For me the nadir of the week was the Jonathan Turley comment, about how anyone cracking down on the Canadian truckers would also have committed the unthinkable outrage of arresting MLK.
It isn't called Letter from the Birmingham Visitor's Center, morons.
I'm really, really sorry about this, because I know it's just too hard for some people to do, but there's no avoiding an actual evaluation of the issues and grievances involved if we're going to decide if a given protest is worthy of support or condemnation.
Sure, it would be simpler to just look at the tactics - Blocking a street! Black Lives Matter did that too! - but the fact that one group is protesting people being murdered by the state and the other is protesting lives being saved by the state seems important, no?
Well, that, and maybe too this: BLM is on foot. Truckparkers is in they cabs, motors running...just by being there running that engine they are slowly killing the community.
It must really infuriate them that we took the lead out of the gasoline so they can't - just through their emissions, nocturnal and diurnal - bring the rest of us down to their level.
I remember being appalled back in the early 1990s when the Moral Majority types started claiming that being criticized for their public statements was EXACTLY like the Jews being hauled off to death camps. I guess it's an essential of fascism that you have control over everything but no power over anything.
These folks - https://convoytraitors.ca/ - are doing some damage to the parkers. The parkers are whining because people posted their (smiling, thumb-up) mugs, and the name of the companies whose trucks they park, on the web for all to see. Highlarity ensues...
Hillary Clinton, who is actually dead and has been replaced by a body double, was spying on the President of the United States in the White House from her underground Command Center concealed within an extinct volcano in Chappaqua.
There's an episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica where Boomer (now played by an Asian woman) infiltrates a Cylon facility & sees infinite copies of herself ready for deployment, proving she is in fact a Cylon. This is how the Conservapedia Joneses of the world see HRC
Yeah. The classic melanin-deprived jerked knee-ism: if people with more melanin had done to US what We did to Them, you better believe we'd be planning the great population reduction movement. Simple projection as we all know. But there's another thing that amuses me (thank the lordette I am easily amused): at the VERY SAME TIME (sorry, not yelling, just very pointed articulation) they are sneering 'Ah, it warn't so bad, they was like family!" as they gently but inexorably restore the Ancient Order. And also too, when they do say it warn't so bad, all I wanna say in response is "Fair enough, if it was not so bad, you go first. Three squares and a cot. Might never see your family again, but they always demand stuff anyway, so good riddance. Whattcha say, Clyde?"
So much of Conservative attitudinizing is built around notions of masculinity and toughness. And for decades, they were hamstrung by "Strong, Silent" archetypes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper.
Donald Trump swept all that away. You can be a Real Man and whine like a throwout bearing in need of lube, you can be a Real Man and lose, and lose again, and again, and complain loudly about your losses every step the way.
Strong and Silent? Fuck that, Weak and Whiny is the new Republican model of masculinity, and Republican men absolutely love Donald Trump for freeing them to finally express the stunted almost-emotions they have kept suppressed all these years.
Many genre fiction magazines limit their submissions to unrepresented minorities (BIPOC for example). I could blame my inability to get published on their "woke" attitude, but I won't because it's cowardly, weak, and wrong. Writing has always been miserably tough. Any effort to level the playing field is OK in my book. Moreover, I think it's contemptible to deem yourself a "victim," especially when you aren't at all.
"But now victim-claiming has become absolutely central to the conservative identity[.]"
JFC, Maestro, this assumption of a factually-unsupported victimhood has been one of their primary driving forces for decades. IIRC, it was one of foundations of the early golden age of talk radio back in the 90s.
But what tickles one of my unmentionable parts is that no one picks up the irony of these nut jobs and cretins' obsession with mandates turning the US into a Nazi state: That is exactly enough what they're turning the nation into. Subverting elections, empowering racists, enabling parasites running an extractive, impoverishing economy, the highest court in the land deciding cases based on what's good for the party, black letter law and precedents notwithstanding, blocking efforts to respond reasonably and properly to a global pandemic -- that's the shit they're willingly making possible. Each and every one of them can fuck off wither Nazi comparisons.
And to think: That's the only block of citizens are elected officials serve regularly.
Much in what you say. Maybe I've just been missing it, because as a cis guy I'm only been able to smell the approaching artillery recently, since they've had to expand their unperson list beyond the usual minorities. I do think they've grown bolder about their subterfuges -- that is, not even trying to make their victimhood claims look good. But that too I may have just missed.
Could be all those emails you get make you, wholly or in part, focused on the now while, for me, today’s horseshit triggers a memory from long ago. But I’m a bit of a big picture guy.
Yeah, big picture is one thing – when I was young and even more stupid I thought I was big picture – but OLD is another. The slow accretion of fascistic-mutterings over the decades is how I got where I am today. And I long ago gave up telling people what was going on, because life's too short to load grievances upon everyone around me. So you lot are the victims of all this pent up blather.
Maybe you can craft an analogy to the sufferers in the gulag...it's a wide-open field.
What I've been seeing is the complete disappearance of anything that's not victim-claiming. In 2020, they didn't even bother to offer a platform (and 2022 isn't looking good either). "Vote for us because the Other Guys made you FEEL bad" is all they've got, and shockingly, it may be enough.
I think we're now in the advanced stage of Fox and talk radio malignancy. The bombastic hyperbole of Limbaugh and his local market imitators (who were even worse) attacked the liberal enemy of America (e.g.) in language that had to rapidly evolve into extreme exaggeration. So it didn't take long to go from "liberals want to raise your taxes" to "liberals are out to destroy America" -- whatever "the Left" was doing to you/America was right out of Gingrich's insane agitprop word list. Trump con man's patter ("It's disgraceful what they're doing to this country") mainstreamed it into the White House. The shameless Holocaust comparisons now are almost a logical outgrowth of this awful, stupid shit, and I can't imagine where they take it from here. Coupled with the right-wing's unshakeable state of being permanently aggrieved -- with all the examples you point out -- we've reached a point of sheer hallucination, i.e. those "What the fuck are they talking about?" moments you wrote about a while back, where Joe Biden is going to put them into vaccine camps.
Jade Helm, of course, was all true. I had gun-loving relatives who were disappeared by Obama's henchmen into a Wal-Mart somewhere, I'm sure of it.
So it didn't take long to go from "liberals want to raise your taxes" to "liberals are out to destroy America"
When ideology blocks you from offering a positive program of your own. how do you turn out your voters? Its has to be entirely about the other guys, and how terrible they are, you've got nothing else.
And then, over time, like any drug that people develop a tolerance for, the dosage must be upped, and upped again. A few months ago, Chris Christie (at one time considered "moderate", I believe) claimed that "Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are DESTROYING AMERICA." This was just a few days after the passage of an infrastructure bill that will send billions in aid to Christie's own state.
Never lose sight of the logical but unstated knock-on of the raise-your-taxes fearmongery:
We'll NEVER raise your taxes – we'll just keep spending without paying for it, and make certain we gazillionaires steer a sufficient percentage to our own personal selves. You, of course are on your own because Freedom, but if you just send us a couple hundred now and then, we'll keep you in supplements to flatten out your despairs, oxy to ratchet back the pain, and ivermectin to ease your...uhmm...worms...
"Why bother then with policy? It only distracts from their grievance."
If you define "policy" as "Government doing things in response to real problems" there's an obvious reason why Conservatives can't do policy.
Yes, there was a time when, for them, "policy" meant "Undoing things that others put in place to respond to real problems." And they had a good run with that, when the targets of the undoing were the "Urban" poor - and they had the cooperation of the Democrats in the undoing.
But then they turned their undoing attention to Obamacare, and it was a complete fucking disaster for them. So they're kinda boxed in now. Conservatism prohibits them from proposing new polices, public opinion prohibits them from repealing the old ones.
My uncle is a perfect example of this. He’s always getting the short end of the stick in everything. Like the time when my grandmother gave him and my dad 10 acres of farmland to divide between them (hoo boy, bad idea). Dad said, “You divide it in half, and I’ll pick first.” Well, no way was he going to do that! So dad said, “Okay, I’ll divide it in half, and *you* pick first.” Oh no you don’t! That’s no good either!
In short, there’s no reasoning with people who are fundamentally curdled and sour.
So then they get to, "OK, YOU get to divide it in half, and then YOU pick" and Uncle Joe says, "Ah, to hell with it, let's just let the whole 10 acres lie fallow, the 30 trillion dollar national debt demands it" because seed and fertilizer cost money, doncha know.
Out here in the new west (my temporary location this week) the farms are small and tenuous, tho the tenant farmers still manage. The real money is in the packing 'sheds' (no longer sheds – many are really massive factories in the central valley), not to mention the outfit that grows seedlings in greenhouses, and the other enterprise that sprays all the stuff on the fields.
Should add here that an old colleague always said "Take some acreage outta production to put in that coastal trail, or for stream setback, or whatever civic reason. The farmers will bitch/moan, but what happens is they all raise their price accordingly (within the rates the packers will pay, anyway) so no loss in the long run."
<i>“If you’re a white guy, tough luck,” wept Ted Cruz.</i>
"You needed that Supreme Court position, and you were the most qualified, but they had to give it to a minority." Okay. How is it that anyone takes this seriously, and how is it that millions and millions of Americans think that constant, non-stop squalling like a tiny baby is an attractive trait that they want in their leaders?
I'm starting to think that Republican voters don't actually want "attractive" or "likeable" or even "tolerable" in the people they send to Washington. It's enough that a given person infuriates people like you and me, if that means the guy must also be a totally loathesome scumbag, they're fine with that, maybe they've even developed a taste for such people.
Remember that they consider all the people we consider to be at least somewhat victimised to just be faking it, and basically fake 'people' fundamentally, so why shouldn't real people with real problems get into the act? (… now that, as I commented recently, it's become less acceptable generally simply to despise victims—a win for decency, but unfortunately Chapter N's solutions turn into Chapter N+1's problems.)
See also: Wilson's principle of national self-determination used by the Nazis as pretext for seizing the Sudentenland and then western Poland (which really was already a part of Minehead), with the aid in the latter case of actual false-flag operations so they didn't violate the Non-aggression Principle, just as some would do in Libertopia.….
The only false note in that sketch is Hilter's biting that baby on the head—he was _really_ good around (white) children in public—no fool, more's the pity.
Maybe not having slept since 1945 (an extremely gratifying thing for me to hear) had got to him.
Trump never loses. His rickety selfworth would collapse like a house of cards if he ever admitted he lost anything. Michael Cohen predicted months before the election that Trump would never admit he lost. That supposedly mentally balanced Republicans have signed onto this delusional ship of fools is one of the most disheartening things about America since the conflation of body counts with victory in Vietnam. BTW, there was and is plenty of conservative whining about losing that unwinnable war.
But he's got to keep eyeballs turned to his own glorious self, so he's got to keep yammering about something, and lately that "something" seems to be losses, mostly of the legal variety. It's just so UNFAIR, that judge who said the Jan. 6 committee could have his Presidential records, and now it's so UNFAIR, that judge who said he and his kids have to testify in that legal suit, and all this comes on top of more than 60 so UNFAIR rulings by courts who threw out his "stolen election" nonsense.
My question is how much of this his dimwit followers can hear before this thought occurs to them: "Gosh, this guy sure does lose an awful lot in court, doesn't he?"
Can't help but think of poor Howard Roarke (the guy in the movie, I never read the book). Again and again, Roarke is wronged, his career is destroyed and he's forced to do the most menial (and sweaty, and HOT) labor, but he never complains, he cares nothing for public opinion, he needs nothing and no one, not even the Zeppelin-breasted Patricia O'Neal. All he wants is his work (well, that and the right to blow up public housing projects when he's really really angry.)
Generations of American men were raised on such archetypes, and what our culture and country have been doing since at least the 60's is the overthrowing of this particular archetype. It's just that conservative men are a little late to the game, because they had to wait for Donald Trump to come along. There is no more perfect anti-Roarke that Donald Trump, he has no discernible talents or interest in work, he desperately obsesses over the opinions of others, he grabs at women, even women who are disgusted by him.
But for an American man - and especially a Conservative American man - which role model is easier or more pleasurable to live up to? Maybe you're angry and frustrated from a lifetime of trying to be Howard Roarke, and now you want to have some fun and be Donald Trump instead? Who can blame you?
(I read the book, so you don't have to. Howard Roark was a terrible architect who disdained such things as "workplace safety", "engineering", and "what the client wanted". He deserved to be breaking rocks in the hot sun. . .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5v8L08Flg)
Fantastic movie, though! King Vidor, the director, got his start in silent films and the whole thing works best as a silent movie: Gorgeous visuals, but every time a character opens their mouth and Ayn Rand's dialogue comes pouring out, it's all just laughably bad.
And it goes without saying that the residents of public housing must have absolutely no say in their own housing, everything must be decided by One White Man, with absolutely predictable results (like alienation and a feeling of being "warehoused"). Seems like that's the only historically accurate note in the movie.
Well it would be laughable, yeah. That was one of the worst-written books ever published for actual money. I started it when I was about the age bracket it seemed to be pegged to, and I could not finish it because it made doing laundry or cleaning toilets look like better options...
Not that I know for sure, but wasn't it Patricia Neal, not O'Neal in the Fountainhead. O'Neal is Ryan's mom and had a short film career. patricia had a longer career and said Klaatu, barada niktu
For me the nadir of the week was the Jonathan Turley comment, about how anyone cracking down on the Canadian truckers would also have committed the unthinkable outrage of arresting MLK.
It isn't called Letter from the Birmingham Visitor's Center, morons.
I'm really, really sorry about this, because I know it's just too hard for some people to do, but there's no avoiding an actual evaluation of the issues and grievances involved if we're going to decide if a given protest is worthy of support or condemnation.
Sure, it would be simpler to just look at the tactics - Blocking a street! Black Lives Matter did that too! - but the fact that one group is protesting people being murdered by the state and the other is protesting lives being saved by the state seems important, no?
Well, that, and maybe too this: BLM is on foot. Truckparkers is in they cabs, motors running...just by being there running that engine they are slowly killing the community.
It must really infuriate them that we took the lead out of the gasoline so they can't - just through their emissions, nocturnal and diurnal - bring the rest of us down to their level.
Can't speak for anyone else, but my own personal emissions are in remission...
well, the wife made some killer baked beans last night, so i'll bow out of this discussion.
"Rollin' coal" against the whole community. . .
Also, I’m led to believe that different countries have different laws.
OTOH, it’s not like his target audience cares. Only we effete nano ring nabobs of negativism do, for the lack of good it does.
I remember being appalled back in the early 1990s when the Moral Majority types started claiming that being criticized for their public statements was EXACTLY like the Jews being hauled off to death camps. I guess it's an essential of fascism that you have control over everything but no power over anything.
If they didn't have guns we could just yell at them and they'd go away.
These folks - https://convoytraitors.ca/ - are doing some damage to the parkers. The parkers are whining because people posted their (smiling, thumb-up) mugs, and the name of the companies whose trucks they park, on the web for all to see. Highlarity ensues...
The parkers seem not to be thinkin’
Gotta wonder just what they are drinkin’
Once the word gets around
They’ll be hurtin’, I’m bound
‘Cause their customer base will be shrinkin’
The essence to these sorts of ideas is that the enemy is everywhere, secret, & ultra-powerful -- but also laughably weak & contemptible
Hillary Clinton, who is actually dead and has been replaced by a body double, was spying on the President of the United States in the White House from her underground Command Center concealed within an extinct volcano in Chappaqua.
There's an episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica where Boomer (now played by an Asian woman) infiltrates a Cylon facility & sees infinite copies of herself ready for deployment, proving she is in fact a Cylon. This is how the Conservapedia Joneses of the world see HRC
Sorry, spoilers -- it's already 10 years since that was on. Yeesh
Ah, man...that was next up in my queueueueue
Yeah. The classic melanin-deprived jerked knee-ism: if people with more melanin had done to US what We did to Them, you better believe we'd be planning the great population reduction movement. Simple projection as we all know. But there's another thing that amuses me (thank the lordette I am easily amused): at the VERY SAME TIME (sorry, not yelling, just very pointed articulation) they are sneering 'Ah, it warn't so bad, they was like family!" as they gently but inexorably restore the Ancient Order. And also too, when they do say it warn't so bad, all I wanna say in response is "Fair enough, if it was not so bad, you go first. Three squares and a cot. Might never see your family again, but they always demand stuff anyway, so good riddance. Whattcha say, Clyde?"
Maybe it was a mistake to put Doug and Wendy Whiner in the White House.
So much of Conservative attitudinizing is built around notions of masculinity and toughness. And for decades, they were hamstrung by "Strong, Silent" archetypes like John Wayne and Gary Cooper.
Donald Trump swept all that away. You can be a Real Man and whine like a throwout bearing in need of lube, you can be a Real Man and lose, and lose again, and again, and complain loudly about your losses every step the way.
Strong and Silent? Fuck that, Weak and Whiny is the new Republican model of masculinity, and Republican men absolutely love Donald Trump for freeing them to finally express the stunted almost-emotions they have kept suppressed all these years.
Giant bundles of grievances. Surrounded by vaguely defined enemies (within and without). Seeking to "purge" and "purify" the nation. Clean. White.
IOW, fascism.
Binders full of grievnaces.
Grievances on top of grievances
Many genre fiction magazines limit their submissions to unrepresented minorities (BIPOC for example). I could blame my inability to get published on their "woke" attitude, but I won't because it's cowardly, weak, and wrong. Writing has always been miserably tough. Any effort to level the playing field is OK in my book. Moreover, I think it's contemptible to deem yourself a "victim," especially when you aren't at all.
"But now victim-claiming has become absolutely central to the conservative identity[.]"
JFC, Maestro, this assumption of a factually-unsupported victimhood has been one of their primary driving forces for decades. IIRC, it was one of foundations of the early golden age of talk radio back in the 90s.
But what tickles one of my unmentionable parts is that no one picks up the irony of these nut jobs and cretins' obsession with mandates turning the US into a Nazi state: That is exactly enough what they're turning the nation into. Subverting elections, empowering racists, enabling parasites running an extractive, impoverishing economy, the highest court in the land deciding cases based on what's good for the party, black letter law and precedents notwithstanding, blocking efforts to respond reasonably and properly to a global pandemic -- that's the shit they're willingly making possible. Each and every one of them can fuck off wither Nazi comparisons.
And to think: That's the only block of citizens are elected officials serve regularly.
Much in what you say. Maybe I've just been missing it, because as a cis guy I'm only been able to smell the approaching artillery recently, since they've had to expand their unperson list beyond the usual minorities. I do think they've grown bolder about their subterfuges -- that is, not even trying to make their victimhood claims look good. But that too I may have just missed.
Could be all those emails you get make you, wholly or in part, focused on the now while, for me, today’s horseshit triggers a memory from long ago. But I’m a bit of a big picture guy.
Yeah, big picture is one thing – when I was young and even more stupid I thought I was big picture – but OLD is another. The slow accretion of fascistic-mutterings over the decades is how I got where I am today. And I long ago gave up telling people what was going on, because life's too short to load grievances upon everyone around me. So you lot are the victims of all this pent up blather.
Maybe you can craft an analogy to the sufferers in the gulag...it's a wide-open field.
What I've been seeing is the complete disappearance of anything that's not victim-claiming. In 2020, they didn't even bother to offer a platform (and 2022 isn't looking good either). "Vote for us because the Other Guys made you FEEL bad" is all they've got, and shockingly, it may be enough.
I know it's unmentionable, but COME ON, you're among friends – which part??!!
I think we're now in the advanced stage of Fox and talk radio malignancy. The bombastic hyperbole of Limbaugh and his local market imitators (who were even worse) attacked the liberal enemy of America (e.g.) in language that had to rapidly evolve into extreme exaggeration. So it didn't take long to go from "liberals want to raise your taxes" to "liberals are out to destroy America" -- whatever "the Left" was doing to you/America was right out of Gingrich's insane agitprop word list. Trump con man's patter ("It's disgraceful what they're doing to this country") mainstreamed it into the White House. The shameless Holocaust comparisons now are almost a logical outgrowth of this awful, stupid shit, and I can't imagine where they take it from here. Coupled with the right-wing's unshakeable state of being permanently aggrieved -- with all the examples you point out -- we've reached a point of sheer hallucination, i.e. those "What the fuck are they talking about?" moments you wrote about a while back, where Joe Biden is going to put them into vaccine camps.
Jade Helm, of course, was all true. I had gun-loving relatives who were disappeared by Obama's henchmen into a Wal-Mart somewhere, I'm sure of it.
The prices are very good, I hear
Watch out for falling helmsmen.
So it didn't take long to go from "liberals want to raise your taxes" to "liberals are out to destroy America"
When ideology blocks you from offering a positive program of your own. how do you turn out your voters? Its has to be entirely about the other guys, and how terrible they are, you've got nothing else.
And then, over time, like any drug that people develop a tolerance for, the dosage must be upped, and upped again. A few months ago, Chris Christie (at one time considered "moderate", I believe) claimed that "Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer are DESTROYING AMERICA." This was just a few days after the passage of an infrastructure bill that will send billions in aid to Christie's own state.
Never lose sight of the logical but unstated knock-on of the raise-your-taxes fearmongery:
We'll NEVER raise your taxes – we'll just keep spending without paying for it, and make certain we gazillionaires steer a sufficient percentage to our own personal selves. You, of course are on your own because Freedom, but if you just send us a couple hundred now and then, we'll keep you in supplements to flatten out your despairs, oxy to ratchet back the pain, and ivermectin to ease your...uhmm...worms...
" Piss and moan" is the best phrase, isn't it? It seems to be Kirk's only real talent. Sure ain't picking out clothes.
I'll be honest- I feel kind of white genocided because I can't just come out and call Kirk a "whiney little bitch"
But you can, brother. Here you will always get a respectful hearing.
I called Betsy DeVos a bitch on
Wonkette a few years ago and I like to never hear the end of that. People talked down to me for weeks.
https://is-a-cunt.com
Why not? That's called "using your privileged for good"
"Why bother then with policy? It only distracts from their grievance."
If you define "policy" as "Government doing things in response to real problems" there's an obvious reason why Conservatives can't do policy.
Yes, there was a time when, for them, "policy" meant "Undoing things that others put in place to respond to real problems." And they had a good run with that, when the targets of the undoing were the "Urban" poor - and they had the cooperation of the Democrats in the undoing.
But then they turned their undoing attention to Obamacare, and it was a complete fucking disaster for them. So they're kinda boxed in now. Conservatism prohibits them from proposing new polices, public opinion prohibits them from repealing the old ones.
My uncle is a perfect example of this. He’s always getting the short end of the stick in everything. Like the time when my grandmother gave him and my dad 10 acres of farmland to divide between them (hoo boy, bad idea). Dad said, “You divide it in half, and I’ll pick first.” Well, no way was he going to do that! So dad said, “Okay, I’ll divide it in half, and *you* pick first.” Oh no you don’t! That’s no good either!
In short, there’s no reasoning with people who are fundamentally curdled and sour.
Wait, your uncle is Joe Manchin?
Poorer but also less smarmy than King Coal
Such a merry olde soule...
So then they get to, "OK, YOU get to divide it in half, and then YOU pick" and Uncle Joe says, "Ah, to hell with it, let's just let the whole 10 acres lie fallow, the 30 trillion dollar national debt demands it" because seed and fertilizer cost money, doncha know.
Out here in the new west (my temporary location this week) the farms are small and tenuous, tho the tenant farmers still manage. The real money is in the packing 'sheds' (no longer sheds – many are really massive factories in the central valley), not to mention the outfit that grows seedlings in greenhouses, and the other enterprise that sprays all the stuff on the fields.
Should add here that an old colleague always said "Take some acreage outta production to put in that coastal trail, or for stream setback, or whatever civic reason. The farmers will bitch/moan, but what happens is they all raise their price accordingly (within the rates the packers will pay, anyway) so no loss in the long run."
The thing that gets to me is that I was brought up to believe that crybabies are losers. These guys seem so pathetic, but when does the losing start?
<i>“If you’re a white guy, tough luck,” wept Ted Cruz.</i>
"You needed that Supreme Court position, and you were the most qualified, but they had to give it to a minority." Okay. How is it that anyone takes this seriously, and how is it that millions and millions of Americans think that constant, non-stop squalling like a tiny baby is an attractive trait that they want in their leaders?
I'm starting to think that Republican voters don't actually want "attractive" or "likeable" or even "tolerable" in the people they send to Washington. It's enough that a given person infuriates people like you and me, if that means the guy must also be a totally loathesome scumbag, they're fine with that, maybe they've even developed a taste for such people.
Periodic reminder that they sent a whole asshole to the White House *because* he hates all the people they hate.
Sublime
Remember that they consider all the people we consider to be at least somewhat victimised to just be faking it, and basically fake 'people' fundamentally, so why shouldn't real people with real problems get into the act? (… now that, as I commented recently, it's become less acceptable generally simply to despise victims—a win for decency, but unfortunately Chapter N's solutions turn into Chapter N+1's problems.)
See also: Wilson's principle of national self-determination used by the Nazis as pretext for seizing the Sudentenland and then western Poland (which really was already a part of Minehead), with the aid in the latter case of actual false-flag operations so they didn't violate the Non-aggression Principle, just as some would do in Libertopia.….
Hilter für ein beßeres Minehead
The only false note in that sketch is Hilter's biting that baby on the head—he was _really_ good around (white) children in public—no fool, more's the pity.
Maybe not having slept since 1945 (an extremely gratifying thing for me to hear) had got to him.
Also: “This map isn’t Minehead; it’s Stalingrad. You wouldn’t have had much fun in Stalingrad!”
Trump never loses. His rickety selfworth would collapse like a house of cards if he ever admitted he lost anything. Michael Cohen predicted months before the election that Trump would never admit he lost. That supposedly mentally balanced Republicans have signed onto this delusional ship of fools is one of the most disheartening things about America since the conflation of body counts with victory in Vietnam. BTW, there was and is plenty of conservative whining about losing that unwinnable war.
73 million Americans can't be wrong. They can't. God or somebody on the tv said so.
God or somebody on the tv said so.
as if there is a difference
But he's got to keep eyeballs turned to his own glorious self, so he's got to keep yammering about something, and lately that "something" seems to be losses, mostly of the legal variety. It's just so UNFAIR, that judge who said the Jan. 6 committee could have his Presidential records, and now it's so UNFAIR, that judge who said he and his kids have to testify in that legal suit, and all this comes on top of more than 60 so UNFAIR rulings by courts who threw out his "stolen election" nonsense.
My question is how much of this his dimwit followers can hear before this thought occurs to them: "Gosh, this guy sure does lose an awful lot in court, doesn't he?"
Can't help but think of poor Howard Roarke (the guy in the movie, I never read the book). Again and again, Roarke is wronged, his career is destroyed and he's forced to do the most menial (and sweaty, and HOT) labor, but he never complains, he cares nothing for public opinion, he needs nothing and no one, not even the Zeppelin-breasted Patricia O'Neal. All he wants is his work (well, that and the right to blow up public housing projects when he's really really angry.)
Generations of American men were raised on such archetypes, and what our culture and country have been doing since at least the 60's is the overthrowing of this particular archetype. It's just that conservative men are a little late to the game, because they had to wait for Donald Trump to come along. There is no more perfect anti-Roarke that Donald Trump, he has no discernible talents or interest in work, he desperately obsesses over the opinions of others, he grabs at women, even women who are disgusted by him.
But for an American man - and especially a Conservative American man - which role model is easier or more pleasurable to live up to? Maybe you're angry and frustrated from a lifetime of trying to be Howard Roarke, and now you want to have some fun and be Donald Trump instead? Who can blame you?
(I read the book, so you don't have to. Howard Roark was a terrible architect who disdained such things as "workplace safety", "engineering", and "what the client wanted". He deserved to be breaking rocks in the hot sun. . .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5v8L08Flg)
Fantastic movie, though! King Vidor, the director, got his start in silent films and the whole thing works best as a silent movie: Gorgeous visuals, but every time a character opens their mouth and Ayn Rand's dialogue comes pouring out, it's all just laughably bad.
And it goes without saying that the residents of public housing must have absolutely no say in their own housing, everything must be decided by One White Man, with absolutely predictable results (like alienation and a feeling of being "warehoused"). Seems like that's the only historically accurate note in the movie.
I'll buy you a beer when the time comes, just for having read it so I do not have to.
Well it would be laughable, yeah. That was one of the worst-written books ever published for actual money. I started it when I was about the age bracket it seemed to be pegged to, and I could not finish it because it made doing laundry or cleaning toilets look like better options...
1.5 marks for "Zeppelin-breasted Patricia O'Neal"
I'd give you the whole 2, but I just feel (a little) sorry for Patricia O'Neal...
Less of a comment on Patricia O'Neal than a comment on a certain style of brassiere favored by movie wardrobe departments of the period.
I tried to heart this, if only for the industrial decolletage, but the heartery seems to be disabled...
Edited to add: Never mind. It is Slow Internet Friday.
You are now a big two-hearted riever...raver...rover...roofer...I dunno; all I know is you now got 2 hearts.
Not that I know for sure, but wasn't it Patricia Neal, not O'Neal in the Fountainhead. O'Neal is Ryan's mom and had a short film career. patricia had a longer career and said Klaatu, barada niktu
True! I was sO'wrong.
Yikes! We both missed it. 2 demerits.
"[she] said Klaatu, barada niktu"
See where that got us!?
Gort 2024