Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Goosebumps, then tears

Goosebumps, then tears

by | 121 Comments

This post is in: 

On TikTok if you prefer:  Link

Watch the video.

You know where the thermometers are.

You know how to google and find phone bank shifts.

If you’re in a swing state, I bet you know how to make some yummy food and take it to a campaign office.

You know how to do all the things Jordan Harris just told us to do.

Do it for democracy. Do it for Ukraine.

Do it for women.  For our friends who will be in danger.

Let’s do this.

Let’s fight for the return of joy.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

121Comments

  3. 3.

    West of the Rockies

    Dear lord, who is that man?  If he were a preacher near me, I would attend that church (and I’m agnostic-leaning-atheist).

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @rikyrah: I’m sure his rally today, in which he spent a bunch of time reminiscing about Arnold Palmer, including fondly commenting on how big his dick was ( Yes, seriously ) will alleviate everyone’s concerns.

  7. 7.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Thanks for posting this, WG. Oh, by the way, I totally forgot to tell you, I got those postcard stamps in the mail

  8. 8.

    WaterGirl

    @rikyrah: Holy cow!  I couldn’t find a thread reader version of this.

  15. 15.

    WaterGirl

    Thanks, Scout211!   Link
    (🧵) THREAD: Donald Trump is clearly fading mentally and physically. His running mate was handpicked by a Kremlin-agent white supremacist (Tucker Carlson) and two creepy far-right billionaire techno-authoritarians (Peter Thiel and Elon Musk).

    This is not the election you think.

    1/ No Trump voter is saying that they are voting for Trump because they want J.D. Vance to be president. Or Elon Musk. Or Peter Thiel. MAGA voters believe they will be getting MAGA if they vote red.

    They are absolutely not going to get that. They are going to get the *opposite*.

    2/ Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison, which he’s entitled to do.

    But he didn’t expect to win in 2016 and didn’t enjoy being president. He might not have run this time had he not felt embarrassed about 2020 and been worried about being imprisoned if he loses immunity.

    3/ He’s hiding his medical records and looks and sounds unwell. He’s cancelling events due to—his own team says—“exhaustion.” He’s doing fewer events than ever. He’s rambling and mixing up dates and names more than ever before, to the point media is starting to write about it.
    4/ He would be the oldest human to be sworn in as president. His wife and daughter have largely abandoned him. He just swayed and bopped silently to his own iPod playlist in front of a crowd for 40 minutes. There’s something wrong with him. Even if he wins, he won’t be president.
    5/ All this was known to Musk, Thiel and Rupert Murdoch when they convened in California early this summer (feel free to Google it; it’s uncontested) to figure out who’d be Trump’s running mate. They and their ally Tucker Carlson knew the GOP VP candidate would be de facto POTUS.
    6/ Canada just revealed it has evidence that Tucker Carlson is a Kremlin agent. So at least one of the men who chose the MAGA ticket is an agent of an enemy of America.

    Obviously this is enough to avoid that ticket like the plague—forever—but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

    7/ Peter Thiel is part of a creepy far-right techno-authoritarian cult headed by failed coder and utterly mid “intellectual” Curtis Yarvin.

    Yarvin has proposed that he and a group of other tech bros decide which humans worldwide are “productive” and turn all the others into goo.

    8/ Oh, you think I’m kidding?

    9/ You’ll notice that the Yarvinist listed in the headline of the preceding article *isn’t* Thiel. No—it’s Thiel’s disciple, Vance, who Thiel *and Yarvin* have been grooming (yes, that is the right word) for years to become president so that Yarvin and Thiel can rule through him.
    10/ When they saw that Trump was running not to be president but to avoid jail; when they saw how elderly and infirm Trump had become, and incapable of being POTUS even if elected; when Tucker Carlson convinced Trump that picking anyone but the Yarvinist Vance would cause him…
    11/ …to get assassinated by the Deep State (again, Google it, it’s uncontested that this is how Kremlin agent Tucker Carlson got Trump to pick Vance); they realized this was the moment to make their techno-authoritarian dream come true.

    And it has *nothing* to do with MAGA.

    12/ Elon Musk will be U.S. co-president if Trump wins… not with Trump, but with Peter Thiel.

    J.D. Vance, who—again—is in a cult in which Peter Thiel is his mentor and superior and which is headed by Curtis Yarvin, would simply be the executor of a techno-authoritarian agenda.

    13/ MAGAism is far-right populism. Rightly or not, some working-/middle-class voters see it as a political ideology under which they’re finally seen.

    That’s no longer the GOP ticket’s agenda.

    Techno-authoritarianism—which Musk and Thiel and Carlson are piggybacking atop MAGA…

    14/ …takes exactly the opposite view of the working- and middle-classes. Under Musk and Thiel’s theology—the right word, as they treat tech as a God rather the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit—the working/middle classes are good for nothing because they do not “innovate.”
    15/ What Yarvin has settled on, in place of the *worldwide genocide he initially advocated for*, is simply *imprisoning* all non-innovators in a virtual reality (yes, like the movie The Matrix!) so that Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and other rich men can “innovate” in peace.

    Google it!

    16/ So when Musk leaps about like a jack-in-the-box at his rallies and talks about white people needing to have more babies and government needing to basically go away completely and tries to pretend that is all for the sake of MAGA he is *lying*. He is *conning*. It is a *scam*.
    17/ Elon believes government is unnecessary because when *you MAGAs*—and it will be nearly all of you!—are liquidated into goo to fuel buses (the first Yarvin Scheme) or imprisoned forever in a meaningless virtual reality locked away from anything that matters (the second one)…
    18/ …what need will there be for government? Or all your white babies? They will simply be digitized so that Elon, Trump, Murdoch, Carlson, Thiel, Putin and a few oligarchs from each white nation can live in a techno-utopia fueled by…

    …well, *you*, actually. Your *prison*.

    19/ Think this sounds crazy?

    It *is* crazy! It is f*cking genocidal! Because these people *are crazy*!

    And they will be running America come January without *anyone* vetting their techno-fascist ideas.

    So why is media ignoring all of this? I have no idea! It’s all in the open!

    20/ My point: let’s say you’ve settled on voting for Trump for some reason, or are still open to it. You need to understand that that’s immaterial *because he won’t be in charge*.

    You owe it to yourself, your family, and your friends to look up all of the *actual* ideas in play:

  22. 22.

    frosty

    @WaterGirl: ​Might as well wait until the Series – it’ll be New York vs New York or NY vs LA. Yawn. I found out tonight that I can’t watch tonight’s game or even listen to it on the radio without signing up for a service I don’t want. SiriusXM is the only radio? It’s like MLB thinks it can go along without any fans.

    So I’m reading a play-by-play on MLB Gameday.

    At least the Ravens are still available on the antenna.

  23. 23.

    Jay

    @BR:

    @WaterGirl:

    Pretty sure WaterGirl posted it, but it’s been a busy week on the blog,

    and some things are well worth a repost even if it’s just in the comments,

    some things slip by and don’t stick.

  28. 28.

    BR

    @WaterGirl: ​

    Thanks and no worries — I haven’t been keeping up with the blog as much the last few days.

    In other news, I decided I’m going to shift my attention to phone banking for my congressional candidate because we’re a swing district and I think he could use the help.

  29. 29.

    Chet Murthy

    @frosty: Worth  noting that Abramson is judged to be a bit of a crank and fantasist. So, y’know, maybe take his pronouncements with a grain of salt?  That said, he’s not wrong about the big picture.  Just, well, that shit about virtual reality prisons and turning people into goo, that’s, well, that’s Yarvin talking, and it’s as realistic as Skynet, yanno?  Which doesn’t change that what Musk/Thiel/Yarvin want, is a world where there is no middle class, and there are only a few wildly wealthy techno-barons.  And then the rest of us.  And sure, when they figure out how to live without us, they’ll try to kill us all off.  But that’s far in the future.

    The near-term thing, though, is all real, and worth fearing.  These aren’t your garden-variety Nazis, who wanted to help their Base to rule the world.  These guys don’t have a Base, they just have their rich friends and family.

  30. 30.

    Jay

    @Chet Murthy:

    One tell, that Abramson is not a complete crank, is that Felon Musk’s “robots” and “robotaxis” were deliberately copied from the movie IRobot, where in a Tech Giant tries to use evil robots to take over the world and confine humans who submit to their rooms.

  31. 31.

    Steve LaBonne

    @frosty: I’m listening to WTAM 1100 via internet radio but maybe that only works in Northeast Ohio, I’m not sure how these things work.

  32. 32.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Chet Murthy: I mean, it’s undeniable that Thiel and Musk are in the Yarvin cult and there was a lot of reporting that Thiel used Jr. to sell Trump on Couchfucker.

  33. 33.

    Steve LaBonne

    By the way, there’s currently a Phantom story arc, of all unlikely comics, about “Ian Mollusc” trying to send a militarized AI powered probe to the moon to claim it as his possession. The flight went wrong and landed in the Phantom’s back yard. The writer is really tearing Musk a new one.

  34. 34.

    Chet Murthy

    @Steve LaBonne: Yes, that’s what I meant by “the big picture” that Abramson’s right about.  It’s the low-level details of Abramson’s predictions, where he’s taking Yarvin’s drug-fueled dreams for actual plans.  They’re not, b/c they’re unrealizable.  What’s realizable, is a world of mass impoverishment, a police state for all Americans, not just nonwhites and women.  That’s realizable, and I think that’s where Thiel/Musk/etc want to go.

  35. 35.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    Damn, that speech was a powerful “leaving it all on the field” speech.

    They don’t like us. We don’t care. We gonna win everywhere.

  36. 36.

    Jay

    @Steve LaBonne:

    And of course, Thiel believes that the key to eternal life is regular transfusions of young white men’s blood.

    Oh, and built himself a bunker in New Zealand.

  38. 38.

    Scout211

    Franklin Foer in The Atlantic today. (web archive version)

    A few snippets, but much more at  the link.

    What Elon Musk Really Wants

    The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.

    . . .

    It’s not hard to imagine how the mogul will exploit this alliance. Trump has already announced that he will place him in charge of a government-efficiency commission. Or, in the Trumpian vernacular, Musk will be the “secretary of cost-cutting.” SpaceX is the implied template: Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing the affairs of state to nimble entrepreneurs and adroit technologists. That means there will be even more opportunities for his companies to score gargantuan contracts. So when Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he’s not imagining a reprise of the Apollo program. He’s envisioning cutting SpaceX one of the largest checks that the U.S. government has ever written. He’s talking about making the richest man in the world even richer.

    Of course, this could be bluster. But it is entirely consistent with the rest of the right’s program for Trump’s second term, which involves dismantling the federal government—eliminating swaths of the politically neutral civil service and entire Cabinet departments and agencies. It is exactly the kind of sweeping change that suits Musk’s grandiose sense of his own place in human history.

    This isn’t a standard-issue case of oligarchy. It is an apotheosis of the egotism and social Darwinism embedded in Silicon Valley’s pursuit of monopoly—the sense that concentration of power in the hands of geniuses is the most desirable social arrangement. As Peter Thiel once put it, “Competition is for losers.” (He also bluntly admitted, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) In this worldview, restraints on power are for losers, too.

    With his government contracts—and his insider influence—Musk will become further ensconced in the national-security state. (He already has a $1.8 billion classified contract, likely with the National Reconnaissance Office, and, through a division of SpaceX called Starshield, supplies communications networks for the military.) At a moment when the government is confronting crucial decisions about the future of AI and the commercialization of space, his ideals will hold sway.

    At Tesla, Musk assigned himself the title of “technoking.” That moniker, which sits on the line between jokiness and monomania, captures the danger. Following the example set by Trump, he wouldn’t need to divest himself from his businesses, not even his social-media company. In an administration that brashly disrespects its critics, he wouldn’t need to fear congressional oversight and could brush aside any American who dares to question his role. Of all the risks posed by a second Trump term, this might be one of the most terrifying.

  41. 41.

    frosty

    @Chet Murthy: Yeah, I could tell by the middle of the tweet stream that Abramson is a bit Out There too. I think I’ll just pass on this business and focus on avoiding having my sons’ naturalization revoked and getting deported back to countries they’ve never lived in.

    Plus avoiding losing my Social Security and Medicare and having my IRA tanked in the coming depression.

    Sheesh. At least my 400 postcards are all in the mail. With any luck I’ll have helped Scott Perry find the unemployment line.

  42. 42.

    Jay

    @Chet Murthy:

    where he’s taking Yarvin’s drug-fueled dreams for actual plans. They’re not, b/c they’re unrealizable

    I don’t think that Abramson is taking the plans as “actual”,

    I think he is using their “stated plans” to point out how crazy these people are and how they view the rest of humanity as NPC’s in a computer game.

    He can’t claim what you said is the “current plan or plot” or that to them, we are just NPC’s, because they have never said that, so he’s using their own words.

  43. 43.

    hitchhiker

    @WaterGirl: Baseball that leads to a Yankees/Dodgers world series is a snore. They’re the most valuable teams, by a LOT.

    #1. Yankees: $7.55 billion.

    #2. Dodgers: $5.45 billion.

    Because I constantly forget how big these numbers are, I give myself this little reminder. A million seconds is less than 12 days. A billion seconds is almost 32 years.

    As I type this, the Yankees are playing the Cleveland Guardians (valued at $1.35 billion), and need to only win one of their next 3 games to go to the world series.

    If that happens, I don’t know that we’ll need a post about it.

  44. 44.

    Chet Murthy

    @frosty: Yyep.  That’s where I’m at.  TCFG is already bad enough that I don’t have the brain space or attention for anything that’s supposedly worse.  TCFG’s reinstallation is the worst-case scenario, and whatever actions I take for that, are going to have to suffice for anything worse.

  46. 46.

    geg6

    @WaterGirl:

    A state rep is a state rep in PA.  Meaning a member of the state House.  We also have a state Senate.  Harris is the State Representative of a district that spans South and West Philly.

  47. 47.

    wjca

    @WaterGirl: I swear I put that in a post today.

    Option 1: I’m losing my mind.

    Option 2: I started to do it and got interrupted.

    Option 3: the evil empire deleted it on you. It’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you.

    (FWIW, I actually saw it mentioned earlier today, so probably you did it at some point.)

  48. 48.

    Jackie

    Extra innings! GOOO GUARDIANS!!!

    Please, Cleveland, please…!

    Oh geez… 3 run homer Spankees  5-2 top of the 10th…

    RALLY TIME Cleveland!!!

  49. 49.

    frosty

    Argghh.

    Like Earl Weaver said, you win games with pitching, defense, and 3-run homers. Cleveland stranded their 3-run homer in the early innings.

  50. 50.

    Steve LaBonne

    Well crap. Still a great season for a team nobody thought would finish above .500 even before Bieber was hurt.

  53. 53.

    MagdaInBlack

    @WaterGirl: Yup. This is why they’ll keep propping him up. Do I think they can do all that tech bro lunacy? No. But they sure can make us miserable trying.

  54. 54.

    frosty

    @Steve LaBonne: I hate finishing a season hoping for next year. Both my Baltimore teams ended up that way this year. Maybe by adding Derrick Henry the Ravens can push through.

    Anyway, thanks for the internet radio idea; that was great!

  58. 58.

    wjca

    @Jackie: Hopefully the WC Mets can beat the Dodgers

    There would be a certain small amusement in seeing the Evil Empire taken down in the World Series by the new kids in town.

  60. 60.

    Gvg

    Trump is so crazy he has attracted all the craziest people in the world to him. There were a lot of competing factions of different crazy reported among the nazis that didn’t fit together in any sensible way. Sometimes I am not to sure all the reports I have read are real. Because they were so peculiar, I knew I couldn’t tell which ones were too silly to be real and in the decades since, people have probably slipped a few tall tales into the strange truth.

    Trump world is like that. The proven truth is so stupid that anything no matter how senseless, gets accepted. We also hate home now, so we are predisposed to believe the worst.

    Theil and Musk start thwarting MAGA’s basic desires, and they will find out they don’t control the crowd with the torches and pitchforks, plus the other GOP politicians want power too and will turn with the crowd. Trump has backed down and changed on things when he found out some of his ideas were unpopular. He originally thought the wall was stupid and originally supported vaccines.

  61. 61.

    Chet Murthy

    @Gvg: roger Stone, nick Fuentes, milo yappingpapaya, and the list just goes on and on with absolute Nutters.  Where the fuck Is the vast plain of rocks from under which all these people crawled out?  And can we please nuke the plain With an h-bomb?

  62. 62.

    Gretchen

    @BR: do they give you a script for phone banking? I’ve never done it and am afraid I wouldn’t know what to say. They’re looking for phone bankers for the abortion amendment in Missouri.

  66. 66.

    Pete Downunder

    @barbequebob: Did the Mets play in the polo grounds? I thought that was the home of the Giants till they went to SF. I saw the Giants play the Cardinals there. I was very young at the time. From memory the Mets played at Shea Stadium out near Flushing Meadows in Queens.

  68. 68.

    hawwingo

    @Pete Downunder:  The Mets played in the Polo Grounds in 62 and 63, while Shea was under construction. I saw one game there, but was so young that I thought every fly ball was a home run.

  69. 69.

    Gretchen

    @Madeleine: Thanks. Maybe I’ll have the courage to do it then. I’ve been sticking to postcards so far. I did doorknocking for several Saturdays in 2018, and felt like it moved some people, but man it was hard for this introvert. I’m not even that crazy about talking to people I know, never mind walking up to the doors of strangers. But my candidate won and has been reelected twice.

  73. 73.

    Geminid

    @David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch: I like Juan Soto. I followed Soto when he broke in with the Nationals and could see he was an extremely talented hitter, not a slugger so much as a doubles hitter with a very keen eye; sort of a Dominican version of Ted Williams.

    I dislike the Yankees, but I don’t begrudge Soto joining them because he deserves the New York spotlight.

  74. 74.

    wjca

    @frosty: My dad was a Dodgers fan. At Ebbets Field!

    I had an uncle (in Indiana!) who, back in the 1950s, routinely answered the phone: “Ebbets Field, Third Base.”  No clue how he might have come up with that, in a family which all clustered around the tip of Lake Michigan.

  75. 75.

    Geminid

    @frosty: Bernie Sanders was an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fan and was appalled when Walter O’Malley moved them to Los Angeles. Sanders probably had socialist leanings already, but O’Malley made him a confirmed anti-capitalist.

  84. 84.

    NotMax

    Darn these aged eyes. Fix.

    @schrodingers_cat

    SNL ought to have been put out to pasture last century. Shallow caricature is no substitute for comedy.

    Sclerotic shadow of what it once sometimes succeeded at. Not always, mind you, but had a respectable batting average.

  87. 87.

    Jeffg166

    My state rep is standing in the back. He’s the guy with the glasses.

    There are now 793,876 registered Democrats in Philadelphia. A good turn out for them is 66%. We need a 90% or better.

  91. 91.

    bjacques

    @Baud: he should publish it on Xitter.

     

    The tech fantasies upthread are nothing if not derivative. They sound like they want to be the Fathers from The Wild Palms (1990s Details Magazine comic strip and then a TV series = Scientology + VR + mind-altering drugs) or else Palmer Eldritch, from the Philip K Dick novel to which Wild series owed a lot.

    But this is also Musk’s and Thiel’s last hurrah just as Trumps’s. If Harris wins, their rancid vision for America won’t have any purchase, and Musk at least will continue his downward spiral of delusion and ketamine addiction. Thiel will simply continue to age. They both look similarly jowly these days. Yarvin will go back to hanging out with trust-fund hipster fascists I guess.

  99. 99.

    The Audacity of Krope

    So I had a wedding yesterday to attend. My bad attitude toward dress clothes bit me on the ass. I didn’t realize every dressy item I owned was selected to accommodate about 40 lbs. more of me than were currently available to fill them.

    @Baud: Did I miss something?

  101. 101.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Baud: I suppose that’s the goal.

    ETA: Now I feel inclined to guess. That was so weird and about something kind of old, had to be a Trump digression.

    EATA: Looks like zhena was on it, thank you.

  105. 105.

    p.a.

    How long before tRump turns on Elmo if he perceives that the CW is he (tRump) is the puppet & Elmo the puppeteer?  Who close to tRump would actually back him?  His Magats would, but who else if the insiders think Elmo’s way is the only way back to power?  Of course, time is getting short before the election & tRump’s perception of reality is 🤪, but as a narcissist his sense of who’s #1 may be accurate enough to sense being supplanted.  And he won’t like that.

  107. 107.

    RevRick

    @frosty: My older brother was a Yankees fan. He only rooted for winners!!! So naturally, I became a Dodgers fan (Da Bums) and was delighted when the Boys of Summer defeated the Evil Empire in 1955. The Dodgers, by the way, are the team that has lost the World Series the most times.

  111. 111.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @zhena gogolia: Literally just watched it, some of the Univision clips that were posted that day as well.

    That was legitimately funny. Seemed well targeted; as someone very conscious of falling into the “not manly enough” category, it was posed in a way there was no chance I’d take any of it personally. Also falls under the “turnabout is fair play” rule.

    Thanks for the pre-anti-warning about that.  I have been pretty sensitive on the matter. Christ, if I’m dodging opportunities to watch Obama speak…

  112. 112.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @RevRick: The Dodgers, by the way, are the team that has lost the World Series the most times.

    An accomplishment they never could have achieved without first making it to the World Series. So it can’t be all bad.

  113. 113.

    Marleedog

    @Baud:

     

    Haven’t verified, but apparently Dan Coats said something.

    Fuck cowardly Dan Coats. In 2020 in a FTFNYT opinion piece that Trump is unfit for office, but could not make himself say “Vote for Joe Biden”. I will bet he still won’t say it.

    He knows what the compromat is and will not tell. He is the epitome of the republican mantra of party over country.

  118. 118.

    Marleedog

    @zhena gogolia:

     

    Trump is definitively disinhibited. I think the Bautista video broke him.

    I am not a psychiatrist, but this is a well recognized symptom of dementia.

  119. 119.

    The Audacity of Krope

    People seem so often to refuse to speak plainly obvious truths, but they love conjecture. 

    This problem is biggest in the media, but still…

  120. 120.

    Ruckus

    @dmsilev:

    I’d normally say you must be kidding but then this is shitforbrains…..

    Anything ignorant, dumb, asinine, out of context/touch, things no one needs or cares about, and just plain wrong is projected out of his mouth at the speed and intelligence of a 1958 Buick with 250,000 miles on the odometer and sill using the oil that came with it new.

  121. 121.

    Ruckus

    @WaterGirl:

    It’s past tense – as in has dissolved. He’s operating, such as it is, on blind momentum. He is angry that he is not KING FOR LIFE of a country that of course doesn’t have a king, has grievances out the wazoo because he believes that he is owed everything for his amazing humanity, wonderfulness, intelligence, and who the hell knows what else, none of which actually exist.

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