FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/16/22.

Preach.

•  Here’s today’s free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the conservatives’ latest New Low – BTW these New Lows seem to be coming faster, don’t they; like the contractions of the birth of fascism – namely, dumping even more immigrants in blue states, only this time sending some of them to Martha’s Vineyard.

As mentioned in my previous and more thorough examination of this trollery, conservatives have been enjoying Greg Abbott’s months-long shipments of immigrants to blue cities because they think the hardships they cause prove that a.) immigrants are disease carriers that no one wants and b) liberals don’t want them either so they’re hypocrites and the Real Racists™. 

But even conservatives know that the blue cities to which they've been sending immigrants are already full of black, brown, and indeed every other kind of people, among whom we white neighbors live quite comfortably. Which is probably why they pulled the Martha’s Vineyard stunt – it’s easier to portray those non-urban toffs as the limousine-liberal-racists of their imagination. 

This is a version of the old conservative gag about how If You Love [People We Despise] So Much Why Don’t You Let Your Daughter Marry One. You may think they stopped doing this one in the civil rights era, but rightwing internet sleazebags have been doing it as Babylon-Bee-level "satire” for years -- only now they usually focus on Latinos; here's an example from 2018, “Seize Ivy League Dorms and Give Them to Immigrant Families.” You can go read it, but I’ll make it less painful for you by supplying my own contemporaneous, better-written description:

Zmirak's big joke thereafter is an image of Messicans nestled in a "glorious Gothic dining hall, with sixty-foot carved ceilings and iron candelabras," being served their food by the silly SJW students. Liberals made to serve the brownskins they pretend to love so much -- it's a classic conservative humiliation fantasy straight out of Birth of a Nation. To add cream to the jest, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds pimps that shit to his own coprophages and, in their rush to assault their strawmen, they suggest things like "Just dump them all in Brooklyn" -- because that's where the hipsters live, see, and since they're all limp-wristed sissies they've probably never seen an immigrant, especially in the trendier nabes like Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.

All that’s new about the routine now is that they've got their politicians doing it with them and – as has been the pattern for decades – they’ve gotten even more vicious and stupid about the whole thing, and the contempt in which decent people hold them is still more justified. 

•  BTW I just got out of a week-long Twitter jail sentence for this, inspired by Sullivan weeping over the Queen:

This Twitter claimed violated their "hateful conduct policy” – which anyone with a middle school education would recognize as an absurd misreading of my comment, unless Andrew Sullivan has become a protected class (beyond the prestige media world where he clearly is one, I mean).

I do not mention this to invite sympathy – no cancelculture crybaby bullshit for me! These morons can do what they like with their own property – but to remind you that Twitter constantly pitches people off for stupid reasons while turning a blind eye to actual hate speech.

I really don’t think it’s political in the sense that Twitter is picking one side or another; I think their poor decisions are partly due to shit algorithms, but mostly just ass-covering gestures – gestures toward ass-covering, I should say, because the owners of the multi-billion-dollar company know they’ll only get in trouble if their decision follow any kind of a pattern, even (maybe especially) if the pattern is simply logical. For example, if they got rid of all the genuine hate speech on their platform, they’d be hauled before Congress to explain their hostility toward conservatives. But if they keep on throwing people off for jokes they don’t understand, along with occasional real offenses, they will have shown themselves to have “done something,” and no one can accuse them of bias.

One day I expect they’ll toss me forever, perhaps for some equally innocuous comment, so if I go quiet there you should look for me, not in instructions behind a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield, but here at alicublog (or, better still, at REBID – subscribe, cheap!).

Also, as a treat, here's one more free issue that may be of use to those of you who will spend the weekend standing in line to see Lizzy in a box.