Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I really should read my own blog.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

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

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

In my day, never was longer.

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

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

T R E 4 5 O N

Battle won, war still ongoing.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

White supremacy is terrorism.

You are here: Home / Archives for Fucked-up-edness

The ‘Privilege’ of Voting: High & Low

by | 122 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

This NYMag article got a certain amount of twitter pushback (look below the fold, at the end of this post, for a sample) last week:

Roxanne Gay had a excellent rebuttal:

… We are reaping what has been sown from voter disillusionment and we will continue doing so until enough people recognize what is truly at stake when they don’t vote. A representative democracy is flawed but it is the political system we must work within, at least for the time being. We have a responsibility to participate in this democracy, even when the politicians we vote for aren’t ideal or a perfect match. Voting isn’t dating. We are not promised perfect candidates. Voting requires pragmatism and critical thinking and empathy and now, more than ever, intelligent compromise…

Every single day there is a new, terrifying, preventable tragedy fomented by a president and an administration that uses hate and entitlement as political expedience. If you remain disillusioned or apathetic in this climate, you are complicit. You think your disillusionment is more important than the very real dangers marginalized people in this country live with.

Don’t delude yourself about this. Don’t shroud your political stance in disaffected righteousness. Open your eyes and see the direct line from the people in power to their emboldened acolytes. It is cynical to believe that when we vote we are making a choice between the lesser of two evils…

.
And then there’s *this* argument:

show full post on front page

The ‘Privilege’ of Voting: High & LowPost + Comments (122)

Love And Death In The Incel World

by | 254 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

When incels started shooting women, it seemed to me that I had read an analysis of something similar. It took me a while, but I recalled Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, from the early 1960s. Seems like now might be a good time to look at that book.

In the early 1960s, second-wave feminism was just getting started in the United States. Birth control pills were new. The civil rights movement was ramping up. AIDS and public recognition of gay issues were in the future. I wondered whether Love and Death could still be relevant. I hadn’t read it in a long time and didn’t remember much of it.

I looked it up and bought a copy of the revised edition from 1966. The original was 1960, before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, although after Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. I skimmed the sections about earlier literature, but the critique of 19th century literature, particularly James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain was clearly relevant.

My recall of the general themes was correct. Fiedler’s treatment of race and gender issues was careful and, I think, acceptable in today’s environment. A bit heavy on Freudianism, perhaps.

What I recalled was that Fiedler showed that male friendship was at the center of much American literature, often with a man of color as sidekick to the main character. Relationships with women were onerous, but few if any adult sexual relationships with either gender. Fiedler also notes that these novels do not contain well-written female characters. The female characters are a few poorly written stereotypes.

We see the same themes in today’s buddy films. But how do we go from a largely asexual plot line to the sense of injury incels feel at their lack of sexual partners?

Fiedler finds in 19th century literature a simple division of women into two types, as are non-white males: Good and Evil. The Fair Maiden is slender, virginal, very white-skinned (often milk-white!), blonde and blue-eyed. The Dark Lady is a sexy brunette, representating poison and danger, sex and death.

Somewhere between Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Fair Maiden and Dark Lady are merged into one character. In Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, the snow maiden becomes the gold-digger. During the 20’s, another shift takes place. The Good Bad Girl is the assertive one who gets ahead; the passive Good Good Girl is likely to be raped.

Fiedler’s analysis of the novels written in the 1950s is, not surprisingly, more limited. We’ve had a little more than 50 years since that revised version of Love and Death. Let me outline how those themes have continued through novels and popular media.

Fiedler barely mentions Norman Mailer, who both wrote and lived these themes, having stabbed his wife and almost killed her. John Updike wrote of the men of suburbia and their appended wives. Johnathan Franzen continues to write of suburban male malaise.

Buddy films are a popular genre, with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” blending into the western genre in a way that would have made James Fenimore Cooper proud.

Computer games, coming out of a masculine-identified computer culture, perpetuate the negatively dichotomous view of women. Gamergate, in which male gamers vilified and attacked women criticizing and trying to change the game culture, was a direct predecessor to the incel phenomenon.

Incels posit two kinds of woman: Stacy, who is buxom and fertile, and Becky, who is skinny and wears yoga pants. This illustration, including commentary (and spelling errors), seems to come from an incel website, but I let Vox do the looking for me. The commentary seems to see both women as undesirable. Stacy lines up in many ways with Fiedler’s Dark Lady stereotype.

Stacy is unavailable to incels; she prefers the more aggressive and masculine Chad. Evolutionary psychology in the form of sexual just-so stories is part of incel thought. The sexual revolution, which was only beginning in 1966, allowed men to expect unlimited access to women for sex. It is the thwarting of those expectations that the incel shootings act out. Fiedler points out with respect to Hemingway’s Catherine in Farewell to Arms that “Only the dead woman becomes neither a bore nor a mother”.

There’s a book to be written about why these themes are so attractive to Americans. Fiedler didn’t say much about that; it’s sociological rather than literary criticism. But his analysis shows a historical misogyny that long precedes the incel movement.

 

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Love And Death In The Incel WorldPost + Comments (254)

GOP: How Can You Call Us Anti-Semites When We’re So Careful Not to Use the K-Word?

by | 64 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Editor of the National Review, promoter of Sarah Palin, Rich “Sparklepants” Lowry:

show full post on front page

GOP: <em>How Can You Call Us Anti-Semites When We’re So Careful Not to Use the K-Word?</em>Post + Comments (64)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: They Are What They’ve Always Been

by | 139 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

(Lalo Alcaraz via GoComics.com)
.

Saturday Morning Open Thread: They Are What They’ve Always BeenPost + Comments (139)

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Aren’t They All Just Proud Boyz, Though?

by | 42 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Per the original story, in the Washington Post:

… In an interview with a website associated with the party, King (R-Iowa) declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” spoke of the replacement of white Europeans by immigrants and criticized Hungarian American financier George Soros, who has backed liberal groups around the world.

King spoke to the Unzensuriert site Aug. 24 in Vienna, a day after concluding a five-day journey to Jewish and Holocaust historical sites in Poland, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The trip, including airfare to and from Europe, was financed by From the Depths, an international nonprofit group that seeks to educate lawmakers about the Holocaust.

Unzensuriert, which translates as “Uncensored,” is a publication associated with Austria’s Freedom Party, which was founded by a former Nazi SS officer and is now led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who was active in neo-Nazi circles as a youth. While the party has distanced itself from those connections, it recently embraced a hard-line anti-immigration stance while seeking ties with other far-right parties and leaders abroad.

“What does this diversity bring that we don’t already have?” King said in the interview. “Mexican food, Chinese food, those things — well, that’s fine. But what does it bring that we don’t have that is worth the price? We have a lot of diversity within the U.S. already.”…

In an interview Thursday, King… accused his “political opposition” of “ginning this up” ahead of the Nov. 6 election…

show full post on front page

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Aren’t They All Just Proud Boyz, Though?Post + Comments (42)

The Khashoggi Affair: A View From 40,000 Feet

by | 216 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

In this post, I’m going to take a 40,000-foot view of the Khashoggi affair, to clarify some things as the Trump propaganda machine swings into action.

Jamal Khashoggi was a citizen of Saudi Arabia and resident of the United States. He was a critic of the Saudi regime and a columnist for the Washington Post. On October 2, he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and has not been seen since. A 15-man Saudi group, including a forensic pathologist with a bone saw, entered Turkey just before Khashoggi disappeared and left just afterwards. The Saudi consul has left Turkey and has not been available to the press. Evidence is available that suggests that Khashoggi was tortured, killed, and dismembered.

Official statements from the Saudi government have denied that they had anything to do with Khashoggi’s probable murder. Government statements have also threatened economic and political retaliation.

The Turkish government has some information about what happened in the Saudi consulate. They have been dribbling it out with the apparent intention of embarrassing the Saudis.

The United States might be expected to be a mediator between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and to press for information about Khashoggi’s fate. President Donald Trump has now almost admitted that it is probable that Khashoggi is dead, but he has vacillated about how that might have happened, bringing in the implausible idea that “rogue killers” might have been responsible. He has said he accepts the Saudi denials.

Trump dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh to speak to King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who runs the country. Pompeo has said that he did not see Turkey’s evidence, but media reports are that he did and brought copies back to the United States. Trump has now tweeted that this is “FAKE NEWS.” Other media reports conflict with Pompeo’s words and each other as to what was said in the meeting with MBS. Pompeo’s jolly smiles and exuberant handshakes in the official photos seem out of place.

Conservatives have started a whispering campaign to the effect that Khashoggi was a bad guy. Whispering campaigns of this type have been precursors to justifying otherwise unjustifiable Trump stands.

show full post on front page

The Khashoggi Affair: A View From 40,000 FeetPost + Comments (216)

#FacePalm Open Thread: Oval Office Occupant Gives Interview

by | 71 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

… to journalistic ninja Olivia Nuzzi, who is young & attractive & must’ve seemed unthreatening. Should’ve checked her previous work, dudes!

NYMag really deserves all the kudos it’s gonna get for “My Private Oval Office Press Conference With Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Kelly, and Mike Pompeo”…

Around 12:20 p.m. on Tuesday, I was on my way out of the White House after a series of meetings in the West Wing. I was reporting on a question that has hung over this administration for months: How has Chief of Staff John Kelly managed to keep his job in spite of convincing and persistent rumors and reports that the president is unhappy with him, and he is unhappy in his job? I stopped to talk to another reporter, and then I began to walk toward the North Gate. As I walked, I noticed I had a missed call from a Washington number I didn’t recognize. It was Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She sounded very serious. She asked me if I had left yet. When I said no, she asked me to come back inside, and when she greeted me, she looked very serious. She implied she wanted me to go with her behind a door. I didn’t understand, maybe didn’t quite hear her. Then, she told me Trump wanted to speak to me.

I walked to the Oval Office. I guessed that the president wanted to disabuse me of any notion that Kelly was about to be fired, or had almost been fired many times before. I was right, but my imagination was too limited. What ensued amounted to a private press conference — featuring a series of special guest stars from the highest echelon of the Trump administration — to try to get me to change my mind.

“I just heard that you were doing a story on … this stuff,” the president said as he came into the Oval Office and sat down at the Resolute Desk. I sat in a chair across from him. Next to me were Sanders and communications director Bill Shine.

“General Kelly’s doing a very good job,” Trump told me. “We have a very good relationship. The White House is running very, very smoothly. We’ve had a big week. We just got a Supreme Court justice on the bench. We have the USMCA, meaning the NAFTA replacement, and many other things. We had a great meeting with North Korea. It was a great meeting. The secretary of State’s coming just in ten minutes.”

He went on, “But I want to tell you a couple of things: the chief is doing a very good job. I’m very happy with him, we have a very good relationship, number one. Number two, I didn’t offer anybody else the job. I didn’t talk to anybody about the job. And I’m not, I’m not looking. Now, look, with time, do people leave? As an example, Nikki Haley told me six months ago, even a year ago — but six months ago, that, you know, she’s been governor, she’s done this, she’s helped us with the campaign, a lot of good things, and you probably saw the conference. It was a very, very positive thing. We have a very positive story going on at the White House. We have a very positive story for the country. We’re doing a great job. We have the greatest economy in the history of our country. We have among the greatest job numbers. Among many groups, we have the greatest job numbers. We have things going on that are phenomenal on trade. China wants to make a deal — I said, you’re not ready yet. But they wanna make a deal, and at some point we might. Iran wants to make a deal. They all wanna make a deal. We have great things going. We have a very smooth-running organization even though it’s never reported that way. So the real story is that. It’s really the real story. When you walk in here, you don’t see chaos. There is no chaos. The media likes to portray chaos. There’s no chaos. I’m leaving for Iowa in a little while. We’re doing something that’s going to be very exciting tonight in Iowa. A big, a big announcement, actually. Doing four rallies this week. I think the rallies have, frankly, built up our poll numbers very greatly. What am I now in Rasmussen? 52?”

The question was directed at Sanders, who confirmed the number. [Note: The Rasmussen poll had Trump at 51 percent.]

“Plus there’s 10 percent, they think, where people don’t respond, unfortunately. I’m not sure if this is nice or not nice, but when they don’t respond, that means it’s an automatic Trump vote. But it’s a 52,” Trump said, “and we’re doing very well in the polls. You see what’s happening with respect to the election, I mean, you know, to the midterms, even though — I know — historically, the president, you don’t tend to do so well in the midterms, but we have, this is a different presidency and this is the greatest economy ever. So, we’ll have to test that. But even the polls are saying that we have really come a long way in the last three weeks. I think we’re gonna do well. And that’s all I have to say. I want to just tell you that I’m very happy with General Kelly and I get along very well with him. We have a very good relationship. And if we didn’t, I wouldn’t stand for it for a minute, and he wouldn’t want it any other way. So it’s just a different narrative than what you were saying. And with that, you’re gonna have to write what you have to write, but the truth is, we have a really smooth-running White House and nothing and nobody has done more in their first two years as president. We’re not even up to the second year.”…

To repeat myself: If your grandpa started rambling like this in public, you’d take away his car keys and checkbook.

#FacePalm Open Thread: Oval Office Occupant Gives InterviewPost + Comments (71)