Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

The revolution will be supervised.

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

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

When we show up, we win.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Let’s finish the job.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

You are here: Home / Archives for Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Saturday Night Slap-Fights Open Thread: It’s A Hard Knock Life

by | 122 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Captain Obvious strikes again!

show full post on front page

Saturday Night Slap-Fights Open Thread: It’s A Hard Knock LifePost + Comments (122)

Dank Grey Dawn Palate Cleanser Open Thread: Michigan’s Current GOP

by | 100 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Thank you, WaterGirl, for tipping me to I owe one of you a hat tip this great article with a dumb headline. From Ben Mathis-Lilley, at Slate — “Even Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What He Created in the MAGA Swamps of Michigan”:

At 2 p.m. in the basement of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, the mood was distrustful, the air was humid with human moistness, and the disagreements over minor procedural issues simply would not end.

The people assembled in this particular conference room were delegates from Michigan’s 9th Congressional District. They were among those who had come to Grand Rapids this past March for a statewide meeting to help nominate a Republican presidential candidate. And despite all of them believing that the nominee in question should be “Donald J. Trump”—as they insisted on saying his name, for some reason—they had already been there for four hours.

One of the major points of contention was which of these delegates would get to attend the Republican National Convention later this year in Milwaukee to take on the largely symbolic act of officially certifying Trump’s victory in the primary. And things took a particularly sour turn when the meeting chair, Deb Ross, said that a delegate named Billy Putman, who was seeking to represent the district, may have submitted paperwork identifying himself as “uncommitted”—rather than as a supporter of Trump’s.

Putman is a bearded man whose suit jacket and evident enjoyment of public speaking marked him as the room’s most likely aspirant to higher office. (He lives with his parents, his siblings, and their families in a single home, an arrangement which was featured in a 2017 TLC reality series called Meet the Putmans.) He and others considered the allegation that he might not be a Trump supporter to be slanderous. In turn, he accused Ross of being “bogus,” and “disenfranchising everyone in this room.”…

This scene was a small expression of the absurd dysfunction that has characterized the operations of the Michigan GOP for nearly a year. It is also a window into the problems of the current Republican Party writ large—one of many intraparty conflicts at the state and local level that are exploding across the country.

The problem, in short, is that the MAGA activists in charge are eating each other alive. States in which old-guard “establishment” Republicans were run off—seemingly paving the way for unified efforts on behalf of Trump—are instead beset by resignations, lawsuits, and financial crises. Conflicts are ongoing in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Georgia as well as Michigan, and are tearing apart smaller chapters at even more local levels…

show full post on front page

Dank Grey Dawn Palate Cleanser Open Thread: Michigan’s Current GOPPost + Comments (100)

Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / Parasites

by | 138 Comments

This post is in: , ,

What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?”

She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.

Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently drinking Diet Cokes. During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions. Their provocations can seem a little beyond their sell-by dates today…

Back in the dinosaur days, when I was still in high school, the NYTimes Sunday Magazine gave its cover to a frog-faced Yale frosh with an essay titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life“. Upon reading it, I thought This chick is Going Places, and I only hope some of them will be as repugnant as her writing here. Apparently the piece did attract fan mail from a number of Serious Literary People, among them J.D. Salinger, who would enter into some kind of a groomer / stalker relationship with that 18-year-old and further precipitate her literary career…

show full post on front page

Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / ParasitesPost + Comments (138)

Requiescat in pace, Flaco (Junk Food’ll Kill Ya)

by | 20 Comments

This post is in: ,

New York City has always had a soft spot for a louche European with a reputation as an apex predator… Although, actually, Flaco was born (at a captive bird park) in North Carolina. He lived twelve years in a small enclosure, and might’ve lived another forty there, but thirteen years is a good lifespan for eagle owls in the wild even in their natural habitat. Per the Washington Post:

After Flaco the owl escaped a vandalized cage at the Central Park Zoo and became a local celebrity last year, animal experts warned the public of the risks the bird faced in the wild. On Monday [March 25th], the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees New York’s Central Park Zoo, announced that those hazards led to Flaco’s death.

Flaco died last month after an apparent collision with a building on the Upper West Side. A necropsy exam later revealed that at the time of his death, Flaco had a herpesvirus from eating feral pigeons and had consumed four rodenticides used for rat control, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement.

Paul Calle, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s chief veterinarian, told The Washington Post that the virus, the rat poisons and the injuries Flaco suffered after flying into a building might have all contributed to the 13-year-old Eurasian eagle owl’s death.

“Sadly, they’re all things that we’ve seen in the past,” Calle said. “They’re kind of some of the risks that wildlife have when they live in the city.”

Flaco was transferred to the Central Park Zoo in 2010 after he was born at a North Carolina bird park. The owl lived there for nearly 12 years until someone cut the steel mesh of his exhibit in February 2023.

While zoo staff found Flaco and started tracking him, they were unable to capture him with bait and owl-call recordings. The New York Police Department posted on social media that Flaco even evaded officers. Zoo officials were initially worried the owl wouldn’t find food in the wild, but witnessed Flaco hunting and eating prey in Central Park within days of his escape…

The Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement at the time that the person who damaged Flaco’s exhibit was “responsible for his death.” A spokesman for the New York Police Department told The Post on Tuesday that officers are still searching for the perpetrator.

Eurasian eagle owls, which are native to Europe, Asia and the Middle East, typically live for one or two decades in the wild and up to 60 years in captivity, said Jessica Wilson, the executive director of New York City Audubon, a group that protects wild birds…

Wilson told The Post that rodenticides can cause muscle weakness and hemorrhages when consumed by birds, and those side effects might have caused Flaco to fly into a building.

“The minute he flew out of the Central Park Zoo, he was presented with so many different threats — threats that wild birds face every day,” Wilson said. “And it was really just a matter of time before one or multiple of those threats did him in.”

show full post on front page

<em>Requiescat in pace</em>, Flaco (Junk Food’ll Kill Ya)Post + Comments (20)

GOP Venality Open Thread: In the Fallen Warlord’s Court: Purging Disloyalty / Rewarding Fealty

by | 91 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

The warlord has been driven into exile, at the moment, but he — and more importantly his backers — still hope to regain control of his former empire. While they regroup for the next battle, the ‘impure’ are purged, and the hoped-for future satrapies are divided…

I owe someone a hat tip for this gift link. Josh Dawsey, at the Washington Post — “Was the 2020 election stolen? Job interviews at RNC take an unusual turn”:

… In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states — and who are reapplying for jobs — about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the applicants are based in key swing states.

“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.

The query about the 2020 election startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers has been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews…

President Biden’s reelection campaign on Wednesday sharply criticized the RNC’s practice of asking prospective employees whether the 2020 election was stolen.

“In Donald Trump’s America, elections are only fair when he wins and nothing is off the table to stay in power — including violence like on January 6th and being a dictator on day one,” Biden spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “And, now, Donald Trump is demanding fealty to his extreme, anti-democratic beliefs to be part of his Republican Party.”

Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election…

This is great news for the media’s horse-race touts! Tina Nguyen, at Puck — “Trump’s Transition Circus Heads to Palm Beach”:

The polling and prediction markets may show Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat, but fortune favors the drape-measurers, and for Trump allies and hangers-on eying roles in a putative Trump II administration, the jockeying has begun. As I reported in October, there are currently two dueling conservative groups working to staff the next Trump regime: Project 2025, spearheaded by the storied Heritage Foundation, with the participation of every right-wing organization under the sun (the Tea Party Patriots, Stephen Miller’s legal firm, Moms for Liberty, etcetera); and the America First Policy Institute’s Transition Project, featuring a who’s who of Trump has-beens (Kellyanne Conway, Hogan Gidley, Larry Kudlow, Pam Bondi, etcetera etcetera). Both organizations, each obviously headquartered in Washington, D.C., are focused on vetting the next generation of Trump-aligned foot soldiers to parachute into federal agencies on Day One.

But the real action of staffing a Trump White House will be occurring closer to Trump himself. Presidential candidates typically establish transition teams in Washington, where they are separate from the campaign, and where staffers can meet and evaluate the thousands of potential employees required to run the federal government. Trump, however, plans to establish his transition directly from the comfort of Mar-a-Lago, according to three people in the know. Also unlike previous transition teams, I’m told, staffers on the committee will have direct access to Trump, too. As a result, whomever ultimately chairs the group is more likely to be a gatekeeper than a true decision-maker—though gatekeeping is a tall order given the fates of his four White House chiefs of staff. “They’ve learned nothing,” sighed a former Trump administration official, predicting more 2016-style mayhem.

show full post on front page

GOP Venality Open Thread: In the Fallen Warlord’s Court: Purging Disloyalty / Rewarding FealtyPost + Comments (91)

‘Should Be A Parody’ Open Thread: The Way We Live Now

by | 153 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I am very much *not* on TikTok — I know my limits — so when this video started popping up on the twitter feeds I follow, I assumed (hoped) it was some kind of performance art / parody. But as far as I can tell from a brief google, this is a real person, this is her actual feed, she says she’s a 28-year-old ‘stay at home 3x boy mom’ / wedding photographer in North Carolina whose husband works insane hours, and… she’s making money off TikTok hate clicks. How much money is that?

neither they nor their spouse can possibly afford to get divorced. The number of times I have called opposing counsel for the first time and asked if their client is open to filing for bankruptcy. And these aren’t poor people! They’re just poor managers.

“what do you mean I can’t afford to get divorced?? We both make six figures!”

Well let’s break this down. Neither of you can afford the home on your own. Normally I’d say sell it and downsize but y’all have it mortgaged to the hilt and have mostly only paid on interest.

Ya got two $90k cars, a motorcycle, a side-by-side, a four-wheeler, a country club membership, and a timeshare, all of which you’ve paid for on credit. Oh and somehow you’ve also managed to wrack up $35k in credit card bills, mostly on expensive vacations.

show full post on front page

‘<em>Should</em> Be A Parody’ Open Thread: The Way We Live NowPost + Comments (153)

Interesting Read: “What Happened to QAnon?”

by | 39 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Philip Bump, at the Washington Post — “What Happened to QAnon?”: [gift link]

As the 2020 election approached, President Donald Trump had two problematic groups of supporters that he didn’t want to alienate. One was the Proud Boys, an extremist group that had already earned a reputation for engaging in violence against opponents. The other was more loosely knit: adherents of the QAnon movement.

QAnon was problematic for very different reasons. While there had been crimes linked to the movement (including at least one killing), the political challenge was primarily that the most fervent supporters held views that were somewhere between bizarre and deranged. There’s an international cabal of prominent people in entertainment and the Democratic Party that worships Satan and traffics children to ingest a chemical they produce? Got it.

Those views sat at the extreme, certainly. But even more anodyne manifestations of QAnonism were dubious, centered on an anonymous figure, Q, who allegedly worked in the Trump administration and was helping the president combat the evil deeds of his enemies. Q began posting cryptic messages online a few months into Trump’s presidency, with tens of thousands of people subsequently parsing them for hidden meaning.

By mid-2018, QAnon was a prominent part of Trump rallies. Supporters held up signs or large “Q’s” to get on camera, with success. By early 2019, after a spate of news stories drawing attention to the movement’s bizarre beliefs, adherents reported being asked to hide any Q insignia at the president’s rallies.

Then the election rolled around. Trump’s campaign slowly began to embrace members of the movement, recognizing its scale and loyalty to his politics. He refused to condemn even the more extreme forms the movement took and, only weeks before Election Day, even endorsed the idea that QAnon members were combating child trafficking…

show full post on front page

Interesting Read: “What Happened to QAnon?”Post + Comments (39)