FIRST DRAFT

We're Not Animals

NSFW at the link. Probably. Depending on where you workl. 

This. THIS THIS THIS THISTHISTHISTHIS: 

We (men) are not fucking sharks!

We are not rabid animals living off of pure instinct

We are capable of rational thinking and understanding. 

Just because someone is cooking food doesn’t mean you’re entitled to eat it. 

Just because a banker is counting money doesn’t mean you’re being given free money.

Just because a person is naked doesn’t mean you’re entitled to fuck them. 

You are not entitled to someone else’s body just because it’s exposed. 

What is so fucking difficult about this concept?

My New Year's Resolution was going to be to spend less time on Tumblr but then there's stuff like this. 

A. 

No It Won't, You Fucking Poser-Loser ... Ploser? We Need a New Word, That's How Much This Guy Sucks.

God, armchair revolutionaries make me tired. 

1776 will not commence again, because that would require that you give up your job that you hate and your family you don't like very much and your fucking recliner and your Bugles filled with spray cheese and actually DO SOMETHING, and if you were capable of improving the world in any miniscule way you wouldn't be such an angry fucking insect in the first place, and you wouldn't need to use the prospective deaths of others to yob off in front of the world on national television to make yourself sound important. Fuck you.

God, can all these people just get back to me when there's a meeting I actually need to be at? At least ten times a day somebody within earshot of me wishes armed revolution would commence over something or other, and is this me getting old, that I've been on this planet long enough to remember EVERY TIME that we are always promising that THIS is gonna be the big one and it never fucking is? How 9/11 was going to make us better people (SO FUCKING GROSS) and how we were gonna be serious again, how the wars were going to teach us not to be so susceptible to bullshit, how Obama's election would end racism forever, how this time, today, this morning, it was all gonna change? 

(And it never goddamn does, and I don't even care that it doesn't. I care that we keep saying stupid shit. I care that we keep making promises we can't keep, instead of getting up every day and picking up the laundry off the bathroom floor for once. The big promises DAMAGE us, they ruin us with their hopelessness, because they make us think ALL promises are hopeless, and ALL change is impossible, and all progress is a forlorn dream with no chance of coming true.)

So now the gun nuts are going to rise, huh? No they're not. Not en masse. Not in a wave that will remake this nation. Not to throw off the yoke of oppression or to protect "freedom" (Hey fuckos, you want to shoot shit for a living and defend freedom? The recruiting office is right there.) or even to keep the rusty hunting rifle Granny kept for shootin' varmints. A few people will cause untold amounts of carnage because bullshit merchants like this guy keep yelling, and the majority of people will go on about their lives.

Grumbling, sure. Resentful, sure. Just like every other Tuesday in the entire universe ever, because we have made these kinds of declarations before, and I'll believe in the next leader of the Last Free Republic when he puts down the remote and does something, anything other than talk about what he's gonna do someday, this time, for real. 

A. 

A really funny gang rape

Here’s a great joke:

How do you know a 16-year-old girl is likely dead?

“You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole!”

Wait, here’s a better one!

How dead is a 16-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a group of high school classmates and repeatedly raped?

“She’s deader than O.J.’s wife!”

Have you stopped laughing yet? Then you'll love this one:

How hard did a group of high school football players, one by one, rape a girl after they had to physically carry her unconscious body from one party into their “rape crew” party?

“They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. And they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl…”

Do you need to catch your breath? Laughing so hard? Yeah, here’s another one that will have you just crying:

How pointless is it to try to help a 16-year-old girl who, after being raped while unconscious (possibly because some asshole roofied her), was peed on and still didn’t wake up?

“That’s like trying to help wood turn into stone. That’s like trying to help the Padres to a .500 season. That’s like trying to help Tim Tebow be a good quarterback. That’s like trying to help Natty Light become a refreshing beer.”

Wait… You’re not laughing?

I guess you’re not from Steubenville, Ohio’s proud high school. If you were, you’d probably think this stuff was hysterical. At least, that’s what the video evidence that was leaked earlier this week reveals.

An anonymous hacker posted a 12-minute clip of a young man, identified as former Steubenville High School baseball player Michael Nodianos, detailing how “raped” a young woman was at the party. Those one-line zingers above? Nothing but his comedic genius at work.

Not satisfied to simply take his one-idiot improv act to video, Nodianos is said to have also tweeted about the incident, so his brilliance could be enjoyed by those without the inclination to sit through a fifth of an hour of pure dickheadery.

The rape was said to have occurred in August, but the prosecution of the football players who were said to be responsible for these acts failed to gain traction until the blogosphere took hold of the story. Allegations that police had brushed the incident under the rug in this 18,000-person football-crazed town were refuted by prosecutors, who said almost no one came forward to offer any information about this vile act.

Now, it seems that everyone’s eyes are on this hamlet best known for its dying industrial base and as the birthplace of famed gambler Jimmy the Greek.

Prior to this national shaming, it seemed as if nothing could bring down the “Big Red” spirit. To wit, here’s the opening line from the “investigative” piece from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

It’s Monday, and ominous-looking clouds are pushing over Harding Stadium as dozens of football players in practice jerseys prepare to take on Cleveland’s Benedictine Bengals.

But this day two key players are missing from the field.

Right. Because that’s the news. We’re missing two key players from this “Championship-Bound” group of extraordinary young gentlemen. Never mind that the story also notes that several players linked to this shameful act were still PLAYING ON THE TEAM at the time this was written.

Talk about a joke…

If you want to spend 12 of the creepiest minutes of your life, watch the video. Usually, when someone tells me something is “extremely disturbing” they’re trying to warn me off about a blood-soaked scene, an obscenity laced tirade or a speech Mitt Romney is giving. In any of those cases, I can eat a ham sandwich and watch it no problem.

This one? No way. I saw it twice and that was three times too many.

The worst part was that this kid and most of his friends were in no way empathetic. They laughed. They cracked jokes. They sipped beverages out of Styrofoam cups while musing about how little this girl's life mattered.

When a friend asked, “What if it was your daughter?” Nodianos replied, “It’s not.”

Well, I have a daughter.

She’s seven.

I worry every day about what’s going to happen to her.

When I see assholes like these strutting around like roosters, proclaiming the awesomeness of someone else’s daughter being brutalized, every ounce of fear and rage I have heightens in my desperation to protect her.

The kid recording all this said he planned to watch this video every day.

I hope he does. I hope it eventually sinks in what actually happened to this girl.

I don’t know if that kid or Nodianos or any of the other vidiots can be charged with a crime. At the very least, I wish they would be forced to stand in front of their peers, the school administrators, the parents and the loved ones of everyone in their school at some giant assembly.

Then, I want someone to play this whole video on a projection screen as they stand there and watch how people stare at them in horror and disgust.

I want every college recruiter and every employer who Googles these pecker-heads to have that video pop up front and center so they can see exactly what they had to say about how “raped” this poor child was.

I hope they do have families and then have to explain to their kids why Daddy was laughing in that video about the hurt girl. I also want them to simply have to worry about people like them being out there, all too ready to take advantage of an incapacitated child.

I’ll bet all of that would just be downright hilarious.

'All of it is an act of love'

Go. Read. NOW. 

There was something disturbing about Romeo and Juliet’s relationship—if you can even call it that. Within less than a week, they profess their undying love to each other and get hitched. Juliet delivers her famous “parting is such sweet sorrow” line, and the next time Romeo sees her, she’s unconscious from a potion that was designed to work for 42 hours, just enough time to trick her family into thinking she’s dead so that she won’t have to go through with the arranged marriage to Paris. Romeo, with whom she has had about three conversations, was supposed to find her alive and whisk her away to a life totally cut off from her friends and family for all of eternity. GOOD PLAN.

I think we celebrate tortured romance in art because conflict is inherently dramatic, whereas doing the laundry for 20 years really ... isn't, but we've fallen down somewhere when our ideal of love is agony. Worse than that, is uncertainty: Do you know how exhausting it is to be with someone you're not certain of? It's so exhausting. It doesn't leave you room to have a life of your own because you're so busy watching your own soap opera. Some of my Facebook acquaintances, I don't know how they hold down jobs and still have time to keep track of who lied to them about who was still sleeping with his ex even though he promised last time was the last time and whatever. 

Before Mr. A I kept auditioning losers and wondering why it wasn't working, and I'm talking about a cokehead poet and a guy who made a lot of money and thought that was as good a reason as any to order me around. In actual fact none of those relationships were designed to be relationships at all. They were designed to be sideshows, distractions from life. They weren't life. They weren't about building a home or a life or a place or anything bigger than ourselves together. It's no wonder we would end up making each other miserable even though we had all kinds of chemistry and things in common. We didn't have a life in common, and we didn't know how to make one. We didn't even really know we had to. 

A lot of our ideas about love are poisonous. It's not just the "love is drama and heights of ecstasy and depths of despair." It's the "love is HARD WORK" stuff, too. People say relationships are work, that marriage is work. They usually mean drudgery, like ha ha, sometimes he wants to watch the game instead of Sex and the City with you. But work is joyful, work is purposeful, work gives shape to your waking hours and improves the world around you, or at least it should. It should reward you as much as it wears you out.
It should be the good kind of worn, like after a hard workout, when your muscles are tingling and you feel like you could go another mile even though you know in a minute you'll collapse into the embrace of a pizza. If it just grinds you down, if you're always watching the clock, if you're making cute little jokes about hanging in there until Friday, you need to find something else to do, and if you're dragging yourself through your relationship with the idea that suck and yawn is what it's supposed to be like, oh God, no it's not. 

I think we spend so much time rationalizing the bad stuff, calling anything that isn't constant implosion boring, making the lows about the corresponding highs as if the latter justifies the former, we overlook all the ways in which love is every day: 

I think there’s another kind of cherishing that is possible, one that doesn’t kill us. Last month, I went with my parents to the dentist to get a cavity filled. My mother went to get some groceries while my father and I were in the waiting room. I noticed that he had his phone clipped to his belt.

“That looks so dumb,” I said.

“Well, I don’t miss your mother’s calls this way.”

A. 

Not That I Shopped There Anyway ...

But suck it, Hobby Lobby. 

They've always been sanctimonious assholes and look, at times convenience overrides my conscience and I go get something somewhere because it's cheaper or closer, but this kind of thing's a no-brainer. These people, and the pizza dicks, and everybody else braying all day long about their religious freedom, are just begging for attention. They don't actually want to help anybody, they're not actually concerned about their immortal souls, and they can't see the difference between the freedom to do what they want to do (like, don't take birth control pills if you think they're putting you in danger of hell) and the ability to coerce others into behaving like you would. Giving someone coverage for something is not the same as mandating they do it, whereas denying them coverage may well prohibit it. 

To Michael's for yarn I shall go. 

A. 

Without A Sidearm

What the fuck do they think goes on in black neighborhoods? 

The finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, who also was Michigan’s former GOP chairman, was captured on video telling a tea party meeting that voters in Detroit get picked up at pool halls and barbershops and bused “from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times.”

Ron Weiser also said at the Aug. 9 meeting in Milford that someone not from Detroit would not want to go to the polls there at 6:30 a.m. “without a side arm.”

I hear this miserable fraidy-cat shit all the time and it is becoming a THING with me, like what do you think, nobody's at the polls with their coffee and their friends in Detroit because Teh Negroes live there and their ways are strange to us all? Not fellow humans, are they, who are voting before work and then going to work and going home and having dinner and trying to get the kids to bed on time and watch Idol and go back and do it all the next day? 

You wouldn't go to the polls in Detroit without a sidearm? Fool, ain't nobody nowhere gonna screw with you UNLESS you show up all aggro and packing your Wal-Mart arsenal. Otherwise you're just some other dude and you're not bothering them one bit. I've been in just about every neighborhood in the city of Chicago at just about every time of the day and night, and not once did anything happen to me that could remotely be construed as threatening. I got invited to a self-confessed gang member's birthday party once. A coke dealer gave me directions when I was lost. Those are the scariest things that have ever happened to me in neighborhoods that appear regularly in the police blotter. 

(I regularly do just the stupidest shit. Last night after dark I drove out to meet a fellow who'd advertised some furniture on Craigslist. As I drove my car into his locked storage lot behind his creepy van, it occurred to me that this was pretty much the plot of every third Morgan Freeman movie, but hey, too late. The furniture was great, the guy was nice, his price was fair, and he offered to deliver it free of charge. Horror.) 

Am I lucky? You fucking bet I am. Could I have been raped and murdered that night or any one of a hundred nights and days when I've been driving around places we've allowed to decay until they look like demilitarized zones? Absolutely. You know what else could happen? I could get pasted all over the freeway by a semi truck out of control. I could drop dead of a heart attack while jogging. I still drive and I still jog and the universe is random and horrible so you tell me where this kind of thinking leads. I'm a grown-up. I lock my doors at night. I live where I live because I believe it's as safe as can be found within the limits of how I want to live. But I try not to live like there's some magic line somewhere that's going to protect me because there just fucking isn't. 

It makes me insane, the way we wall ourselves off from one another and act like it HAS to be that way. It drives me up a fucking tree, hearing people put limits on their movements because of absolute bullshit. Yes, you can drive there safely. Yes, you can park your car there. Yes, you can order from that restaurant. Yes, you can live your life as if you're not shit-stupid and scared of people who don't look like you. These are CHOICES you're making. Own that at least. Give yourself that much credit. This isn't me saying you need to seek out the most Beirut-like place to live. This is me saying you can venture places without a sidearm, if you want, because it's up to you. 

And think about this: If you're scared to VISIT someplace, why are you okay with anyone living there? Statistically the people who live in these places are far more likely to be the victims of crimes than those just passing through, so where do you get off exactly muttering darkly about where you won't go and what you think happens there? 

Apparently if you're the bag of fuck cited above, you get off before you get anywhere near anything new, so your beautiful mind doesn't have to be troubled by it. 

A. 

How Did You Learn to be a Homo in Your Day?

Apparently they teach Kids Today in school now! 

“So, here you are, you’re an animal and you’re a god! So, what are we going to teach you about in school? Well, we can teach you about sex, we can teach you how to rebel to you[sic] parents, we can teach you how to be a homo! But we’re definitely not going to teach you about the word of God! Amen.”

I'm furious. Not on my own behalf, although it might have been nice to get some lessons in before encountering actual gays in the wild. Mostly I'm furious on behalf of my friends who had to do ALL THIS EXTRA WORK teaching me how to be a homo. 

I mean they had to teach me EVERYTHING. Paying bills on time, applying for jobs, catching the bus, gathering in liquor-serving establishments with friends, going on dates, playing instruments ... it took FOREVER. Some of them took me to movies and bought popcorn to demonstrate how it was done. Hell, a couple of them even had to get married and raise a damn kid together around me. They had a Fourth of July barbecue and all. They bought a house. 

What a tremendous amount of effort. Kids today are freaking spoiled. They don't know how good they have it. 

A. 

The Stomach

Framing, by the Very Liberal New York Times: 

The new inflation calculations, for instance, would probably not affect wounded veterans and disabled people on Supplemental Security Income. And Mr. Obama is sticking by his request for additional upfront spending on infrastructure and an extension of expiring unemployment benefits.

He would also secure some tax and policy changes long sought by both parties but unattainable in the context of smaller budget deals. His proposal would permanently extend popular tax breaks like the credit for corporate research and development, permanently stop the alternative minimum tax so it does not expand to affect more of the middle class, and stop a long-planned and deep cut to Medicare health providers, which Congress has never shown the stomach to allow to kick in.

It is always the height of political courage to fuck over old, poor or old and poor people. Taking care of them, of course, involves no bravery at all. 

I hate just about everything right now. Somebody show me a kitten. 

A. 

The Idiocy

Courtesy of friend of the blog Hobbes.

She's a great artist. I may have helped with the text on this one.

Puny God

I've spent approximately six minutes on Facebook in the last 72 hours. Treacly remembrances of things make me crazy, appropriation of other people's pain to make oneself feel important makes me crazier, and in the history of everything there has never been an intelligent discussion of anything on Facebook. It's the butthole of the Internet. I like mine because I like memes and pictures of my friends, but Christ almighty, sometimes I want to set two thirds of it on fire. 

In those six minutes I managed to see this about nine times:

Forget arguing the actual point, because there isn't one beyond modern Christianity's eager self-martyrdom reality show. Let's talk about this:

SOMEBODY CAN KEEP YOUR GOD OUT OF SOMEPLACE HE WANTS TO BE?

Really? Your God listens to the Supreme Court? People ON the Supreme Court don't listen to the Supreme Court, but your God obeys them? Your God takes orders from the Freedom From Religion Foundation? Your God listens to that dick who has to inject his lack of belief into every conversation about everything from recipes to road head? Your God is cowed by that? Even other atheists think Richard Dawkins is an asshole, but your God takes one look at an op-ed of his and turns tail and runs?

What kind of pathetic weak-ass God do you worship, anyway? A God who needs national approval to show up in the schoolyard and help out kids who are being bullied and beaten and stabbed and shot? A God who needs an official memo complete with TPS report cover to get His job done that day? A God who respects a lock on the door, a bar on the window, a sign that says go away?

Have you ever read the Scriptures you claim to revere?

That God drew water from the rock, parted the seas, raised the dead from their graves, smashed the cruel and corrupt. That God swept down over the earth and uprooted tyrants, freed slaves, inspired nations, lifted up the widow and the orphan, all before His daily Chipotle run. That God was here for the ones who wanted Him, sure, but He was there for everybody else, too, and certainly wasn't waiting for an engraved invitation to get shit done. His Son declared that He had sheep not of this flock, and that no one, no one at all, would go to the Father except through Him, that He was there for everyone. He didn't ignore the people who rejected Him, wag His finger and cluck that He told them so and they'd be sorry.

He forgave them their rejection and welcomed them to His cosmic party no matter how late they came or how lousy their hostess gifts were. That was the WHOLE FECKING IDEA.

That's the God worthy of worship, not this petulant bastard who whines that He didn't even WANT to be in your stupid school anyway, and if a bunch of kids get shot then GOOD because it proves His point. I don't know who'd want to worship that jackass. I wouldn't sit next to Him on the subway, much less build Him a temple and name Him my king.

A.

Waiting for the End of the World

In my day, people with root cellars filled with guns, butter and likker or backyard bomb shelters were called survivalists. They're now called "preppers," which is a term that I'd never heard of until today. It turns out that Nancy Lanza, the mother of the mass murdering Newtown monster, was a prepper.

Nancy Lanza, whose gun collection was raided by her son Adam for Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook school, was part of the “prepper” movement, which urges readiness for social chaos by hoarding supplies and training with weapons.

“She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told reporters. “Last time we visited her in person, we talked about prepping – are you ready for what could happen down the line, when the economy collapses?”

Paranoid mother, crazy son, it now makes a sick sort of sense. Logic obviously had nothing to do with this mayhem but the great explainers in the MSM are already trying to turn this into a "teachable moment." Step away from that thought, y'all. Nothing teachable here other than assault weapons are lethal and shouldn't be in the hands of preppers, survivalists or whatever you want to call them.

The most perplexing thing  about today's revelation is that a small and very prosperous town of the sort that is usually known for preppies is now known for prepper madness. I guess Stephen Stills got it right back in the 1960's when he wrote, "paranoia strikes deep, into your life it will creep."He wrote those lyrics before he worked closely with David Crosby who had a cocaine driven descent into paranoid gun toting madness in the 1980's.

I've never liked guns, never owned one or even lived in a house with anything beyond a squirt gun or cap pistol. My Republican father carried one for 3 years during World War II and never wanted guns around.I have no problem with responsible gun owners-and they do exist- but I wish more of them would speak out against the NRA, which has morphed during my lifetime into a doomsday cult worthy of the People's Temple.

I get frustrated with the predictable back and forth that always follows a massacre such as this. I *wish* it would lead to sensible gun control legislation but there's nothing sensible about the Newtown Massacre or about the gun culture itself.

I don't usually favor symbolic actions but I'm glad that Dianne Feinstein plans to go back to the future,as it were, and push to restore the assault weapons ban. I have no illusions that it will pass the Senate let alone the Teabagger controlled House, but sometimes you've just got to take a stand and this is one of those times.

Does anyone seriously imagine that the framers envisioned  military-style weapons in the hands of some whackadoodle loser with Mommy issues? I would hope not. I also don't recall the NRA or Huckabees and Gohmerts of the world challenging the assault weapons ban in court, which would have been litigation that only Wayne LaPierre or Nino Scalia could love. I know Justice Scalia is an opera buff. I wonder if his taste extends to Wagner and not just to Rossini and Verdi...

Circling back to Senator Feinstein. This is a rare Senator who has personal experience with gun violence. I'll never forget her announcing the murders of Moscone and Milk in 1978. After that and Jonestown, which occurred not long before, I was concerned that we really could be:

 

It's Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn't Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda: 

(Here's my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violent people are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watching The Matrix about 46,000 times--at one point on a three-day loop--for the book, and I shot nobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don't look at the kid's taste in movies or his literary output--look at those two things in the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won't even speak when spoken to, who also writes about bloody murder sprees? For God's sake, keep an eye on him.) 

I would never say we don't need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days. 

Once we're done with this: 

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”  

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school. 

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon. 

But getting back to Cleolinda's wise words up there, what we're not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote "our kids," as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in "the media" or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen. 

It's all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they're going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone's time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round. 

It's like there's a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it's all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren't hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that'll fix everything. It's how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS' ROOFS WHILE WE'RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can't I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don't need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do. 

A. 

Republicans Also Propose Bill Saying Kittens Fucking Suck

Seriously, what is wrong with these assholes? 

A. 

Oh, NOW You Want a Big Tent

If only you had some kind of power position in the party, or were once its standard-bearer, or something: 

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that the Republican Party, which lost minority, women and young voters in 2012, needs to have a "bigger tent" during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."

"I think we have to have a bigger tent," McCain said. "And obviously, we have to do immigration reform. There's no doubt whatsoever that the demographics are not on our side."

Watching these people flail about is really amazing. It's like they just woke up JUST THIS MORNING and oh holy shit, brown people everywhere. Chicks. With their chick bits, which need attention. WHERE DID ALL THIS COME FROM? If only there had been some sign, in the past 40 years, that singing Dixie under your breath wasn't gonna work forever. If only someone had warned them. 

Also I love how they're flat-out stating that it's not that dealing honestly with minorities and women is the right thing to do, or that minorities and women have legitimate needs of any kind. It's that "the demographics are not on our side." In other words, we can't win with just the old white racists anymore so NOW it's a crisis and I guess we HAVE to listen to them, god, the indignity, but what are you going to do? They keep existing and breathing oxygen. Inconvenient. 

"And as far as young women are concerned, absolutely, I don't think anybody like me -- I can state my position on abortion. But to -- other than that, leave the issue alone," McCain said. 

"I'm proud of my pro-life position and record," McCain said, clarifying that he did not mean he was now pro-choice. "But if someone disagrees with me, I respect your views."

Do you respect his or her views enough to allow him or her equal rights under the law? If not, NO YOU DON'T RESPECT MY VIEWS, you colossally panderiffic assclown. 

In other words I love women but I MEAN I DON'T OH GOD PLEASE DON'T PRIMARY ME TEA PARTIERS. So much for the courage to call for a bigger tent. 

Schmuck. 

A. 

Men and Women Must Not Speak, Lest They Screw

A former colleague, Howard Ludwig, writes in his stay-at-home-dad column about some serious insanity overtaking the lifestyle section these days: 

A good number of at-home fathers I know dropped their collective jaws last month after reading an article titled “Navigating Play Dates with Stay-at-Home Dads.”

Wilmette-based Make It Better, an online and print publication for families on the North Shore, produced the article. Tips include avoiding play dates with “a dad you find attractive” and asking your husband to chaperone a play date with a stay-at-home dad and his children.

Now, the article was called to my attention by a group of at-home dads, many of whom actively advocate for full-time fathers. Their reaction mirrored my own, which was equal parts astonishment and feeling offended. One of my buddies even referenced the article on his Facebook page and changed his status to read, “I’m too sexy for your play date.”

Like we're not already paranoid. Now every guy taking his kids to the playground is a potential sex pervert? Christ. 

And a CHAPERONE? I get how going blind on tequila with somebody you secretly think is a babe is probably a bad idea, but "HUNNY, come along to the jungle gym with me and the kids so I don't accidentally make out with Dadster McHottie over by the swings?" Really? 

(Also, apparently lesbian moms are not a threat, though you would think, if being around someone who could potentially want to sex you was cause for concern, this would be an issue, too.) 

It's one thing to say to YOURSELF that perhaps the texting with the guy down the street is getting out of hand and you should back it off. It's another to view even the presence of menfolk as a de facto temptation. The idea that men and women can't be friends because mere proximity sets off some kind of MUST SCREW NOW beacon needs to die a bloody, painful, most of all quick death. Then we can stake it, cut off its head, bury it at the crossroads, salt the earth, buy a spaceship, and nuke the site from orbit just to be sure.

I hate this trope. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. It's demeaning to women, it's demeaning to men, it advances dangerously sexist nonsense about how we're separate species who can only speak through interpreters, and it teaches us not to trust each other because OMG SEXING. If we don't think of one another as people, how can we have any expectation of respect? 

Yes, high-pressure situations can blur boundaries and yes, people cheat on each other all the time, but none of those situations are occasioned by geography. We're not guinea pigs, where if you put us in the same aquarium we have to hump. 

A. 

I Didn't Fight For Your Freedom

A re-post from a couple of years ago that I hope, some day, never needs to be said again.

 

Nope. No freedom being defended here.

So it's Veterans Day, which means that the US is awash with mostly obligatory tributes to military personnel. 

I hate this shit.

I didn't fight for your freedoms.  In the six years I was in, I never once defended your right to vote, or to carry a gun, or to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure (that one doesn't really apply anymore, anyway), or any of the other things you enjoy as a citizen of this country.  I just didn't.  Neither did anyone who went to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam.  It's all bullshit.  It's a fucking lie that we tell ourselves and each other so that we don't have to think about why we send young men and women to serve, suffer, and die for old men's vainglorious ideas and profit margins.

I passed through Burlington, WI on Saturday to visit their annual chocolate festival.  Who could say no to that, right?  Well, while there (this being Wisconsin), I got myself a beer.  To do so, you had to put up with the shitty metal cover band in the beer tent.  There's a 45-year-old lead singer acting a fool--pouring beer on his own goddamned head, making dumb-ass sexist remarks, saying stupid shit about his teen-aged daughter, etc.  Since that wasn't reprehensible enough, he then proceeded to thank all the veterans in the crowd, specifically pointing out one man whose--well, I'll just quote this asshole.

I wanna thank all of our veterans for what they do for us.  Every guy in the band, our fathers were all in the military.  My dad was in Korea!  This guy right here in front--his son is in Iraq right now.  He's over there FIGHTIN' FOR OUR RIGHT TO PARTY!

I wanted to rush the stage and strangle that fuck with a microphone cord. 

It's all bullshit, folks.  We don't do anything for anyone's freedom.  The military hasn't actually deployed en masse to defend your freedom in a long, long time.  Unless you call rich people fucking over the world's poor and powerless a form of freedom.  As you may have guessed, I don't.  It's bullshit.  And it needs to stop. 

I don't mind honoring sacrifice, but the military doesn't have a monopoly on that, now does it?  I also don't mind remembering military dead and wounded.  But we do it all wrong.  We just fetishize the suffering (like good Catholics, no?) without wondering why it ever happened in the first place.  Remembrance and memorial, it would seem, also involve reflection and assessment.  Just because someone died or was wounded doesn't automatically validate how he or she came to be in that state.  We send our young people overseas to be bored, pull duty, sometimes get shot at, and occasionally get hit.  Then we never ask why they're over there in the first fucking place, because doing so, apparently, does them a disservice.  What kind of jack shit is that? 

A real Veterans/Remembrance Day would involve commitments to cease sacrifices that don't actually, you know, do anything in the name of freedom.  Losing your legs so that Chevron can see higher profit margins is not noble.  It's a god damned shame.  Dying in the service of defense contractors doesn't bestow sainthood on the deceased.  It just means that a life got snuffed out for no good reason.  Reflexive military worship is a cancer on society.  Unscrupulous people use it to justify their actions and avoid any criticism.  That shit makes the act of asking why we should send young people to absorb bullets and get blown to pieces into some kind of subversion and/or sedition.  How fucking ridiculous is that?  Wondering if someone's death was worth the cost doesn't dishonor the person.  I don't know how we've confused evaluating the motives and actions of leaders with spitting on corpses, but we have.  And until we can untangle those things, we're just well and truly fucked when it comes to international affairs.

So this Veterans Day, take a minute to actually reflect on the acts and deeds of people in uniform.  But that involves critical thought instead of blind acceptance of the rightness of our leaders' actions.  Honor the dead and care for the living, but don't think that people in uniform today are actually standing between you and tyranny. 

Remember that.

Further Adventures In Social Media; or, We Just Can't Be Educated

Instead of engaging these dopes, I think I'm just going to have this. ALL OF THIS.

Well, I'm back for one more pre-election go with Adventures In Social Media.  Please kill me now.  Anyway, today I bring up an acquaintance from high school, who gives us the following:

 

I just stopped at this point.

Folks, that guy is under the impression that he was right.  If there are any of you out there who think that this world can actually see a riot that "upholds violence," please--take a few minutes to say goodbye to your family and friends, then swallow your cyanide pill. 

And the hell of it is, I didn't even bring up the RACIST AS FUCK underlying assumption.  Hmmm...what could it possibly be about Obama supporters that would make these crackers think that they're more prone to mindless violence.  What could it be?  What could they be assuming?

You know what they're assuming--the same thing white folks have been assuming for almost half a millennium in this fucked-up part of the world.  They assume that BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT RATIONAL HUMANS.  Period.  End of story.  End of fucking story.  That's been a constant trope for centuries now: the wild savage blood, the jungle lust, the frantic dancing and trance-like states of The Negro mean that they're not nearly as intellectually advanced as us calm white folks.  These people are so familiar with it they don't even recognize it.  You know, like how a fish is unaware of water.  But the unstated assumption is just hanging there for anyone with eyes to see.

I didn't even call them out, because they would instantly deny that they could ever think such a thing, and then I'd hear a chorus of how I'm the real racist because I think they're racist, and I'd blow my fucking brains out. 

So thus ends my pre-election jaunt through social media.  It's done a good job of convincing me that education is a lost cause.  If you need me, I'll be over by the liquor cabinet.

Even More Adventures In Social Media; or, Have These People Ever Heard Of The Internet?

Behold, the Internet!

Okay, so maybe I'm doing this bit too often, but it's just comedy gold.

Once again, a cousin posted something stupid, and I did this idiotic thing called "responding with facts."  Naturally, things only got better from there.

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

• Red: God-bothering first cousin
• Blue: Yours truly
• Purple: Cousin's African-American acquaintance
• Green: Cousin's god-bothering in-law

It's pretty awesome, and you can see the beating after the jump.

Tina throws it down

I was thrilled 3 or 4 years ago when I belated learned that Tina Fey was half-Greek. It's an ethnic pride thing; plus I've had a crush on the funny and brilliant Ms. Fey for years. It's just a pity that I never had this classic recitation, uh, recited by my late father, Lou: "Tina Fey is Greek. She's doing very well, you know."

 Via Planned Parenthood Action.

And as Long as We're on the Assclown Topic

Once again, history's greatest monster is some poor woman who needs help feeding her children: 

Despite the fact that low-income women who give birth to children would logically need increased assistance to care for their larger family, Pennsylvania lawmakers — State Reps. RoseMarie Swanger (R), Tom Caltagirone (D), Mark Gillen (R), Keith Gillespie (R), Adam Harris (R), and Mike Tobash (R) — don’t want their state’s food stamp program to provide additional benefits for that newborn. If a woman gives birth to a child who was conceived from rape, she may seek an exception to this rule so that her food stamp benefits aren’t slashed, but only if she can provide proof that she reported her sexual assault and her abuser’s identity to the police.

The primary sponsor of this bill, oddly, doesn't list it among her many accomplishments (including but not limited to promoting "American Law for American Courts"). Even more disheartening, a Democrat is co-sponsoring the thing, though he at least has the stones to put it out there.

Nowhere in the bill is it mentioned that perhaps the men who can't govern their own dicks should have benefits reduced to them, because women are the ones tasked with providing for their children, and women bear those children, and women raise those children, and women are shamed for getting pregnant and shamed for not getting pregnant and shamed for being raped and shamed for reporting their rapes and shamed for not reporting their rapes and shamed for giving birth and shamed for getting abortions because stupid bitches and that's why. 

As to the actual dollar amount that will be saved by the state through eliminating the horrible scourge of poor fake-rape babies, the bill is silent. There were eight entire cases of fraud proven overall, according to this, in the past month.  

So clearly this is a crisis we all need to get working on. Fuck this. If you added up all the fraud and waste and horror that poor people supposedly cause, I doubt it would total a month's worth of time blowing shit up in Afghanistan, but hey, people on public assistance are already down, so that makes them much easier to kick. 

I do not understand what we get out of this, as a society. I really, really don't. If I thought making poor people feel like shit about themselves would actually end poverty maybe I'd be a little more in favor of doing it, but you know, it's not about the objects of our charity. It's about us, and what we deserve to do. To send outward into the world. To show others.

And all of the testing, the probing, the constant suspicion that somebody somewhere is getting away with something, that doesn't do shit to make people any less poor. All it does is make those of us who are not poor a little less rich. 

A. 

Childless Women Can't Say Shit, Part the Eleventh

The worst insult they can come up with for this woman is "childless:"

They have demonstrated that the worst thing you can say to a woman with an opinion is that she’s a) ugly b) sexually frustrated c) bitter d) childless e) slutty, or f) some combination of the above. Koenig has been on the receiving end of all of it, despite the fact that Keonig in a committed relationship and has mentioned, many times, that she has never ruled out motherhood.

It's shit like this that made me not want kids once upon a time. If Doc hadn't told me I didn't have to automatically love other people or their kids if I had my own, I think I'd still be on the pill. As it is, I want a kid desperately, and I think STFU Parents is hilarious, and here's why: 

It's not about parents, good or bad.

It's about shitty behavior on social media. 

It's about oversharing. It's about posting incessant updates about banality. It's about hijacking other people's statuses and using bad grammar and generally being a total asshole who doesn't know what the Internet is for. Just like STFU, Conservatives and STFU, Liberals and STFU, Believers and every other STFU site out there. 

But that this one challenges the general assertion that parenthood is somehow above mockery is cause to call the author an ugly, unlovable whore. 

Because if she had kids, she'd automatically become a total asshole with no sense of humor, too? 

That's a pretty lousy way to encourage someone to breed, and a much more stinging indictment of parenthood than anything posted on B's site. 

A. 

The Backstory

To this, is up now at Sexy Feminist.

This was a tough one.

But I can't tell you all, all day long, to shout what's important to you from the rooftops and damn the consequences, if I'm not willing to do the same. 

A. 

A Kinder, Gentler Booty Call

Mitt Romney, everybody: 

Mitt Romney said Tuesday he has no plans to push for legislation limiting abortion, a softer stance from a candidate who has said he would "get rid of" funding for Planned Parenthood and appoint Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the Republican presidential nominee told The Des Moines Register in an interview.

Oh for fuck's sake. Just take a position and stick with it. Own your evil. I have more respect for movement pro-lifers at this point because at least they're being consistent in their contempt for women and their placing slogans above substance. At least you know where they're at, even if it's on the street corner holding pictures of dismembered baby dolls in ketchup. 

A. 

Please Just Go Galt & Leave Us The Fuck Alone

I know it's been said before like a thousand times but the overwhelming butthurt coming from our multimillionaire class has gotten way old. I'm tired of it, I really am. I would like you people to take a steaming cup of STFU and please, go Galt or go to your island in the Caribbean or the south of France or whatever better place you think exists for people like you and just leave the rest of us alone. We'll clean up your mess, just like we always do. We're used to it by now. 

Today we learn that timeshare kingpin David Siegel, whose crashing empire was chronicled in the documentary "Queen of Versailles," has sent a letter to his "valued employees" in which he tells them they will all be fired if President Obama gets reelected. Because of taxes and stuff. And fairness. And class war. And on and on.

So, y'know, no pressure or anything, just something to keep in mind as you head into the voting booth in a few weeks.

He writes:

Just think about this – most of you arrive at work in the morning and leave that afternoon and the rest of your time is yours to do as you please. But not me- there is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have that freedom. I eat, live, and breathe this company every minute of the day, every day of the week. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. I know many of you work hard and do a great job, but I'm the one who has to sign every check, pay every expense, and make sure that this company continues to succeed. Unfortunately, what most people see is the nice house and the lavish lifestyle. What the press certainly does not want you to see, is the true story of the hard work and sacrifices I've made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and people like me who made all the right decisions and invested in themselves are being forced to bail out all the people who didn't.

Now the economy is falling apart? Now? Where were you in October 2008, buddy? Remember who was president then? Your good buddy George W. Bush, the man whom you claim to have single-handedly re-elected in 2004 through "probably illegal" means (and I'm quoting you from Queen Of Versailles here). You support  people who treat the global economy like their personal gambling casino and when it all falls apart you want to blame us? Don't think so, buddy. You created this mess, now you've got to live with it, just like the rest of the hoi polloi. You think you're special? You're not.

He closes with this:

You see, I can no longer support a system that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, so will your opportunities. If that happens, you can find me in the Caribbean sitting on the beach, under a palm tree, retired, and with no employees to worry about.

Yes, please go. Go now. Don't wait until November. You are a bloated leech on the hard work of the middle class, the real engine of our economy, and the very people whom you deride as living a worry-free existence thanks to your sacrifice. This country would be better off without you. Ta-ta. Buh-bye. 

I suppose I should be a little more gracious to these poor dears. I should find that last shred of Christian charity that still lurks somewhere deep in my soul. But right now I'm so over this shit, I can't even be bothered to muster the energy to look for it.

'Born with Boots'

Go read Megan and then come back.

Certainly, if we give out lump sums of cash, there will be people who just blow it on drugs, gambling or alcohol. But the current social safety net isn't immune from fraud either. The research in the story is compelling, showing that most people who are given cash transfers use it to educate themselves and take care of their children.

Word. I'm just about done worrying about what could possibly happen if we give someone who's poor a truly pathetic amount of money so that he doesn't STARVE TO DEATH, when shit like this is going on: 

Ed Burke's Juicy Fruit
"Ten years ago, Chicago's most powerful alderman, Edward M. Burke, and the rest of the City Council signed off on a deal that promised $16 million in taxpayer subsidies to the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. to help it build a new corporate campus on Goose Island rather than move to the suburbs," the Sun-Times reports.

"Three years later, Burke's law firm, retained by Wrigley, persuaded Cook County officials to lower the property assessments for two buildings the chewing gum giant had bought down the street from the new campus. Burke's legal work helped Wrigley cut its property taxes by more than $412,000 between 2006 and 2008, records show.

"For that, the company says, it paid the alderman about $90,000 in legal fees."

So Wrigley still came out more than $15 million ahead.

Obviously we can't trust these schmucks with lump sums of cash, so why not put them on some kind of punitive voucher system and drug test them frequently while mocking them in campaign speeches and on Facebook with stupid memes? I mean, give them lump sums of cash, and every banker schmoe in sight is going to be blowing it on ill-advised IPOs and badly designed vacation homes, or they're going to lose it altogether. Parasites. 

In all seriousness, OF COURSE we should just give people a wad of bills every month (or every week, or whatever) so they can make the same life-or-death decisions about which bill gets paid when that everybody who isn't Mitt Romney is making these days. Then they could put off buying spaghetti sauce in order to get diapers. Then they could duct-tape the hole in their shoes, so they can go to the pharmacy and get a flu shot. Then their lives would be up to them, the way yours is when you're not beholden to the crabbiest busybody on the Fox News block. 

The only downside to giving away a lump of money is that it would interfere with our need to create a situation where we can be sure they won't be spending "our" taxpayer dollars on booze, or organic vegetables, or sugary soda, and if there is one thing we absolutely love in this godforsaken country it is getting our national back up over $2.50 worth of fucking groceries. We love that more than football and chocolate cake and handjobs. Telling stories about shitty poor people we know is like our national Olympics and it never ends.  

We love it because it gives us a pass not to give a shit about the enduring nature of poverty in America. If we can pull up an anecdote about JUST ONE SINGLE POOR PERSON being an asshole then that means we don't have to feel bad about the next poor person we see. Because people who aren't Us are all the same anyway, and love is a bowl of sugar and there's only so much so don't waste it on the unworthy. Instead, just sit around on your damn couch and wait for a really worthy cause to come along. I'm sure it'll be here any second. 

Number two, by making it about "our taxpayer dollars" and which side of the line we're on, we're giving ourselves the righteously indignant self-esteem boost of thinking we're on the upside. In truth, welfare of any kind isn't me paying for your groceries. It's goddamn INSURANCE that if I need groceries that bad someday and am broke, I can get some. Put it just that selfishly, if you want. It's not assistance to someone else. It's making a deposit at the bank of karma and if you don't ever have to visit that ATM, be fucking glad about it instead of complaining. 

We absolutely should have a lot more trust in the inherent decency of the overwhelming number of people who need help in this country, and spend a shitload of a lot less time crabbing at them about the exact brand of pickle relish they buy and whether we think they deserve to splurge on the brand-name stuff this month. 

A. 

Intrinsic Evil

Illinois bishop Thomas Paprocki, formerly an auxiliary bishop of Chicago and generally somebody I would not have expected to be this obtuse: 

There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils. My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding "political" and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues. People of faith object to these platform positions that promote serious sins. I know that the Democratic Party's official "unequivocal" support for abortion is deeply troubling to pro-life Democrats.

So what about the Republicans? I have read the Republican Party Platform and there is nothing in it that supports or promotes an intrinsic evil or a serious sin. The Republican Party Platform does say that courts "should have the option of imposing the death penalty in capital murder cases." But the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (in paragraph 2267), "Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor. If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself — the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."

One might argue for different methods in the platform to address the needs of the poor, to feed the hungry and to solve the challenges of immigration, but these are prudential judgments about the most effective means of achieving morally desirable ends, not intrinsic evils.

Certainly there are "pro-choice" Republicans who support abortion rights and "Log Cabin Republicans" who promote same-sex marriage, and they are equally as wrong as their Democratic counterparts. But these positions do not have the official support of their party.

Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.

None of this is new, of course, and part of what's got my back up here is just the passive-aggressiveness of it, as if Paprocki is God's Perpetually Angry Receptionist, saying he's not ACCUSING you of taking all the paper clips out of His drawer, but maybe you should think VERY CAREFULLY about what kind of employee you want to be. For your own sake. And clean out the damn fridge already; it smells like something died in there. 

US Catholic magazine, which is really warming my black little heart with its borderline-blasphemy these days, fixates on the tax exemption issue that always pops up when some purported servant of God shoots off his mouth: 

So, I could be jeopardizing my salvation if I vote for a candidate who supports the Democratic platform (but not if I vote GOP), regardless of what a particular official actually does when elected. This is sketchy moral logic to say the least, but my real question is: Does it constitute an endorsement, which would jeopardize the Springfield diocese's tax-exempt status? Paprocki writes that he feels duty-bound to speak, even if he sounds "political," but wouldn't be easier just to abandon tax exemption and jump into poliics with both feet?

But I'd like to talk about Paprocki's seemingly endless fixation on words, because that's where his argument falls down.

He spends the first few grafs of this piece boring on about the word God being in or out of the document, and then segues into this comparison of what is written in both parties' platforms. Nowhere does he talk about what each party practices. He makes a deliberate equivalence between Democrats' support for abortion rights (or, putting it in terms a pro-life Catholic Democrat might, their opposition to empowering the state to force a woman to bear a child against her will) and Republicans' support for the death penalty. Both are things that might make voting for either party morally objecitonable. 

Then he goes on to be all EXCEPT NOT REALLY on the death penalty, ignoring the fact that in practice, Republicans are far more eager to impose the death penalty upon the unwilling than Democrats are to impose abortion. 

In practice is where his argument falls apart. What happens when a particular party's will is imposed? Forget what a man says; what does he DO? What consequences do his actions produce? What aim does he have in pursuing his goals? What kind of world does he want? If we follow him, what kind of world do we get? Paul Ryan spells it out pretty clearly. Mitt Romney isn't making much of a mystery these days of what he really thinks of everybody. Paprocki's focus is on the words. On the rules. On the platforms and what they say. On the lines of code in the box and not what that code looks like spun out to its logical end. 

Time was, a decent fellow and fair to middling carpenter set out on the road to tell people that the rules don't matter if people don't matter. If the system of laws and words doesn't serve people, then you burn that whole thing down. Results are what matters. Not what the code in the box says, what it looks like when spun out to its logical end. 

Yet here's Paprocki back again, saying we should prize a platform that does not promote "intrinsic evil" over a party that, more often that not, lately, produces it in spades. 

A. 

Living in the Crash Position

I wrote this, about Laura Roslin and Galactica: 

What's the hardest thing to do after a loss? Trust, again. Hear the phone ring and know it's not a crisis siren, hear the love in someone's voice and know he's not going to die. Fracking getting up in the morning, with all it entails; you'd like to stay mired in your fear and your anger and your very special alone-ness for all of time, but contact is inevitable, leading to information bleed. We have to start over. We have to keep moving. We have to meet each other and change and push and love each other. We don't know any other way to do this. We don't have any other choices. And so she steps forward, into his arms.

And Doc wrote this, about bullying and being bullied: 

He probably found solace in being good at something and eventually realizing that being able to throw a ball for a high school team wasn’t the end all and be all of life. He left high school, left college and began to find himself in a world where different was embraced. He was chosen for a show that celebrates that in its own way and allowed him to create his own power.

The first chance he got to take his skill and his power and give some hope to someone else, he turned into a bully.

I went to my 10th high school reunion a few years ago. I wasn't the most picked-on kid in school, but I certainly wasn't the least, either. I was awkward and over-eager and didn't quite understand how social cues (or fashion) worked for a long time. I always said the wrong thing, too loudly. I always hung around too long. And I had frizzy hair and buck teeth that could open a soda bottle, and kids are assholes, really. 

And even after I had friends, and was making professional progress, and had a life, I still felt a little bit like an underdog all the time, and pushed too hard all the time, and was afraid of failure all the time, and figured it was just a matter of time until the people who liked me realized I was a loser and dumped me for somebody cooler or more fun. These aren't THE WORST PROBLEMS EVAR, like I was born white in America so let's all calm down, but they were things I noticed I was doing as a result of what had happened to me. 

So I went to my 10th reunion intending to be all IMMA SHOW YOU PEOPLE, with my kickass husband and my stories about how I was doing exactly what I said I was gonna do when I lit out of town like my ass was on fire. And I looked around the room, and realized that everybody in that room had been trying to do the best they ever could, and some of us really screwed it up. Some of us had been bullies and some of us had been bullied and some of us had been weak and looked the other way, and absolutely nobody gave a shit about any of our excuses or reasons but us. 

The most pernicious thing about bullying is that the minute you think about it, you're alone with it, with something that happened to you that didn't have to happen, and you have to take that in. As long as you're passing it on, it's just how kids are and it's necessary for their emotional growth and blah blah blah all the shit we throw out there to perpetuate the cycle. 

You have to stop and let it hit you: something happened to you that you couldn't control, that wasn't right, that wasn't your fault. And that you have to be okay with now, in order to get up out of the crash position, and know that when someone offers a hand to you they're not going to turn around and slap you with it a second later. That's the hardest thing in the world to do, because it's the easiest, because it's up to you. 

A. 

Matt Lauer Is a Sexist Douchebag

Well, the Today Show finally did it. They finally broke me. I actually yelled SHUT UP at the TV in the waiting room of my doctor's office:

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think my favorite part, aside from how he asks her to talk about sex with her husband and then shames her for talking about it ("I'm blushing, I'm blushing") is when he basically asks why she didn't quit the Olympics because she knew she had had sex and therefore might be pregnant. 

Lauer asked whether the couple considered perhaps waiting to try to expand their family until after the Olympics. With a laugh, Walsh Jennings replied that restraint "only lasts so long.”

“I just felt like it would take me a while this time to get pregnant for some reason,” she said. “So a month before, we’re like, ‘Should we start trying?’ I had never experienced morning sickness. We were in Gstaad, Switzerland, one of my favorite places, our favorite places, in the world ...  we decided just to get going on the process.”

“Apprently we’re very fertile,” she said before covering her eyes with embarrassment.

Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical editor, says competing at the games did not increase Walsh Jennings’ risk of pregnancy complications.

“The risk that she put to herself and fetus was zero to none,” she said.

Five weeks into a pregnancy, fetuses are tiny, well protected and “very, very, very hearty[sic],” Snyderman says.

“The embryo is microscopic. It’s just implanted in the lining of the uterus,” Snyderman says. “It would take an act of God to dislodge it, not a bump on the tummy, not a dive.”

Well thank God NBC's "chief medical editor" (please tell me there isn't more than one "medical editor" because I've been told journalism is in trouble financially) weighed in to tell us that this woman and her doctor and her husband made a smart decision, because otherwise I'm sure we'd have some fucking busybody in the comments second-guessing her every move OH WAIT: 

ill never understand the concept of "trying" to have a baby. it's not like you build up enough sperm and suddenly it happens. it can happen the first day you try. good for her, but she shouldve waited until after the olympics to "try". glad the baby is healthy.

Someone please explain the male and female reproductive systems to this idiot. And take away his/her car keys. I don't need anybody that stupid on the road with me. 

I mean, how dare she win a gold medal while carrying a baby! Sit at home and sip weak decaf tea and watch soap operas while you're knocked up, ladies! Don't work or drive or walk too fast. Don't do anything but eat and sleep! After all, you're pregnant, so you're done accomplishing things now! If you need achievement, try living through your husband's and kids' accomplishments. That never goes badly. 

A. 

The War's Never Over

Never.

Ever.

As part of my job, I talked to a young man today who had recently been fired.  He is 26 years old.  We sent him to Iraq when he was 19 years old.  Yes, "we."  You and I.  Everyone who lives in the United States of America sent him there.  And he got broken.  Ruined.  He has post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury that you and I are responsible for.  He did not incur those injuries defending our freedoms, or securing weapons of mass destruction, or "fighting them there so we won't have to fight them here," or any of the other reasons we were told that we had to send young men and women to Iraq.

No. 

We sent him to go get ruined for the biggest bunch of bullshit I've ever seen in my entire life.

And ruined is exactly what he is.  He got fired from a job for some chickenshit reason.  That was the longest employment he'd had since returning to the States in 2006.  He'd worked there 17 months.  He can't remember things on a day-to-day basis.  He has problems dealing with what most of us would think are simple situations.  He gets very nervous when he hears sudden, loud noises.  And his wife has to help him with what you and I would think are simple tasks.

We did this to him.  We ruined him.  We destroyed his life and the lives of those who care for him and deal with his disabilities on a daily basis.

That's on us.  We simply cannot put him back together again, because what was broken is no longer something that can be reassembled.  And we did that.  We let people send him, and thousands of men and women like him, to a pointless war.  We did that because people thought that we needed to look strong, or that there wasn't any appreciable difference between electoral choices, or that we just needed to teach Those People In That Part Of The World a lesson. 

But we ruined that man.  And his wife.  And his parents.  And his siblings, cousins, in-laws, and everyone else who has been personally touched by this fucking ridiculously unnecessary problem.  Us.  We did that.  I'm not saying that he's a hero, or a "wounded warrior," or any other stupid platitude we use to refer to the people we ship off to fight our stupid wars. 

What I am saying is that if we, as a people, hadn't decided that there wasn't a difference between Bush and Gore, or that we needed to "send a message to the Arab street" after 9/11, or that Saddam Hussein (a secular dictator who imprisoned and killed people we would refer to as "Islamic extremists") was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden (an Islamic fundamentalist who thought Saddam Hussein was an affront to Islam), then this man wouldn't be in the situation he is today.  He probably wouldn't be reviewing his investment portfolio, and he might be looking at four years upstate for a stupid felony, but that doesn't matter--we didn't give him those choices, because we took those options from him. 

Yes, that's right.  We created a society where this bullshit outcome was not only possible for some people, but likely.  And that makes me sick.  I drove to work today, and I had to stop on the way home, open the door, and puke on the road.  Because this shit makes me sick. 

I'm sick to fucking death of dealing with the people that we have broken, or given up on, or just never even acknowledged existed in the first fucking place.  Not because that work isn't important, but because it never ends.  Because we refuse to acknowledge that we are all in this together, and to see that, as the boss so eloquently says, your fate is our fate.  That's what makes me despair.  And to see that we have a large percentage of the population that has decided that these people--the people who live nearby, that serve you food, or drive you places, or clean your hotel rooms, or pick your orders, or do any of a thousand other tasks that are necessary to the functioning of a society--not that they don't matter, but that they are somehow taking shit that is yours that doesn't belong to them--that just makes me want to go to the liquor store, buy all the whiskey that I can afford, and go outside and drink until I'm dead. 

Maybe I'm just a little too drunk to make sense tonight, but that's what I've got to say.  Be well, everyone, and take care of your fellow people.  That's all you can do that matters worth half a shit in this world.

Two Years' Probation

It's lucky His Grace wasn't a 20-year-old black man with a crack rock in his pocket. 

A. 

Time for the Today Show to Get On the Case

I suppose they'll be flying Matt Lauer in any day now. Interviews with the victims' families and people who knew the gunmen from high school. Maybe some special graphics and a theme jingle. Surely this will warrant dumping whatever Pretty White Mother controversy is going on at the moment. I mean, it's a mass shooting, after all. 

The gulf between what we are told to accept as normal and what we are taught to think of as a crisis never fails to astound me in its size. 

A.  

So Many Potential Sword Jokes

For some reason no one up until now has considered that Lancelot might be bi? 

The first book in the series, June 2011's Lancelot And The Wolf, was rereleased for the Amazon Kindle, where it raced up the charts. However, a torrent of one-star reviews on Amazon.com first tipped off Mirador publishers that the issue may be more than a coincidence. The investigation that ensued revealed that all the reviews were posted in the same short time period and had similar anti-gay connotations, describing the series as “Twisted” “Perverted” and “Disgusting.” Not long afterwards similar hate emails began pouring into the publisher’s offices and to Luddington directly.

I think 90 percent of our sex problem is the need to put everybody in a box, and say you are straight, and you are gay, and we are friends, and we are In Love, and the most important thing is where you put your bits so that we know how to categorize you. I can't tell you how many people argue that bisexuality doesn't exist, like it's just laziness or refusal to pick a side or something. What if there aren't sides? What if it's just love, either way? 

I've actually read the original here, and I'm sorry, you tell me who Lancelot loved more. You tell me who Arthur loved more. The point is that they loved each other. Otherwise it's just two guys waving their dicks around over a chick, and not a tragedy. Things like that are just a mess, and everybody involved would be far better off with a threesome than this CHOOSE ME OR HIM bullshit, and also who the hell on earth has a vested interest in keeping Lancelot straight anyway? Like what is the inherent win there for anybody except maybe Guinevere? 

A. 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - Akin breakin heart edition

Well, so much for taking this week off - let's dive in before I change my mind.

Akin Says He Has No Plans to Quit Missouri Senate Race ABC News ^ | August 20, 2012 | Chris Good

Posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:24:53 PM by Blackyce

Akin said he has no plans to withdraw.

“I don’t know that I’m the only person in public office who’s suffered from foot-in-mouth disease here, and this was a very, very serious error. On the other hand, there are so many good people in Missouri who nominated me, and they understood my heart,” Akin said.
...

Akin said no Republicans have called him and asked him to withdraw from the race.

“No one has called me and said, ‘Todd, I think you should drop out,’” Akin said. “No one has said that. But I gather people are saying that in the media, but they didn’t specifically call me and tell me that.”

****************

Anybody know his number?

1 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:24:56 PM by Blackyce

To: Blackyce

Funny, Drudge currently has a story up that he just announced he’s dropping out? Which story is more recent?

3 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:28:56 PM by apillar

Matt Drudge hasn't gotten anything right since 1998 - are you still hanging out there?

To: Blackyce

What he meant was that fewer than one-tenth of one percent of abortions are the result of rape, but that’s not what he said.

This is exactly why Claire McCaskill ran “anti-Akin” ads in the Republican primary dog-whistling Democrats to cross over and vote for him.

Unfortunately for Claire he blew up sooner and more thoroughly than she had planned.

Akin will be gone and Brunner will be in his place by next weekend.

4 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:29:12 PM by E. Pluribus Unum (Government is the religion of the sociopath.)

There's just two things wrong with your 11th-dimensional chess theory - you're an idiot, and he's still running.

To: Blackyce

He hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of winning and he could very well lose Missouri for Romney.Get him the hell out of there!!!!!!

6 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:29:31 PM by Gay State Conservative (The Word Is Out,Harry Reid's Into Child Porn.Release All Your Photos,Harry!)

.

.

To: Blackyce

Don’t go away mad Akin, just go away. Your political career is over and it was of your own doing. Now scram!

8 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:31:21 PM by PhxTM06

 

To: Blackyce

Aiken to be on Hannity after bottom of hour (3:30 EDT).

9 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:31:40 PM by Will88

.

To: PhxTM06

He is digging another hole on Hannity right now. Gads....he is stumbling.

17 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:40:27 PM by penelopesire (TIME FOR A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR!)

.

.

To: penelopesire

Soros is probably pouring millions into his campaign right now to keep the imbecile in the race.

Soros has his minions donating to make it appear he has all this conservative support.

And FWIW, I just listened to him on Hannity. The guy is dumb as a rock. "I am conservative. We need to get rid of Claire McCaskill. I am conservative. We need to beat Claire McCaskill. Rinse repeat.

38 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:58:50 PM by nhwingut (Sarah Palin 12... No One Else)

To: Blackyce

I don't give a damn that this guy said something politically incorrect.

No, he said something shit-stupid.

If conservatives are not only willing to throw him under the bus, but seem to take a certain amount of glee in doing it, then we are already lost. Leftist thinking has won out.

Tellit to Limbaugh.

Leftists never apologize, never give in, and they never tear down their own people in power no matter how many mistakes they make. That is why they are winning. Meanwhile, every time some Republican says "macaca", "conservatives" are all too eager to tear him down and cede the win to the leftists.

That's because "macaca" is a racist slur.

Seems to me that there are quite a few conservatives, including Freepers, with no heart at all. Resisting the tyranny of political correctness is hard, and they are just looking for an excuse to enter the warm embrace of submission. Oh, a Republican said something that the media can misconstrue?

Misconstrue??

That's never happened before! Let's take this opportunity to be every bit as petty and irrational as the lefties so that we can look around at our leftist masters and say "See? I'm cool too!"

24 posted on Monday, August 20, 2012 2:43:24 PM by fr_freak

.

More inernecine warfare after the jump for joy.

Don't Talk About the Gay

Skeery, skeery gay: 

"That bullying thing is the biggest lark out there....There are sexually confused children who could be pushed into a lifestyle that I don’t think is appropriate with them and it's not for the norm for society, and they don't know how they can get back from that. I think a lotof timesthese young teens and young children, they find it very hard on themselves and unfortunately some of them commit suicide."

You know, it's funny to remember this now, because I used to consider the environment I grew up in to be conservative, but my Catholic school in its "understanding sexuality" type class, brought in a gay dude to talk to us about being gay. Not to condemn it, or even discuss how it related to Catholicism. Just to talk about what it was like to be gay, and how he always knew he liked boys, and that was just how he was. The only out gay person I'd ever known of up to that point was a distant relative who lived very far away, so this was a whole new thing to me and probably to a whole lot of other people.

And it was probably not a whole new thing to a number of kids, who probably felt very alone before that day.

I don't think anybody walked out of that room gay who hadn't walked into it that way. It's not like all the boys sat up and said, why, penis can be an option for me! I never thought of it that way! Come here, Biff, let's get busy. I mean, granted, it can be a bit of a revelation when you discover bisexuality exists or that you might be straight but you're not blind, but mostly this is about putting words to stuff you already knew, not coming up with new feelings because you now have a language for them.

The idea of the gay contagion is so pernicious, and it's not that every homophobe is closeted, like that's not an excuse or even really a very good reason to be a hateful asshole, but when you are afraid that the mere exposure to someone who is not like you will destroy the very fabric of society, well, let's just say you're not that confident in your worldview to begin with. 

A. 

 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - Oh, my Akin head!

Sorry for getting out of my box - but this one couldn't wait for a week.

OK folks - you knew this was coming - I ordered some extra air scrubbers for this one, and pressed every commenter into service hooking them up.

Ms. A took one look at the profusion of new ducts coming out of the iso chamber, muttered something about how this was going to affect her insurance premiums, and hastily departed.

First, let's take the wayback machine to a kinder and gentler time, when teabaggers were king, and women made sammiches:

Tea Party-backed Rep. Akin wins Missouri GOP Senate primary to take on McCaskill
FoxNews ^ | Aug. 8, 2012

Posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 6:31:48 AM by Milagros

CBS News Tea Party-backed Rep. Akin wins Missouri GOP Senate primary to take on McCaskill

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Rep. Todd Akin, who played up his tea party credentials and conservative appeal, broke out from a three-way Missouri Republican primary on Tuesday to earn the right to take on Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, setting up one of ...

1 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 6:32:04 AM by Milagros

Let the tongue-laving begin!

To: Politically Correct

If Akin lives up to the ad that Claire was running against him, I’ll be a very happy Missourian.

4 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:01:52 AM by listenhillary (Courts, law enforcement, roads and national defense should be the extent of government)

.

.

To: tsowellfan

Polling has shown that Claire loses to Akin, as well as Steeleman and Brunner. Now we’ll find out. Akin, I thought was so far behind that he’d be in third place at the end of the night. I thought he was ‘too conservative’ so said Clair’es ad. Hope he’s as good as Claire says he is!

8 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:08:30 AM by Big Giant Head

.

.

To: maryz

Akin will do just fine. He has been around awhile and does not have a lot of dirt or garbage that can be thrown at him. I liked him the best of the three candidates. He is a good choice to take on Claire. I would have been happy to vote for either of the other two as well. It was refreshing to have some decent choices for once.

19 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 7:40:55 AM by gopno1

.

.

To: listenhillary

He has never shied away from being a Godly conservative.

Unintentional irony alert!

He would make a great senator.
Heard McCaskill bashing him this morning as she heads out to Kansas City to campaign.

29 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 9:22:34 AM by katiedidit1

.

.

To: katiedidit1

They are all good candidates imo.

Once upon a time, before the Marxists captured the jackass party and drove nearly all the RINO inclined politicians over to the GOP, elections were about who could do the best job among a slate of decent candidates. They weren't about the lesser of two evils.

Congratulations to the Missouri GOP for getting back to where the entire country should be.

50 posted on Wednesday, August 08, 2012 3:40:26 PM by Vigilanteman (Obama: Fake black man. Fake Messiah. Fake American. How many fakes can you fit in one Zer0?)

The 6th Century?

To: Politically Correct

I understand why all the rinos are sissies now. The single white women base hates the tea party. It makes it difficult to win when they can’t even get a portion of their vote.

63 posted on Thursday, August 09, 2012 8:11:15 AM by lookout88 (.combat officer's dad)

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

.

My my - such a tabagger outpouring of love for the home-schooling McCaskill-killer.

.

"You know - it would be a cat-a-strophy if perchance, harm was to befall this serene - scene."

Oh my: Missouri GOP Senate nominee says victims of ‘legitimate rape’ don’t get pregnant
Twitchy team ^

Posted on Sunday, August 19, 2012 2:59:08 PM by Perdogg

“Legitimate rape” became a Twitter trending topic in the U.S. this afternoon after liberal blog Talking Points Memo posted a video of Rep. Todd Akin claiming that victims of “legitimate rape” are unlikely to become pregnant.

1 posted on Sunday, August 19, 2012 2:59:11 PM by Perdogg

LIES! LIES!  It's all em-ess-em LIES!

To: Perdogg

McDonnell smear job take two. Did not work in VA, will not work in MO any better

2 posted on Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:00:25 PM by MNJohnnie (Giving more money to DC to fix the Debt is like giving free drugs to addicts think it will cure them)

See?

To: AnotherUnixGeek

there is a video of it.

11 posted on Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:08:06 PM by Perdogg (Mutts for Mitt all agree - Better in the crate than on the plate)

Oh.

To: TwelveOfTwenty

why say anything about it?

10 posted on Sunday, August 19, 2012 3:07:21 PM by Perdogg (Mutts for Mitt all agree - Better in the crate than on the plate)

Don't ask, don't tell?

.

The angst and level 8.5 facepalms after the non-forcible rape.

.

Legitimate Rape

So this asshole. 

Forget for a moment the positively CHARMING idea that women can will a pregnancy into or out of being. (Which throws the whole pro-lifers vs. IVF thing into a new light, like if we crazy bitches just wanted a baby harder, we could make it happen without offending Jesus by freezing embryos.)

Let's just deal for a moment with the "legitimate" rape comment, as it differentiates that kind of rape from all the other rape out there. There is some kind of thing going on where people think there's an epidemic of fake rape accusations. These people saw one lifetime movie or one report about one accusation and suddenly all the women who ever reported a rape were just doing it for the ... attention? All the prizes you get? 

What do they think happens to women who report they've been raped/ Do they think those women all get free candy and presents? Do they think those women aren't called whores, don't have their sanity questioned, aren't blamed for being tipsy or being dressed a certain way or going a certain place or daring to be outdoors at a certain time? Do they think it's fun to have people dig into their sexual histories, examine their behavior, and generally do everything but deal with the fact that something horrible happened to them that they did nothing to cause or deserve?

Maybe they should try it sometime. See how legitimate it feels. 

A. 

On Not Being Creepy

Basically, this boils down to TAKE THE HINT: 

10. Someone doesn’t want you around? Go away. Here are some subtle hints: When you come by they don’t make eye contact with you. When they are in a group the group contracts or turns away from you. If you interject in the conversation people avoid following up on what you’ve said. One of the friends of the person you are interested in interposes themselves between you and that person. And so on. When stuff like that happens, guess what? You’re not wanted. When that happens, here’s what you do: Go away. Grumble to yourself (and only to yourself) all you like about their discourteousness or whatever. Do it away from them. Remember that you don’t get to define other people’s comfort level with you. Remember that they’re not obliged to inform you about why they don’t want you around. Although, for God’s sake, if they do tell you they don’t want you around, listen to them.

In working events for a number of years now, both as an author and a volunteer at various conferences, I've come to know this kind of guy much better than I want to know him. At a recent event, there was a dude who kept hanging around the entrance where I was working check-in and talking to me about things unrelated to work. Standing too close. Leaning over. Staring expectantly at me like a cat at a mouse hole. 

This was problematic for a couple of reasons. One, I wasn't there to have chitter-chat. Two, his standing around was causing a backup and a crowd at the door, and if there's one thing that drives me bananas at events, it's badly-designed ingress and egress routes that cause crowds, because right from the get-go people are inconvenienced and pissed. The point of event check-in is to get people inside as fast as possible so they can enjoy themselves.  

I asked the fellow to please move off to the side, and told him I was sorry but I didn't really have time to talk. He wandered off for a while. Later, when the crowd had thinned out a bit, he came back, again standing just a little too close, staring just a little too intently, and I had no built-in excuse to make him leave. I was stuck at the entrance, and he was taking advantage of that. Once again, I smiled and mentioned that I had work to do. "Oh, don't mind me," he replied, smirking. "I'm just here to bother you." 

I'm claustrophobic. Not in elevators or cars, but in crowds. If you trap me, I get the overwhelming urge to make like a badger and claw and chew my way out of whatever enclosure I'm in. If that enclosure happens to be your ass or face, best MOVE. 

Now, I don't for a second believe this guy was hitting on me and being sweetly clumsy about it. First, he was the steady boyfriend of someone else at the event. Second, the whole time this was going on Mr. A was sitting right beside me (also working, and we're not that couple that gets each other into fights), so if he was trying to ask me out it would have been spectacularly inept, even by the standards of Weirdos I Have Known. Third, I don't assume everybody who's an asshole is that way because they secretly want me, because please. 

This guy wanted to bully. He wanted the petty power that comes from making somebody else twitchy and he wanted to be the good guy who was just trying to be nice when the bitch told him to go away. He wanted that BAD. 

That's the thing about this. People who accuse women (especially women at cons, because geekdom does have its own boundaries and issues therewith) of taking this all too seriously ignore the fact that you always KNOW. I mean, unless you have some kind of condition that causes you to miss social cues and you haven't dealt with that, generally, though, people know when someone is approaching them trying to be charming.

There's a warmth there. A genuine interest. A willingness to give space, to have some kind of open response and approach. Most of all, a lack of presumption: I want to be near you, but I don't think for a second I have the RIGHT to be near you contrary to your wishes. I've had many, many, many friendly encounters with strangers, even flirty ones, and rarely felt threatened, but the couple of times I have, it's been night and day. And in those cases, I was incidental. They would have been creeping at anybody who was behind the table, because bullying is never about its object. 

What eventually happened at my event was I was rude enough to this dude to get him to think I was just one of those bitches who don't appreciate Nice Guys, and off he went, hopefully to his actual girlfriend. I felt bad, momentarily, and wondered if he'd cause some kind of trouble about it. Because I'd be the one to get into trouble, you see, for not being nice enough.

That's the point of bullying someone like this. It's not because you just LOVE THEM SO MUCH. It's that you want to be able to make them uncomfortable with no repercussions for yourself, by putting them in a position where objecting to your behavior makes them the bad guy. 

A. 

Power of the State

Tell me again how this is all about freedom, because nothing says freedom to me like the state being able to force you to bear a child against your will: 

The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.

As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.

Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.

A. 

 

'Negroidal'

This is something we're saying now? 

A. 

'Along with those other dates'

Dial DOWN the drama, son: 

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly (R), an ardent opponent of abortion rights, said that today's date would live in infamy alongside those two other historic occasions. Wednesday marked the day on which a controversial new requirement by the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires health insurance companies to cover contraceptive services for women, goes into effect.

"I know in your mind you can think of times when America was attacked. One is December 7th, that's Pearl Harbor day. The other is September 11th, and that's the day of the terrorist attack," Kelly said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. "I want you to remember August the 1st, 2012, the attack on our religious freedom. That is a day that will live in infamy, along with those other dates."

FDR called. He says your mom still owes him change from 1941, which adjusted for inflation is now like $50. He says have your sister bring it the next time she sneaks in the servants' entrance wearing that girdle he likes. 

For fuck's sake, is there anything sadder than watching these scolds try to pretend they're doing something important? Pearl Harbor? 9/11? Those were days on which people legitimately did important things. This is just some chicks not having to pay so much for their birth control pills, and don't get me wrong, that's awesome, but it's completely nothing like having a few thousand people dead at the end of the day. 

One thing that keeps making me crazy in this "religious freedom" freakfest of a conversation is the point nobody's making: Nobody is forcing religious women to go on birth control. If your ladies are sufficiently godly, they can go about their days with nothing changing one bit. If they are really that serious about Jesus being opposed to the slutty sluttiness, they can just not take any pills at all, and continue to have a baby every year, excruciating pain every month, and possibly bleed to death for good measure, the way the Bible tells them to. 

Meanwhile, out here in the 21st century, those of us who think Jesus would rather spend HIs time sorting His junk mail and keeping His eye on sparrows will take the money the new law saves us and buy some Chipotle with it, or pay rent, or put gas in our cars, and if Jesus or the Pope have a problem with that They are welcome to take it up with us personally. 

A. 

War on Christmas in July: The Battle of Chick-fil-A

There are other ways to do this: 

"The alderman has the ideological support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel," the Tribune reports.

"'Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,' the mayor said in a statement when asked about Moreno's decision."

I'm sorry, I didn't get my Chicago Values handout, but if I remember correctly they have something to do with "What's in it for me?"

More importantly, this sets a dangerous precedent: If your ideological belief isn't shared by Joe Moreno, forget about building a business in the 1st Ward.

And if the next alderman is against gay marriage and you're for it, the next alderman will have every right to reject your business too.

Agreed. It's a pretty clear free speech issue: You cannot deny them access to public services for which they clearly qualify based on the repulsive political stances of their higher-ups, especially if you are fucking dumb enough to say that that's the reason for your denial in the first place. Get off my side, assholes. Stop helping if this is the only way you can think of to do it. 

Moreover, this entire Chick-fil-A THING is on my last goddamn nerve, because like the War on Christmas before it, like the persecuted people who want to make a show out of praying in schoool, it's mobilized the dumbest people on the planet in defense of something that needs no defending. Here comes Sarah Palin, and this asshole, and Mike Huckabee, and half a dozen fuckwads I've defriended on Facebook and blocked on Twitter, talking about how a fast-food chain is so horribly victimized and we need to stand up for them. 

I don't care how horribly bigoted the Chick-fil-A folks get; they're really probably not going to go broke anytime soon. Meanwhle there is war, famine, pestilence, death, and oh by the way ACTUAL religious persecution happening, and you could not pay any of the talk-show bleaters all up in arms about the fucking chicken nuggets to gve a shit. There are a lot of powerless people in the world getting picked on for their politics and none of them own a fast-food chain. 

It's easy to be in favor of fried chicken! It's easy to love Christmas, too, even though every December we go through some stupid kabuki thing where we judge who loves Christmas and how those filthy atheist whores are trying to take it away. And it drives me wild seeing people who should know better, like Rahm and his aldermen, playing into that, and mistaking the nuggets for the meal, and giving these perpetually angry wingnuts precisely what they want: An excuse to hold a rally in favor of something that doesn't matter at all. 

A. 

In Which I Agree with David Frum

I know, I feel gross about it, but: 

TV news -- and especially local TV news -- is dominated by news of violent crime, the more spectacular and murderous the better. TV news creates a false picture of a country under attack by rampaging criminals, and especially nonwhite criminals. The people who watch the most TV news, Americans older than 50, also happen to be the group most likely to own a gun.

Only one-fifth of young Americans own a gun; one-third of over-50 Americans do. Republicans are twice as likely to own a gun as Democrats. Maybe not so coincidentally, Republicans are more likely to watch the scariest news channel of them all: Fox. Whites are twice as likely to own a gun as nonwhites -- and it may also not be a coincidence that gun purchases have suddenly spiked since November 2008.

Proponents of gun control are baffled that horrific massacres such as the one in Aurora, Colorado, do not lead to stricter gun control. They have their causation backward.

The more terrifyingly criminal the world looks, the more ineffective law enforcement seems, the more Americans demand the right to deadly weapons with which to defend themselves. It is local TV programming directors, not the National Rifle Association, who are tirelessly persuading Americans that they need to strap a gun to their legs before heading to the mall.

I cannot make my doctor's office stop showing The Today Show no matter how much I beg. The nurses like it, she says to me. Okay, but after five minutes of it in the waiting room my blood pressure spikes to stroke levels. The morning after the Aurora shootings, before anybody even knew what this was, we were having a panel debate on whether you should "be worried about taking your kids to this movie." 

First of all, the fucking thing is rated PG-13 and is incredibly loud and violent so no, you shouldn't take your (young) kids to this movie. Not that that stopped half a dozen people at my midafternoon showing from bringing toddlers. I swear the next time a retail spot opens up next to my 'hood's theater I'm snagging it for a drop-off babysitting service for the kids' sakes. I hope that two-year-old keeps you up ALL NIGHT with his nightmares, geniuses. 

Second, though, WHAT THE FUCK ON EARTH. Really, that's our major concern right now, if you should take your kids to a movie because somehow one dude who went on a rampage at Batman means every movie is now dangerous? You know what's dangerous? The WORLD. I will never understand, when so much out there that we cannot control limits our freedom, we would voluntarily scare the shit out of ourselves on a near-constant basis about things that have already happened when it's what we haven't thought of that's gonna come out of nowhere and kill us. 

You watch morning TV (and evening TV about YOUR CHILDREN and how will you KEEP THEM SAFE) and the whole world starts to look like this network of safe areas and danger zones, with checkpoints and times where and when you can cross. Streets you won't go down, people coming to get you, everybody else out there filled with murderous intent and you, helpless. We know, somewhere deep in our bones, that we can't protect ourselves. We know this is futile. And instead of saying look, none of us are safe or all of us are and there is no middle ground, we build a bunker, top it with battlements, and hurry everyone inside after dark. 

Only to find that we sit, surrounded by ammunition, with no one to shoot at but ourselves. 

A. 

Build That Stage!

Absolutely brutal. This needs to be on every TV and radio station in the country. If Mitt Romney is elected we might as well dig our own graves:

 

 

Crazy People Cannot Be Bought

Dear, sweet Democrats. When will you ever learn?

The conventional wisdom over the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid, which SCOTUS ruled could not be compulsory, was always: no worries! Look how generous the Feds are being with the states! No state, even the reddest of the red states, would turn this deal down! Or, as Matthew Yglesias put it, 

[..] Congress' approach was essentially to make Red America an offer it couldn't refuse—expansion could be done on very generous terms with the federal government picking up over 90 percent of the tab, but failure to expand would come with a hefty financial penalty in terms of lost matching Medicaid grants.

We heard this tripe repeated by all of the wise ones in our media, and even I knew it was bullshit. Sure enough, Red America is saying no. Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin -- and who wants to bet that wingnutty governors in Oklahoma, Michigan and other places won't also follow suit?

Who is shocked at this development? Anyone? Bueller? Please. I could have told you this would happen.

Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: crazy people cannot be bought. Were you not paying attention during the Republican debates when the crowd yelled "let him die!" at Wolf Blitzer's hypothetical uninsured young person who suddenly needs care? When Blitzer asked who should pay, did you not hear Ron Paul reply "the churches," to the cheers and hollers of the crowd? These are not people who think caring for the poor is their responsibility. Let someone else deal with it! Churches or ... hey, just maybe they'll die and then we won't have to worry about it anymore. Freedom!

Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: the Republican Party is rife with assholes, sadists and masochists. It's true! Have you not seen fleets of Hummers traveling the interstates of Red America, despite $3-plus gas prices? Why do they do this? Because sending a "fuck you" to Al Gore and the rest of the effete liberal tree huggers is more important than the $100 it costs to make it to Walmart. That's money well spent to this crowd.

Democrats: these are people who have been voting against their own economic interests since forever. You thought you could bribe these people with generous federal money? Chumps. They don't care about money and they sure as hell don't care about the poor. They call them mooches and leeches, and blithely tell the unemployed to just "get a job" during the Second Great Depression, as if jobs grow on trees. This crop of Republican governors would set fire to a homeless person on national television if they thought they could score a political point and take that uppity Obama down a peg.

Democrats, listen to me when I tell you: you are not dealing with rational people. Please stop acting as if you are. We need you to show up and get on message here. Dangling little bipartisan baubles is not working. 

Humane

Remember this, because it's maybe the most important thing you can know to know what the world is really like: We protect our own. 

Any family, any organization, any group of people you can make out of any combination of anybody anywhere, is our own. We draw circles and we work inside them, and it's not always for nefarious reasons. We do this because the world's too big. We have to bite it off in chunks, to make any impact at all. We pick what's ours and we do our best with it. 

But when you entrench like that, when you draw the circle too tight, when you create a power structure that turns protection into isolation, when you admit no one who's not already admitted, your response to a problem is to make the circle smaller, and protecting your own means something much darker. 

Like this: 

The messages indicate former Penn State President Graham Spanier and two other former university officials knew they had a problem with Sandusky after a 2001 shower incident, but apparently first decided to handle it using a "humane" approach before contacting outside authorities whose job it is to investigate suspected abuse.

"This is a more humane and upfront way to handle this,' wrote Gary Schultz, then vice president at the university.

More humane. For whom? The poor, put-upon child rapist? Pardon me if I give him limited access to my sympathies. I wrote up there about having to triage. I'm not immune. 

It gets worse: 

"The only downside for us is if the message (to Sandusky) isn't 'heard' and acted upon, and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it," Spanier purportedly writes.

Because that bolded bit is the heart of it. Us. Spanier writes that the only downside for us is a public relations problem. Forget the monstrousness of that on its face, the very ordinary "bad headlines are on par with being raped as a teenager by your fucking coach" and just think about us. That's where this went wrong. That's how it all went off the rails. 

Us isn't the children in the program Sandusky was running, the poor and vulnerable children whose parents trusted these great legendary men not to turn them wrong. Us isn't the victims, it isn't their families, it isn't even sick, sick Jerry Sandusky, who would have received more mercy were he a rabid dog menacing people on Main Street. Us isn't any of those people. Look where Spanier's drawn the circle. Look who's inside it. Look who's not. 

Curley indicates he no longer wants to contact child welfare authorities just yet. He refers to a conversation the day before with Paterno. It's not known what Paterno may have said to Curley.

Curley writes: "After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday, I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps."

The athletic director apparently preferred to keep the situation an internal affair and talk things over with Sandusky instead of notifying the state's child welfare agency to investigate Sandusky's suspicious activity.

"I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved," Curley allegedly continues.

The person involved. An internal affair. Think about the Catholic Church scandals, the people they express concern for and how they do it. Lip service to the victims, sure, in press conferences, but under their skins, in depositions and private conversations, their worry is for their own: The priests, the bishops, the rich donors who fund their operations. And they believe that's all internal, and they have no need to involve outsiders. So too with this. 

What is internal? Who is the person involved? You aren't the law. You're a person who draws a circle, who protects his own, and the law stands outside that, draws the circle around everybody. That's the point. That's why we have the law, so that the circle widens, and we can protect as many people as we have people at all. The person involved is the victim. The internal affair is his. 

He's part of that us, and there is no upside for him, or any of the others, once Spanier and Paterno and the others said let's keep this inside our circle, and keep everybody else out. 

A. 

Branding the Damage On

Girls. If you think this is funny or cute for WHATEVER reason in your relationship, please break up right now.

 

And I say that as somebody whose spouse got a tattoo of their wedding date on his ring finger.

 

(Which was not my idea [much less my command]. I found it sweet, if a little bit fate-tempting, like isn't this like painting on a target for the universe? That's how this kind of stuff happens, you get your lover's name inked on you and immediately, as if that caused it, she's banging the fellow who does the landscaping.)

 

(Nevertheless, it was sweet. And nobody does our landscaping. We live in a condo. Landscaping is when I throw out the dead plants I forgot to water.)

 

This is gross. Look, marriage is hard enough without throwing all this cutesy bullshit at it designed to make you hate each other. The world is designed to make you hate each other and yourselves already, what with the weather and the economy and how we can't build a washing machine that doesn't at some point make a noise like someone stuck a squirrel in the gears, so let's keep pimping out this adversarial view of relationships where you're locked in a struggle to the death. Who has time for that shit? Jesus, no wonder nobody gets married now until they're like 35, because it takes you that long to jettison all the cultural crap you've been loaded up with, like this idea about "preventing" cheating somehow, and decide if you really want to do this after all.

 

A.

Not Trying Hard Enough

I'll say: 

Mr Cameron said the existing benefits system was "sending out strange signals on working, housing and families".

He went on: "A couple will say, 'We are engaged, we are both living with our parents, we are trying to save before we get married and have children and be good parents.

"'But how does it make us feel, Mr Cameron, when we see someone who goes ahead, has the child, gets the council home, gets the help that isn't available to us?'

"One is trapped in a welfare system that discourages them from working, the other is doing the right thing and getting no help."

But your fictional couple is getting help. They're getting help from their parents, which makes them lazy and entitled, last I checked in with the world's foremost authorities on self-determination, right-wing politicians of the world. "My dad could afford to give me a start in life, therefore I am completely independent and deserve sole credit for all of my achievements" is a construction I will never understand. 

Then again I suppose we should all have the grace to be born white in a Western country, because I totally remember that choice in the womb and boy am I awesome for having made it. 

A. 

ps. I'm just about done with the state telling people how many children they can have. Either put birth control in the water supply and make people have to apply for a breeding license, or shut the fuck up, because shaming people for having children is like the least effective way to do this. 

The Country We Deserve

Stories like this one fill me with so many conflicting emotions. Let's just start at the beginning, shall we?

SEWANEE, Tenn. - As Robin Layman, a mother of two who has major health troubles but no insurance, arrived at a free clinic here, she had a big personal stake in the Supreme Court's imminent decision on the new national health care law.

Not that she realized that. "What new law?" she said. "I've not heard anything about that."

[...]

Layman was hardly the only patient unaware that the law aims to help people like her, by expanding health insurance beginning in 2014. And this gets to the heart of the political dilemma for Democrats: Despite spending tremendous political capital to pass the law, the party is unlikely to win many votes from the law's future beneficiaries, most of whom live in Republican-dominated states in the South and West. In fact, many at the clinic said they don't vote at all.

Oh, lord have mercy. My knee-jerk reaction is to scream, "Pay some fucking attention, people! Christ on a cracker, what the hell is wrong with you?" But I already know the answer to that. It's not that they're too busy or lazy or uneducated to pay attention -- there may be an element of that, but that's not the crux of the issue.

The real problem is that these are people who have given up. They've decided -- with good reason -- that our institutions were not created for them. Those things like caring about who goes to Washington and what's happening in the news are for other people. Robin Layman has already been told she doesn't matter, so what's the point of civic crap like voting? What's it going to get her?

It's really hard to argue with that. Turn on any news broadcast -- Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, it doesn't matter -- and tell me who's talking about people like Robin Layman? No one. We had one presidential candidate in the past decade who did that, and he ended up being a scoundrel. The worst thing John Edwards did wasn't having a baby with his mistress, it was in bringing the plight of the working poor onto the national stage and then dropping it like a hot potato when he got tripped up by ambition and his penis.

You don't have to be Gandhi or Jesus Christ to care about the poor. Republicans never back down, they wear their toe-tapping, diaper-clad scandals like a badge of honor. I guess when you're out there beating the drum for the wealthy and powerful, you can get away with stuff like that.

The other thing I needed to say about this TNR story is that this isn't just a dilemma for Democrats. This is a dilemma for the nation. People like Robin Layman are not going away, regardless of what the Supreme Court does. They will still be there, sleeping in their cars at the po' folks clinic, hoping to finally get some professional care for the problem they've been putting off for months until it finally got so bad they couldn't ignore it any longer. They will continue to be a drag on the nation, not just economically but also socially and morally.

I find it enormously ironic that Tennessee would become a national poster child for our broken healthcare system. Healthcare is a really big business in Tennessee; a lot of people here have made a shit ton of money off of it. I'm not just talking about bazillionaires like the Frist family, or "supply side" guru Arthur Laffer, who serves on the board of a medical tourism company. It's not just U.S. Rep. Diane Black, whose husband owns a major drug testing company (where Bill Frist sits on the board. Cozy.) We're a big center for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, too.

If the healthcare industry is so important to Tennessee's economy, and so many of our political leaders and most prominent citizens are making bazillions of dollars off of it, how come so many of our citizens are left out in the cold when it comes to their healthcare needs? Just wondering.

I don't know how to make people care. I don't know how you make Sen. Lamar Alexander and Sen. Bob Corker care about the tens of thousands of uninsured people in this state. Until those folks start showing up and demanding some attention, the plutocrats and politicians won't care.

And I don't know how to motivate our poor, the people in the trenches who live our healthcare crisis day in and day out. I don't know how you get them to believe that they really can change the system, when that system has failed them so many times and in so many ways.

So we're left with a situation where raising taxes on millionaires by 3% is anathema, and the poor continue to be voiceless and ignored. The longer we wait, the more entrenched our broken system becomes, especially here in Tennessee where so many of our political leaders profit from exploiting a broken system.

I guess we'll just have to wait until the bodies start piling up outside the mansion gates and the problem can no longer be ignored. Not a very satisfying solution, is it?

Hand In Your Feminist Card

Okay, shit like this? Is why women who are feminists but say they aren't feminists say that. 

I have to admit that when I meet a woman who I know is a graduate of, say, Princeton -- one who has read The Second Sex and therefore ought to know better -- but is still a full-time wife, I feel betrayed. I'm not much of a moralist -- I have absolutely no right to be -- but in the interest of doing what's right both for me personally and for women generally, I have been strict with myself about earning my keep. For the longest time I would not date anyone who would now be called a one-percenter because money and power are such a potent combination, and if I am going to be bossed around, I don't want that to be the reason. When it's come up, I have chosen not to get married. Over and over again, I have opted for my integrity and independence over what was easy or obvious. And I am happy. I don't want everyone to live like me, but I do expect educated and able-bodied women to be holding their own in the world of work.

We can spend all day lifing stay at home mothers and housewives and you know what will happen at the end of it, as a result? Those women a) probably won't be well-disposed toward people who call them idiots who are wasting their lives b) will be just as subject to the rules of a society that deems them worth less than men c) might be ashamed of themselves which as long as I've been alive has never magically made anyone become awesome. 

I could give a fuck who has a "real" job and who doesn't, and who is betraying the sisterhood by being a wife and mother, because that crap is a distraction from what people — mostly wealthy men — are doing to perpetuate a system that degrades the lives of all women. 

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time -- by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits -- is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it? The whole point to begin with was that women were losing their minds pushing mops and strollers all day without a room or a salary of their own.

Wow. Because feminism began when some middle-class woman in 1969 went to work, and it's all worthless if some middle-class to wealthy woman doesn't do so now? The "whole point" once upon a time was that women couldn't vote or own property or inherit money, that women could be thrown into asylums for sticking up for themselves or telling their husbands not to beat them anymore, that women could have their children taken from them if they displeased their spouses, that women couldn't serve on juries or could be fired from whatever jobs they did manager to land because of their inconvenient chickitude. 

The "whole point" was that women are human beings and citizens of this country and deserve to be treated as such, in the workplace, at home, and in the pages of the Atlantic. You know, there are ways to talk about women's willingness to surrender their own economic power (as parts of this piece do) that don't devolve into shaming other ladies, wealthy or not, but this reads like Wurtzel is mostly after winning the Feminist Olympics and writing a new rulebook on who gets to use the F word. Which, look, i will hand you the medal myself if it means we can get  back to how the state should be able to tell me how many children I can have. 

And apparently stay-at-home dads don't exist in this world, although I know quite a few of them these days. I wonder what kind of feminists they are. Probably the wrong kind. 

A. 

It's So Rude When You Destroy People's Lives and They Get UPSET About It

Look, I am not condoning threatening anybody, so let's get that out of the way first. Don't threaten people, don't egg their houses, and don't behave in anything less than a law-abiding manner. 

That being said, if you go out of your way to fuck somebody over, it's really kind of beyond the pale to act all affronted when they get riled by it. Via liprap: 

Jefferson Parish School Board member Pat Tovrea - one of five board members who voted against extending the teachers union contract past June 30 -- is speaking out about how he was treated by teachers after the June 6 meeting.

"I had the actual teachers who taught my child (a year ago) approach me in the most vicious manner," said Tovrea, whose 7-year-old son is mildly to moderately autistic. "These ladies accosted me and said, 'We taught your son. Remember that' in a threatening manner."

As he tried to back out of his parking spot at Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School in Kenner, teachers repeatedly shouted "shame on you," Tovrea said. They then blocked him in by standing behind his car with three children, he said.

"They clearly possessed rage, rage like you would see in an institution," he said. "It was a vicious and hostile tone of people who are considered teachers."

Yes. They said mean things to you, and stood behind your car. This horror is beyond imagining. All you wanted to do was try to negate their contract! Why couldn't they just leave you in peace? After all, we should have learned by now that the real way to hurt people is behind closed doors, across a mahogany desk, surrounded by fellow suit-wearing members of one's club. Not by speaking. To someone's face. With your mouth. 

Look, this is why the civility bullshit and the constant lamenting of partisanship and the lauding of bloodless objectivity above all else is so pernicious. The only thing civility in politics serves is incumbent power. It's always going to be rude to stand up for yourself in the face of bullying. It's always going to be an affront to those who want to keep you in your place when you try to break out of it. Incivility is the POINT. DIsruption of the status quo is the POINT. Otherwise you don't get anywhere, because what incentive is there to give you what you want? 

Moreover, this fight should be bloody and it should be hard. You should have to look at the people your politics affect. You should have to tell them, face to face with their anger, why you're doing what you're doing. You OWE them that. Otherwise we're all just constructs, just pieces moving around on the board, and I know it's fun to play that on the Sunday shows but that's television, come on. We have a right to put our own faces to the things that affect us, to say, this is not an abstraction. 

These are real things, teacher contracts. They affect the actual teachers who taught your son. They affect your friends and your neighbors and your kids and your relatives, and expecting everything to be all polite so it's easier for you to wreck it is asking them to make their lives into something for you, into something that isn't real, something that doesn't matter. You have every right to do whatever douchey thing you're about to do, to talk in general terms about this group or that group, about what they do and don't deserve. And they have every right to stand up and say, you mean me. The person who taught your son. You mean me. 

It disrupts the conversation, doing that. It inconveniences the person who wants to make a point that is either monstrous or thoughtless or glib. It shames him, or it should. It prevents him from getting out of the parking lot at the end of the meeting. It's rage, and it's vicious and hostile. 

Good. 

A.