starfish: I totally agree. I just think we could have “branded” it better than “defund the police.”
I would have to Google…Pretty sure at least one or two Black congressmen have said that it was a bad slogan.
Chet Murthy
@Quinerly: i personally think the goal should have been to end qualified immunity, but that sounds so wonkish, I kind of get why that wasn’t the slogan.
Scout211
@Jackie: 👍
I got the notification from the California Secretary of State today that my ballot was accepted and counted.
Captain C
@TBone: They have a certain talent for making such things excruciatingly banal in a very FTFNYT-specific way.
Quinerly
@Chet Murthy:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/08/james-clyburn-defund-police-slogan-democrats-polls
From 2020….Clyburn and John Lewis.
CaseyL
Got my ballot today, filled it out tonight, and I’m freshly back from popping it into the drop box.
New insert in the ballot package: a sheet of paper explaining, among other things, that you MUST sign and date the outside of the ballot envelope. I bet that’s to try heading off GOP lawsuits seeking to throw out ballots that aren’t signed and dated properly, because FSM knows the GOP has been trying that tactic in every swing state. (Which Washington is not; but we do try to be pro-active.)
Another change: no more coded “stub” to tear off of the ballot so you can follow its progress from pickup through counting. Now your name is on the outside of the ballot envelope, big as day, and you track your ballot that way.
Jackie
@Scout211: 👍🏻 I’ll wait impatiently until Monday to see if my ballot’s been received, and another day to get the accepted/counted verification.
Villago Delenda Est
But…but…the progressive purity ponies say she’s a cop!
Frankensteinbeck
I am a white, straight male. I was born in a deep red state. I was raised in two deep red states. I live in one now. In my youth, I radiated ‘Other’ in some fashion. Did they know I was a Jew? Did they think I was gay? I honestly don’t know, but I have seen both the smiling face for their own kind, and the violent hate waiting under it for the Other. None of the horribleness that has revealed itself the last 25 years has been any surprise to me. I knew what these people were like. They tried to make me one of them.
Quinerly
@Villago Delenda Est:
Exactly what I said to my friend.
Jackie
@CaseyL: AND we finally got an “I VOTED “ sticker!
I’ve called our SOS every election year since 2016 requesting a sticker be included with our ballot; that’s the main thing I’ve missed by not voting in person. Well, that and the Hershey’s Kiss lol!
Chet Murthy
@Quinerly: Yep. And I remember reading about polls after the George Floyd Murder protests, that those protests had actually hardened white people’s attitudes about police brutality. I don’t see what the solution is. Nevertheless, I can’t really blame protestors for landing on “defund the police”: when you have an armed gang predating on your people, on your children, it’s a lot to ask them to -not- demand that that gang be taken off them.
I remain convinced that the George Floyd protests would have dissipated in a -day- if the Feds had passed a law abolishing qualified immunity as a defense in cases of police misconduct, brutality, or crime. A. Day.
Ah well.
P.S. I’ve been profiled once in my life by po-po. I was so secure in my privilege as a well-educated offspring of well-off parents, that I didn’t even recognize it was happening. It was only a few years ago that I realized it. Of course, I’ve known for at least a couple of decades that in any exigent circumstance, I would be treated as “fitting the description”: I’m dark-skinned enough that that’s how it’d go down.
Chris
@lamh47:
The nice thing about a Fox News interview is that it flips the expectations.
Since the absolute fucking morons that are still the majority in this respect insist on thinking of the mainstream media as “liberal,” any interview Harris could possibly give to the New York Times or CNN (or God forbid NPR or MSNBC) is going to be dismissed by low-info undecideds as a softball interview. The Sulzbergers et al are free to write all the slander they want, and it’ll all go through unnoticed, because “it must be REALLY BAD if even the LIBERAL MEDIA is saying so!!!” Etc.
By contrast, no one thinks Fox News is soft on liberals except people who are never going to vote for anyone but Trump anyway. It relieves Harris of all the bullshit expectations that go into so many media interactions, and it actually allows her to be combative a little without looking like a defensive control freak who can’t even tolerate questions from her own pet media.
That’s not all it takes. You still have to actually do a good job with the interview. But hey, it sounds like she did!
Noskilz
I think the most depressing thing for me is seeing people willingly embrace the most imbecilic nonsense imaginable – vaccine and weather control conspiracy theories, and worse.
It’s one thing to know abstractly there is the odd loony who goes in for that sort of thing, and quite another to encounter them in person, and in quantity.
Gwangung
@Noskilz: YeGy…disheartening to see so many weirdos.
NotMax
A (very) vaguely related chuckle.
“I couldn’t live like that.”
:)
Jay
@lamh47:
Bret Baier was the FAUX guy namechecked in Dominion’s filing against FAUX who:
a) Ran an internal email campaign to get FAUX to pull their calling of Arizona for Dolt45,
b) Parroted every “steal claim” on camera,
c) While sending multiple internal emails noting that everybody at FAUX knew that Biden won, fair and square.
So, yeah, he plays almost sane on TV but he’s as big a MAGgat as the rest.
wjca
In California, the return envelope has a bar code on it which identifies you. Of course, this can raise issues when, for example, one spouse votes by mail, and inadvertently uses the other spouse’s envelope. And then, on election day, the second spouse shows up to vote in person. And discovers our system says he already voted. (We did get things sorted out. Eventually. But it was a hassle, both for the voter and for the poll workers.)
lamh47
@Jay: Oh…I can’t stand him, but his “peers” love to claim Brett was the only “honest journalist” at Faux news…as if all you said didn’t happen…smh
Chet Murthy
@CaseyL: Huh. I was told years ago that the reason for the barcode (on the CA ballot) is so that you can take away the proof that you voted, and the identity of the particular ballot you had cast. So later, if there was a some question, you could present your barcode as proof that it was your ballot and not a fake. All while maintaining secrecy (until the moment you elect to present your barcode stub).
Doing away with that stub seems to remove the ability to conduct that sort of verification after-the-fact. Ah well, I’m sure I don’t fully understand.
Chris
@Chet Murthy:
“Black Lives Matter” was the most bland and unobjectionable version of a civil rights slogan it’s possible to imagine, and respectable white society, well beyond just Republican voters, still immediately pretended to believe that it meant “kill the whitey and rape his women.” That’s always held me at arms’ length from the idea that the choice of slogans was the problem.
Chet Murthy
@Chris: 100% there with you. White America -still- hasn’t come to terms with what Black Americans suffer daily.
karen marie
@Sister Golden Bear: I positively GASPED when I read that! omfg! Yay!
Craig
@dnfree: early hero of mine. I’ll always remember the howls from the racists when of statue of Ashe was installed on Monument Ave. in Richmond Virginia.
The Audacity of Krope
@Chris: 🎉🎉🎉🙏🙏🙏🌅🌅🌅
dww44
@Chris: I’m in a purple state yet mostly surrounded by friends and relatives who will continue to vote for Trump and am so very tired of always having to do the work of refuting their partisan takes on everything.
Talked to one friend today who was complaining about the slowness of the FEMA response to the recent hurricanes. She says she got this take from CNN. Now I’ve got another job to do as we live in one of the impacted states and I just feel compelled to correct the record. It really is so very wearying. Years of consuming conservative propaganda has rendered them far too susceptible to believing in bad performance by the government particularly when Democrats are in charge.
hitchhiker
@Chet Murthy: Some years ago Mr H.’s band was hired to play at the wedding of one of the band members’ daughter’s wedding. He was black. I went along as usual, to be roadie b/c Mr H is a disabled bass player and can’t lug his own gear.
That night was the very first time in my white life that I got to be a fly on the wall at a celebration that was almost completely black people. It’s when I learned that it must be the case that every black person I’d ever known was harshly censoring themselves fucking all the time they were in public.
This wedding party, family, and a hundred of their friends were not censoring themselves — not being aware of what I guess must be the White Gaze at all. It was such a revelation, and I was so ashamed that I’d never guessed it was even happening.
karen marie
@Sister Golden Bear: Well, now I’ve read the actual decision, and it doesn’t say “it’s the first amendment, stupid.”
When one thinks something is too good to be true, it usually is, as in this case. Oh, well, it’s still a walloping decision!
Anotherlurker
Even as an old white guy, I really felt like “other” when I lived in Fla. I had been in residence for 6 weeks when I took my 1st fishing trip on a party boat out of Cortez. It was a mostly white crowd but there were 2 African American Dads and their 2 teenage boys. We tried our first fishing spots and all was going well. I like to fish the bow because I like trying out lures that I had restored. I also like to fish away from the crowd in the stern. About 20 minutes on this first spot another Angler made his way to the bow and asked if he could fish up here. Sure I said. He was about my age, 72, and he wore a Michigan State ball cap. He drops his bait to the bottom, looks at me and says “There are too many (n words) fishing in the stern. I mumbled asshole under my breath and took a look at who he was complaining about. You guessed it. The 2 Dads and the 2 teenage boys.
On that same trip I was reading my Kindle. It has a bright cover with an orange peace sign. A couple of other old white guys on board took one look and asked me if I was a “fucking liberal”. I didn’t say anything. One of these salt of the earth retirees looked at me and said this is a Republican boat. Other chimed in and said Hillary should be shot. The skipper saw this and apologized and said they didn’t mean it. Sure Cappy.
I stayed in Fla. almost 3 years. I should have packed up and moved back to NY the next day.
By the time I did leave I was severely depressed and going on my 9th month of dealing with recurring facial Shingles. My oldest friend, here in The Bay Area, told me if I didn’t get out of that state he was coming to get me. Getting out of Fla. saved my life. My only assets left are my friends.
Sister Golden Bear
@karen marie: The “it’s the First Amendment, stupid” is on page 2 of the decision, at the end of the introduction.
Chris
@dww44:
I’ve had the privilege of being able to cut most conservatives out of my life a long time ago, but even that’s increasingly not a help as even people in my environment sink deeper and deeper into bullshit.
It’s shocking to remember how bad the national conversation was a mere ten years ago, and yet how rational and rooted in reality it seems compared to how unhinged today’s discourse has gotten. Back when Hurricane Sandy happened, nobody blamed Obama who wasn’t already a partisan Republican, because he doesn’t control the weather and he did in fact do as good a job as you could possibly expect from the federal government, and he got credit for it. Today, everybody just “knows” that FEMA is fucking everything up and those poor people in the Southeast are being left to drown. Back in 2011 and 2012, the economy was still in dire straits, but it was visibly bouncing back and Obama got credit for it. Today, everybody just “knows” we’re in a recession despite an economic comeback that Obama at any point in his presidency would have killed to have.
Every conversation about politics feels like that scene from Firefly where they’re trying to con their way into a hospital, and Jayne just blurts out his memorized line at the end even though nobody asked him anything and his line has nothing to do with anything in the conversation. People have absorbed their pre-scripted narratives, and damn it they’re going to vomit them back at me no matter what the context around them is.
Chris
@Anotherlurker:
Also did three to four years in Florida, mostly in Miami but the last eight months at my grandmother’s place up north.
North Florida was mostly not that bad politically, partly because I’m white and partly because my family, their friends, and my fellow worker drones at the store I was working at were all various shades of liberal. Still, I remember a deeply creepy moment when I was one of the first people in church and started talking to a lady I’d just met there:
“Oh! You just moved here from Miami? Are you Cuban?”
“No.”
“Are you Jewish?”
“… No?”
Seriously, who the fuck asks that as their very first question with someone they just met? “Oh, you’re an outsider? Let me know what racial classification to sort you into!”
I was fucking thrilled to get the hell out of Florida, but that’s largely because I turned 26 in that state and got to discover the joys of a red-state safety net, including a couple of medical issues that turned out to be minor but could potentially have been a big deal. And then the point was driven home for me when one of my co-workers died, from a condition that should have been eminently treatable, except our sainted employer didn’t offer health insurance and neither did the state of Florida, so the only treatment he could get was through a charity clinic that was only open one day a week. That was when I was like “dude. As soon as your master’s is finished, you gotta get the fuck out.”
To this day I tell people that moving back to Maryland, where I was able to sign up for Medicaid within a month, literally felt like crossing the Iron Curtain. I don’t know if it saved my life, but I’ve never felt such an incredibly stark difference in terms of “you are passing from one world to another, and while neither of them’s perfect, the difference in how they value human beings and human life is simply blinding.”
Wolvesvalley
@karen marie:
Thank you for the link to the decision!
It does say that, just not at the conclusion. You’ll find it at the end of the top paragraph on page 2.
I apologize for any weird spacing; I can’t use visual mode for this comment.
ETA Oops, Sister Golden Bear beat me to it. :-)
currawong
If you get a chance on Britbox, have a look at Magpie Murders. The outside shots are filmed on locaion in Kersey in Suffolk. We stayed with friends for a night last year who live just outside Kersey and we had dinner in the pub in the village. It’s as beautiful as it looks.
currawong
If you get a chance on Britbox, have a look at Magpie Murders. The outside shots are filmed on locaion in Kersey in Suffolk. We stayed with friends for a night last year who live just outside Kersey and we had dinner in the pub in the village. It’s as beautiful as it looks.
Citizen Alan
@Sister Golden Bear: It is darkly amusing to me that the best known thing about Bakersfield is a song by Buck Owens sung from the perspective of a homeless man who the people of Bakersfield look down on and treat poorly.
Citizen Alan
@Anotherlurker: Whenever I experience signs of conservativism in Fresno, I just remind myself that I had made it to the final two for a job in Tallahassee. And if I’d been offered it, I would have taken it due to my crushing fear of unemployment.
And probably been absolutely miserable.
Gloria DryGarden
@Quinerly: wasn’t ” defund the police ” really about
“get the police some social worker street staff and other alternate mediator staff?”
i feel certain that the many clear writers here could come up with a succinct way to say that….
I get that you’re disappointed that your neighbor didn’t try harder to sell her son on voting for Harris.
Im still vaguely trying to flip some very trump sorts of friends. I might come up with some questions, next, like is that ok with you? Would thus be alright? Are Yu sure? I have no expectations, and some friends I’m completely avoiding. But I’ve sent out the YouTube of Kamala of faux with Brett blundering baier, and there’s a faint chance they’ll watch.
Gloria DryGarden
@Frankensteinbeck:
when you write this, in memoire form, or as fiction, or as an essay, or an article, can I please read it?
Gloria DryGarden
@Wolvesvalley: ❤️💚💜
Chris T.
You don’t lose it all in a week. What you do lose is conditioning that keeps you from getting as horribly sore. It takes a week or two to “decondition”, after which going back to the gym can really hurt the next day.
But: the soreness means it’s working. Sucks, really, but that’s how it is.
Chris T.
@CaseyL:
It’s a bit complicated but it boils down to this: muscle burns calories all the time, while other body composition doesn’t (relatively speaking anyway, neurons burn a lot but you don’t grow a lot of neurons by working out 😜). It’s too strong to say that evolution “thinks” or “means” this or that, but to put it in those terms anyway, evolution thinks food is scarce: every calorie is precious and you might never get another one!
As such, the body will run and remove (catabolize) “unnecessary” muscle for its 4 calories per gram. (This also reduces overall body mass, making it easier to run away from danger.) To hang on to muscle you have to actually use it, meaning work it near capacity. This (along with testosterone and its downstream metabolites—women produce some too, just less than men, and it has the same effect) causes anabolic or muscle-building effects.
There’s a whole (and very complicated) cascade of chemical messaging here, using prostaglandins and IGF-1 and the like, and it takes a day or more of recovery work to rebuild (and over-build) muscle tissue, so rest-and-recovery is crucial along with muscle loading. You get other positive effects from weight-bearing exercise, including increased bone density and bone strength, too. So your best bet is to work each muscle / muscle-group roughly about 3x/week and take in plenty of protein (recommendations vary, but at least 1g/kg and as much as 2g/kg body weight) and get proper sleep and so on. You’re fighting myostatin, which (oversimplifying a bit) is the muscle-breakdown enzyme, so as to tip the anabolism / catabolism balance towards “anabolism”.
Nonetheless, once you’ve built a lot of muscle, it comes back a lot faster than it took to grow it originally. The current best theory for the reason here is that building bigger muscles works in part by convincing satellite cells—muscle stem cells—to divide and have the daughter cells fuse with the main contractile cells, adding additional nuclei. Skeletal muscle cells are “large” cells that are multi-nucleated, and each DNA-nucleus can be convinced to send “build more muscle” RNA to the rest of the cell. If you have, say, twice the nuclear density, the same amount of gym work will build muscle twice as fast as before. (Again this is no doubt horribly oversimplified and the ratios are much weirder, especially since cytology is so complicated.)
Note that myostatin-deficient mice, dogs, and cattle have brittle tendons, so there’s something extra going on here. See a myostatin-deficient dog (in comparison to a normal dog) here (nmd-journal.com). If you could knock out your own myostatin, you might look like The Hulk, but it wouldn’t necessarily be good.