Saturday, October 13, 2018
Freedom
I grew up in the suburbs. That period between about 12 and 16 when you can't drive is hell. I wish I had a nice subway.
Friday, October 12, 2018
Men and Babies
Given the context of the impending effective overturning of Roe and the creepy online misogynists obsessed with women's "fertility" and babymaking powers that are everywhere these days... I have a question. Do you really know men who a) want children b) want children in the sense of wanting to honestly handle 50%+ of the childrearing duties c) could possibly handle being a single parent if circumstances required?
a) is easy of course. I would like progeny, take care of it my woman! b) is I think much more rare even in an aspirational sense and c) hahahahaha.
But life is complicated and weird and tragic and if you really want children, c) is always going to be a possible outcome of your 18 year commitment.
a) is easy of course. I would like progeny, take care of it my woman! b) is I think much more rare even in an aspirational sense and c) hahahahaha.
But life is complicated and weird and tragic and if you really want children, c) is always going to be a possible outcome of your 18 year commitment.
Spread The Benjamins Around
Some highly ethical PR firm in DC is currently concocting the comeback strategy for Mohammad bin Salman, which will culminate in a weepy Tom Friedman column about how his good friend temporarily lost his way, but has shown proper remorse to Tom Friedman and all is good now.
We Feel A Bit Bad About The Gulags, But The Cons Left Us With Little Choice
The reasonable "overreach" argument is something like "oh wow George Bush wanted to privatize Social Security and the backlash to that brought voters to the polls and elected a bunch of Democrats."
The conservative version - which is taken very seriously - is more like "oh wow the liberals disrespected us on Twitter so we really had no choice but to start putting babies in cages. Their fault, really, the baby cages."
The conservative version - which is taken very seriously - is more like "oh wow the liberals disrespected us on Twitter so we really had no choice but to start putting babies in cages. Their fault, really, the baby cages."
Good Guys, Bad Guys
There are reasons - probably usually gross but maybe occasionally not - that we have to be jolly old pals with some bad countries. Even gross reasons are reasons. But the degree to which the press - and no, not just the opinion pages - falls in line with official government policy about Whoever Is Good And Bad Today - is always pretty fascinating. One would think the press (and I mean the elite press like the Times and the especially the NoVa mouthpiece the Post) could at least explain these things to us. The State Department might not be able to come out and say "sure, he's a bastard, but he's our bastard" but journalists can. Instead we tend to get a good dictator/bad dictator split coverage. The good ones are our good pals, the bad ones do truly horrible and despicable human rights violations just like the good ones.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Tucker's White Power Hour
I admit I got one wrong with Tucker Carlson. For some reason (not that it really a mattered) I thought he mostly played a jerk on TV but he wasn't that much of a jerk. Sure he was a conservative asshole - I'm not pretending he was Good - but not, you know, Nazi level bad. Better than your typical conservative asshole even before they all embraced Nazis, even.
Who knows or cares what's in his heart but wow he's bad.
Who knows or cares what's in his heart but wow he's bad.
Vote
I'm lucky. My polling place is about 200 feet away and I don't think I've ever had to wait more than 5 minutes to vote. It's easy. I doubt anyone in Philly is more than a quarter mile from their polling place, if that. We have lots of them! The stories you hear every election cycle about people lined up for an hour or more to vote are insane. There is zero reason for it to be that way. Zero good reason anyway. You can just add more polling places, more machines, whatever (I'm not going to get into the absurdity of our voting systems). I think when I lived in California I voted in someone's garage. This is not a problem without solutions, and the solutions cost negligble amounts of money.
Fuck the Celebrities, They Don't Vote For Us Anyway
One thing about being old but also extremely online is that I'm always fascinated by things that I manage to miss. The internet is piped directly into my head yet somehow I managed to miss a meme! It's oddly satisfying. It isn't that I take pride in being a clueless oldster, it's that I rarely miss any of this nonsense so when I do it's a relief.
Along those lines, I can identify one Taylor Swift song. This is not bragging. It's fascinating to me! But she's popular and the
Nazis thought she was one of them and now they are mad and conservatives feel the need to condemn her. This is funny.
Along those lines, I can identify one Taylor Swift song. This is not bragging. It's fascinating to me! But she's popular and the
Nazis thought she was one of them and now they are mad and conservatives feel the need to condemn her. This is funny.
Voter Fraud
I just received notice from Orange County, CA that they suspect I have moved and should let them know.
This is the type of thing Republicans have been pushing as "voter fraud" for years. Nobody (almost) bothers to tell their local election board that they moved unless wherever they re-register provides an option to do that.
This is the type of thing Republicans have been pushing as "voter fraud" for years. Nobody (almost) bothers to tell their local election board that they moved unless wherever they re-register provides an option to do that.
Fox News Always Was
I would say it's basically conventional wisdom among the DC set that Fox News is just a propaganda outlet now. But the thing is that it always was. It was less obvious before Obama because insanely critical coverage of Clinton (barely anyone watched then) and obsequious coverage of Bush was pretty much the norm. Fox took it up to 11, but it was already at 10 elsewhere. Coverage of Obama elsewhere in the media was more...normal. It was good and bad in complicated ways but not insanely one sided. But the sharp contrast with how Fox covered things made the differences impossible to ignore. Fox didn't change, though, everybody else did.
Great Moments In Foreign Policy Punditry
"When I see someone having the balls to take on the religious component, to take on the economic component, to take on the polit- with all of his flaws, ok. And with all due respect to his cousins, not a one of them would have had the balls to do that. Then I wanna invest just a little. I just wanna to stick my head up and say 'God I hope you succeed.' And when you do that the holy hell comes down on you. Okay, well, fuck that is my view." - Thomas Friedman, adviser to the world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)