Reading above about Greg Kelly and the people who want to believe (instead of dealing with facts and stuff), this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis? All that slippery slope stuff of believing lies and letting the bad act go till the next bad act then rinse/repeat.
As for all the fine people of the heartland, well, it's not just commuters clogging Grand Central but the despicable tourists.
Speaking of which, shortly after my back thing got fixed by two rounds of acupuncture and I was off the cane, I'm in GCT taking the child to their shrink. We see all the tourists and I say to the child that next time my back goes bad, instead of a cane, I'm going to use a baseball so I can use it on the tourists there. To which the child replied: "That's the smartest thing you ever said".
As for Fun City, born in Queens, moved to Manhattan in 77, when side streets weren't so safe after dark. (Speaking of 77: Was staying in the West 80s at the time of the blackout. Broadway in that area was super desolate, no riots and looting in the area. FWIW.) Yes, dangerous and fun, a goddam great place to be young.
Moved to a northern burb when pushing forty, continued to work in New York right up till the pandemic. Still consider myself a New Yorker because a) living there isn't per se a requirement and b) once a New Yorker always a New Yorker. Which is to say the conservatives that have beaten up on the city since eternity can go fuck themselves.
"Still consider myself a New Yorker because a) living there isn't per se a requirement and b) once a New Yorker always a New Yorker. Which is to say the conservatives that have beaten up on the city since eternity can go fuck themselves."
You guys have a particular gift for seeing through conservative bullshit (see also Trump, Donald). Which is why they hate you so much.
I'm convinced it doesn't work, because I fear needles, but I spent part of today burying an egg I'd rubbed against my migraine in a national park. So, you know, don't listen to me. I'm glad it helped you. Pain sucks.
Had the old L5-S1 herniation in a part where serious ass surgery would be needed, not the easy-peasy slipping in of a needle. PT was of course bullshit. Did an epidural that worked till the alcoholic narcissist (and occasional drinking partner of Dan Rather's) had me work on a project that undid the epi. So instead of repeating it, did two rounds and pretty much as resolved as possible.
I'm sold to the extent that anyone who doesn't take a chance on this before surgery is a putz.
"Does this practitioner survive?" I cannot understand this. Short version though is that I think acupuncture should always be tried before something more involved. Too cheap and easy not to take a chance.
What! Standing in line at U-Haul -- people standing in line in NYC!!! When has THAT ever happened before?
Yeah, I suppose we could point out that the end of July and end of August have always been the peak moving-to-new-apartments periods in the city, but why bother? The only thing they didn’t add is This Is Joe Biden’s America, skipping over the part where he’s not, you know, actually the President.
They do that out here in the benighted country, too (kids going off to college), but you never hear a peep about people leaving Fritters, Alabama due to the bogeymen beloved by conservatives.
We drove through Enumclaw today. It's undergone a little bit of gentrification, but as with the Enumclaw I spent a small amount of my youth in, it's still a lightly populated area inundated with people who all look alike, talk alike, live alike, worship alike. If you're a kid who doesn't fit in, you're moving out as soon as you fucking can. If you're a kid who does fit in but wants more for yourself than farming, which is a hard job you do on the edge of bankruptcy, or even just fucking wants to have something to do in the evenings that doesn't include drinking a very limited set of beverages from a very limited type of bar, you're moving the fuck out. If you want a job, you move. If you want to meet new people you didn't grow up with in an effort to find some dates, you move.
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone moves *into* these places. New York may have its own disadvantages that make people move, but they're not moving to Enumclaw or even Nebraska. There's probably a reason for that.
Enumclaw! I don’t think I ever drove through there going between Pullman and Olympia. But now I’ve got WA town names in my head, and “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Puyallup?”
Hello from unincorporated Skagit County near Burlington. I live in a lowish, middle class sort of mixed neighborhood within hearing distance of I-5. We all have ok houses and yards. Across the street the nice 3 bedroom, one bath with good yard just sold for more than $350,000 in less than a week. The former owners are moving to AZ. Have not yet heard who the newcomers are. I had no idea we were sitting on such a "gold mine." Yeah, people are trying to get away from something. They should observe, however, Burlington had a peaceful, organized BLM march.
People (especially young people) leave Fritters because A.) There isn't much to do, and B.) The jobs available are dog shit. Plus the infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the 1970's and everybody is all up in your business.
Even in my town, far from NYC (but dangerously close to the hellscape that is San Francisco), I've noticed belongings piled up in front of houses and apartments, the detritus of panicked refugees fleeing at the end of the month, leaving plaintive signs that moan: "FREE!" Finally I have begun to see it as the harbinger of hell on earth it really is. Every month.
"burned out hulks of cars along the Belt Parkway" which is not in Manhattan. Hmmm . . .
Yeah, it's looking like the coming civil strife in America will be conservatives trying to pit rural folks against city people. I have no idea how this plays out, and neither do they beyond "we'll show those city slickers what's what!"
Which part of the Belt has them burned out hulks? Because I never saw such and god knows I've spent enough time online the entire length. Not that those people care about factual accuracy.
When I was really young, we would go visit my father's father who lived in Brooklyn. That took us along the full length of the Belt Parkway, and the stretch between JFK and what would be the Verrazzano Bridge always had stripped car hulks along the side of the road.
I ventured into the Robert twitter thread and skipping by the thrilling Robertesque catastrophe responses are some comments (in addition to yours) that made me cheer.
"...next thing you know there'll be DELICIOUS TACOS everywhere, it's a slippery slope..."
"...Are you going to threaten me with universal health care next?"
Get the people in rural America fired up about the hellscape of "Democrat cities" - don't they have any new ones? Or do they think that still works? It's easy to scare white people about black ones they never actually meet (or even see).
So let's see. They hate L.A. and "Hollywood," because it's populated by people who understand what fantasy is, and how to create it (with skill, and for profit), as opposed to their imitation, cosplay lives of "militias," "re-enactments," "Rahowa," and etc. They hate San Francisco because it's a place where people really do exercise the kind of "freedom" they purport to revere but which, when they encounter it, makes them insecure, frightened, and resentful. They hate Boston because it's snooty and intellectual, onto which they project their own opinions of themselves as common and ignorant. And they hate NYC because it's liberal, glamorous, successful, thriving, and cool, as opposed to...well, you get the idea.
Got it. And all the rest of the cities are full of n*****s killing each other. Especially Chicago. They're out of control and we're going to have to send the tanks in.
This summer's protests are hardly reaching the levels of destruction of the Rodney King riots, but I read what Rod Dreher wrote...
"You just get so sick of these people and their filthy mouths, and their berserk screaming at people. You get sick of the pornification of the public square, and the degeneration of civil standards. Sometimes you have to use violence to preserve order."
...and part of me wants to see someone break a bottle over his head and kick him once or twice in the gut.
By nature, I am a pessimist, but even with that general mentality, I've been particularly depressed looking forward to the future. I don't see how America comes out of this election with any kind of stability. Mail-in ballots aren't going to be counted and polling places will be closed, Trump will either win or sow doubt about the results (maybe both), and the Republican party that gave up any kind of platform except "Trump good, Non-Trump bad" will not participate in a functioning government or society. Throw in on-going historic unemployment levels and a lethal pandemic that a large chunk of the population is not willing to help alleviate, and we're just royally fucked.
A business in Long Island called Montauk Brewery had the audacity of offering the softest support for first responders *and* black lives. This is America, so I think you can guess what happened next. A cop and his real estate wife (I'm going to make an assumption that they were both assholes in high school) formed a Facebook group opposing the business (conservatives used to support small businesses back when they had any kind of platform that wasn't based on grievance and malice).
In any event, I had the misfortune of reading through the comments on one of Montauk's instagram posts. You get the garden variety stuff like "BLM is a hate group," but did you know that BLM also supports pedophilia? I don't know what happened in the past year or two, but these fucking nut jobs have become OBSESSED with pedophiles. Since these people notoriously project their own failures on others, it makes me wonder what is really going on with the right wing zealots these days.
Anyway, I know America has survived some awful stuff, but it just doesn't feel great right now.
"part of me wants to see someone break a bottle over his head and kick him once or twice in the gut." Who can blame you? Dreher's one of America's Most Punchable.
The pedophilia thing is two things, I think: 1.) Pure projection: Most authoritarians abuse their children in one way or another (not necessarily sexually) and if we ripped the band-aid off that, oh my God; and 2.) Less-pure projection: They all know they're scumbags, absolutely the opposite of the godly Americans they pretend to be, so they have to think of something that makes the people the treat like shit worse -- and what could be better for that than a secret pedo ring, which you don't have to prove because it's secret.
Jack Kelly at Forbes seems to have a permanent gig doing articles about New Yorkers "fleeing the city in droves". Here he is from a year ago with the exact same bullshit:
Kelly was lying his ass off back then, too, claiming that "One million people have fled New York City and the tri-state area... in the last nine years." Besides this not even being about New York City, he was off by one million people -- the metro area actually gained population in that period.
I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. To us kids in the 60's and 70's, Canarsie was almost Long Island. A trip to Manhattan was indeed referred to as "going into 'the City,'" but there was nothing ominous, dark or menacing about it -- it was fucking thrilling, and something we did all the time. Needless to say, Kelly's list of "dystopian" neighborhoods were all predominantly minority areas. He's one of a breed of racist New York old-timer I still run into for whom the city was a paradise right up until they let you-know-who move into white neighborhoods.
Do these people wake up in the morning and ask themselves "What can I lie about today?"
Growing up in Brighton Beach in the '60s and '70s, just a bike ride away from Canarsie (which I often did as youngster, riding the great bike path that ran along, you guessed it, Belt Parkway), the only thing I remember worrying about was the polluted waters of Plum Beach (my brother claimed it was radioactive, but he may have been exaggerating a tad bit). I recall riding the subways late at night with my older sister, after seeing a Broadway (when the plebes could afford it) or Off-Broadway show and somehow managing to avoid being knifed, shot or mugged. I mean, sure, crime was bad then, overall, but it was never the hellscape that people remember, and it's gotten much better since. A pandemic will tend to make people desperate, though.
Actually, they recently found a batch of radium on Dead Horse Beach, just a short ride from Plum Beach. It was probably worse back then anyway. We go to Plum Beach all the time, it’s kinda gross these days but fun!
Slightly off-topic, but some kid from Portland was biking past the crowds leaving the RNC when he got sucker-punched by an asshole named Eric Metaxas. Of course, the kid was the one questioned by the cops afterwards. But the best thing about it was this: >>“Sometimes you have to use violence to preserve order,” Christian writer and Metaxas friend Rod Dreher wrote in a blog post.<< https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ally-eric-metaxas-allegedly-punched-protester-after-white-house-speech?ref=wrap
These Republican reports from the front are great news—they’ve got me monitoring Zillow. The minute 7th Ave drops to early ‘90s pricing, I’m buying. (The joke here is, I’ll be waiting forever.)
This vaguely reminds me of a Maxine Hong Kingston character who notes how often 'Orientals' in Hollywood movies commit suicide may be taken for wishful thinking on the part of the white unconscious.
Reading above about Greg Kelly and the people who want to believe (instead of dealing with facts and stuff), this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis? All that slippery slope stuff of believing lies and letting the bad act go till the next bad act then rinse/repeat.
As for all the fine people of the heartland, well, it's not just commuters clogging Grand Central but the despicable tourists.
Speaking of which, shortly after my back thing got fixed by two rounds of acupuncture and I was off the cane, I'm in GCT taking the child to their shrink. We see all the tourists and I say to the child that next time my back goes bad, instead of a cane, I'm going to use a baseball so I can use it on the tourists there. To which the child replied: "That's the smartest thing you ever said".
As for Fun City, born in Queens, moved to Manhattan in 77, when side streets weren't so safe after dark. (Speaking of 77: Was staying in the West 80s at the time of the blackout. Broadway in that area was super desolate, no riots and looting in the area. FWIW.) Yes, dangerous and fun, a goddam great place to be young.
Moved to a northern burb when pushing forty, continued to work in New York right up till the pandemic. Still consider myself a New Yorker because a) living there isn't per se a requirement and b) once a New Yorker always a New Yorker. Which is to say the conservatives that have beaten up on the city since eternity can go fuck themselves.
"Still consider myself a New Yorker because a) living there isn't per se a requirement and b) once a New Yorker always a New Yorker. Which is to say the conservatives that have beaten up on the city since eternity can go fuck themselves."
You guys have a particular gift for seeing through conservative bullshit (see also Trump, Donald). Which is why they hate you so much.
Ah, fuck their feelings.
You cured your back with acupuncture? Outstanding. Does this practitioner survive? Asking (really) for a friend.
I'm convinced it doesn't work, because I fear needles, but I spent part of today burying an egg I'd rubbed against my migraine in a national park. So, you know, don't listen to me. I'm glad it helped you. Pain sucks.
My wife, who is very handicapped all her life, swears by it and says that the only time she is without pain is when she does it regularly.
I rest my case.
Had the old L5-S1 herniation in a part where serious ass surgery would be needed, not the easy-peasy slipping in of a needle. PT was of course bullshit. Did an epidural that worked till the alcoholic narcissist (and occasional drinking partner of Dan Rather's) had me work on a project that undid the epi. So instead of repeating it, did two rounds and pretty much as resolved as possible.
I'm sold to the extent that anyone who doesn't take a chance on this before surgery is a putz.
"Does this practitioner survive?" I cannot understand this. Short version though is that I think acupuncture should always be tried before something more involved. Too cheap and easy not to take a chance.
I mean is the acupuncturist still around.
Yup. Kere Paz in Ossining:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/paz-acupuncture-of-westchester-ossining
What! Standing in line at U-Haul -- people standing in line in NYC!!! When has THAT ever happened before?
Yeah, I suppose we could point out that the end of July and end of August have always been the peak moving-to-new-apartments periods in the city, but why bother? The only thing they didn’t add is This Is Joe Biden’s America, skipping over the part where he’s not, you know, actually the President.
They do that out here in the benighted country, too (kids going off to college), but you never hear a peep about people leaving Fritters, Alabama due to the bogeymen beloved by conservatives.
We drove through Enumclaw today. It's undergone a little bit of gentrification, but as with the Enumclaw I spent a small amount of my youth in, it's still a lightly populated area inundated with people who all look alike, talk alike, live alike, worship alike. If you're a kid who doesn't fit in, you're moving out as soon as you fucking can. If you're a kid who does fit in but wants more for yourself than farming, which is a hard job you do on the edge of bankruptcy, or even just fucking wants to have something to do in the evenings that doesn't include drinking a very limited set of beverages from a very limited type of bar, you're moving the fuck out. If you want a job, you move. If you want to meet new people you didn't grow up with in an effort to find some dates, you move.
Honestly, I'm not sure why anyone moves *into* these places. New York may have its own disadvantages that make people move, but they're not moving to Enumclaw or even Nebraska. There's probably a reason for that.
Enumclaw! I don’t think I ever drove through there going between Pullman and Olympia. But now I’ve got WA town names in my head, and “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Puyallup?”
Hello from unincorporated Skagit County near Burlington. I live in a lowish, middle class sort of mixed neighborhood within hearing distance of I-5. We all have ok houses and yards. Across the street the nice 3 bedroom, one bath with good yard just sold for more than $350,000 in less than a week. The former owners are moving to AZ. Have not yet heard who the newcomers are. I had no idea we were sitting on such a "gold mine." Yeah, people are trying to get away from something. They should observe, however, Burlington had a peaceful, organized BLM march.
Are you gonna take the gold? (But go where, though?)
Hell, no. I'm going to stay right here and watch and listen and vote. (WA does it all by mail.)
Any incest problem in Enumclaw? Or at least excessive inbreeding (which I guess would make everyone everyone's cousin).
People (especially young people) leave Fritters because A.) There isn't much to do, and B.) The jobs available are dog shit. Plus the infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the 1970's and everybody is all up in your business.
But all those fine people, all those good Americans. How can one leave?
Even in my town, far from NYC (but dangerously close to the hellscape that is San Francisco), I've noticed belongings piled up in front of houses and apartments, the detritus of panicked refugees fleeing at the end of the month, leaving plaintive signs that moan: "FREE!" Finally I have begun to see it as the harbinger of hell on earth it really is. Every month.
Yeah, people moving at the end of the month. Who ever heard of such a thing before the rioting gone rampant on President Biden's watch?
Don't bring facts into it. Those people are philosophically opposed to facts.
"burned out hulks of cars along the Belt Parkway" which is not in Manhattan. Hmmm . . .
Yeah, it's looking like the coming civil strife in America will be conservatives trying to pit rural folks against city people. I have no idea how this plays out, and neither do they beyond "we'll show those city slickers what's what!"
It's a fairly common authoritarian tactic, and it goes bad places.
As sure as sunrise!
They scream his name at night on the streets...
Saying the same thing I said at Mine Host's: "'To arms! To arms! The n*****s are coming!' has essentially been the Trump campaign."
Few messages work as well on White folk!
It's not only not Manhattan, it's also complete bullshit.
Which part of the Belt has them burned out hulks? Because I never saw such and god knows I've spent enough time online the entire length. Not that those people care about factual accuracy.
When I was really young, we would go visit my father's father who lived in Brooklyn. That took us along the full length of the Belt Parkway, and the stretch between JFK and what would be the Verrazzano Bridge always had stripped car hulks along the side of the road.
No matter how bad a mayor deBlasio may be, can you imagine him degenerating to Rudy Giuliani level batshittery?
'About the sad, sick country in which it’s embedded, I’m not so sure.'
That's the worry Roy.
I ventured into the Robert twitter thread and skipping by the thrilling Robertesque catastrophe responses are some comments (in addition to yours) that made me cheer.
"...next thing you know there'll be DELICIOUS TACOS everywhere, it's a slippery slope..."
"...Are you going to threaten me with universal health care next?"
Et cetera. Hang in there, allies.
Get the people in rural America fired up about the hellscape of "Democrat cities" - don't they have any new ones? Or do they think that still works? It's easy to scare white people about black ones they never actually meet (or even see).
I hear tell that people have recently moved from Arizona to California.
So let's see. They hate L.A. and "Hollywood," because it's populated by people who understand what fantasy is, and how to create it (with skill, and for profit), as opposed to their imitation, cosplay lives of "militias," "re-enactments," "Rahowa," and etc. They hate San Francisco because it's a place where people really do exercise the kind of "freedom" they purport to revere but which, when they encounter it, makes them insecure, frightened, and resentful. They hate Boston because it's snooty and intellectual, onto which they project their own opinions of themselves as common and ignorant. And they hate NYC because it's liberal, glamorous, successful, thriving, and cool, as opposed to...well, you get the idea.
That about right?
Got it. And all the rest of the cities are full of n*****s killing each other. Especially Chicago. They're out of control and we're going to have to send the tanks in.
Fuck their feelings.
Yet, there they are getting underfoot at Grand Central Terminal, Times Square...
This summer's protests are hardly reaching the levels of destruction of the Rodney King riots, but I read what Rod Dreher wrote...
"You just get so sick of these people and their filthy mouths, and their berserk screaming at people. You get sick of the pornification of the public square, and the degeneration of civil standards. Sometimes you have to use violence to preserve order."
...and part of me wants to see someone break a bottle over his head and kick him once or twice in the gut.
By nature, I am a pessimist, but even with that general mentality, I've been particularly depressed looking forward to the future. I don't see how America comes out of this election with any kind of stability. Mail-in ballots aren't going to be counted and polling places will be closed, Trump will either win or sow doubt about the results (maybe both), and the Republican party that gave up any kind of platform except "Trump good, Non-Trump bad" will not participate in a functioning government or society. Throw in on-going historic unemployment levels and a lethal pandemic that a large chunk of the population is not willing to help alleviate, and we're just royally fucked.
A business in Long Island called Montauk Brewery had the audacity of offering the softest support for first responders *and* black lives. This is America, so I think you can guess what happened next. A cop and his real estate wife (I'm going to make an assumption that they were both assholes in high school) formed a Facebook group opposing the business (conservatives used to support small businesses back when they had any kind of platform that wasn't based on grievance and malice).
In any event, I had the misfortune of reading through the comments on one of Montauk's instagram posts. You get the garden variety stuff like "BLM is a hate group," but did you know that BLM also supports pedophilia? I don't know what happened in the past year or two, but these fucking nut jobs have become OBSESSED with pedophiles. Since these people notoriously project their own failures on others, it makes me wonder what is really going on with the right wing zealots these days.
Anyway, I know America has survived some awful stuff, but it just doesn't feel great right now.
Saw that Dreher quote, too. The man is a dyed-in-the-wool-fascist, for sure. But this is troubling, moreso than even the home-grown variety: this madness is spreading outside our borders. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/qanon-supporters-join-thousands-protest-against-germany-s-coronavirus-rules-n1238783
"part of me wants to see someone break a bottle over his head and kick him once or twice in the gut." Who can blame you? Dreher's one of America's Most Punchable.
The pedophilia thing is two things, I think: 1.) Pure projection: Most authoritarians abuse their children in one way or another (not necessarily sexually) and if we ripped the band-aid off that, oh my God; and 2.) Less-pure projection: They all know they're scumbags, absolutely the opposite of the godly Americans they pretend to be, so they have to think of something that makes the people the treat like shit worse -- and what could be better for that than a secret pedo ring, which you don't have to prove because it's secret.
Jack Kelly at Forbes seems to have a permanent gig doing articles about New Yorkers "fleeing the city in droves". Here he is from a year ago with the exact same bullshit:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/09/05/new-yorkers-are-leaving-the-city-in-droves-heres-why-theyre-moving-and-where-theyre-going/#63803a241ac5
And here's one Roy Edroso assassinating it at something called alicublog:
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2019/09/once-again-how-ya-gonna-keep-em-down-on.html
Kelly was lying his ass off back then, too, claiming that "One million people have fled New York City and the tri-state area... in the last nine years." Besides this not even being about New York City, he was off by one million people -- the metro area actually gained population in that period.
I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. To us kids in the 60's and 70's, Canarsie was almost Long Island. A trip to Manhattan was indeed referred to as "going into 'the City,'" but there was nothing ominous, dark or menacing about it -- it was fucking thrilling, and something we did all the time. Needless to say, Kelly's list of "dystopian" neighborhoods were all predominantly minority areas. He's one of a breed of racist New York old-timer I still run into for whom the city was a paradise right up until they let you-know-who move into white neighborhoods.
Do these people wake up in the morning and ask themselves "What can I lie about today?"
Growing up in Brighton Beach in the '60s and '70s, just a bike ride away from Canarsie (which I often did as youngster, riding the great bike path that ran along, you guessed it, Belt Parkway), the only thing I remember worrying about was the polluted waters of Plum Beach (my brother claimed it was radioactive, but he may have been exaggerating a tad bit). I recall riding the subways late at night with my older sister, after seeing a Broadway (when the plebes could afford it) or Off-Broadway show and somehow managing to avoid being knifed, shot or mugged. I mean, sure, crime was bad then, overall, but it was never the hellscape that people remember, and it's gotten much better since. A pandemic will tend to make people desperate, though.
Actually, they recently found a batch of radium on Dead Horse Beach, just a short ride from Plum Beach. It was probably worse back then anyway. We go to Plum Beach all the time, it’s kinda gross these days but fun!
Slightly off-topic, but some kid from Portland was biking past the crowds leaving the RNC when he got sucker-punched by an asshole named Eric Metaxas. Of course, the kid was the one questioned by the cops afterwards. But the best thing about it was this: >>“Sometimes you have to use violence to preserve order,” Christian writer and Metaxas friend Rod Dreher wrote in a blog post.<< https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ally-eric-metaxas-allegedly-punched-protester-after-white-house-speech?ref=wrap
Sometimes you have to sucker punch someone (not particularly well) and run away like a coward.
BTW I'm not getting email alerts since maybe a couple days before you went on vacation.
What email are you using? I can't trace your account by your username. You can also write me at roy@edroso.com.
These Republican reports from the front are great news—they’ve got me monitoring Zillow. The minute 7th Ave drops to early ‘90s pricing, I’m buying. (The joke here is, I’ll be waiting forever.)
This vaguely reminds me of a Maxine Hong Kingston character who notes how often 'Orientals' in Hollywood movies commit suicide may be taken for wishful thinking on the part of the white unconscious.