This is, like, my latest rant: that the difference between Trump actions and long time GOP goals is insignificant and irrelevant. Trump famously does everything in the shittiest way possible as should be expected from a subhuman monster and low intellect thug. Notwithstanding, he's already ticked off a shit ton of the party's boxes of goals with more to come. (He couldn't even tell my wife to fuck off in a decent, polite sort of way.) And speaking of the party, a lot of the prep work was done by both the Roberts court as well as decades of Democrat whatever exactly -- apathy? support??
And citing Perlstein requires citing yet again his instant classic:
I think it quite possible that, if 1890's time travelers show up here in a couple years, they'll realize what a magical time the gilt age really was by comparison...
We’re at NYC’s once famous Vertical Club. The Mrs and Donny are on the indoor track.
This after one of the casinos in bankruptcy filings. She runs up or whatever, tells him she’s excited to meet a celebrity like he and, being overly sensitive she shared that she thought he must feel awful over the filing because she would in his position.
At this point instead of saying anything, he just ran off. Which, besides being dickish, was infantile.
Whatever; I keep telling her that it was because of that that he first thought of running for president — so that he could thereby get back at her.
Yeah, conservatives have been on this path awhile. In the last few years one of their favorite slurs has been "virtue signaling," as if the concept of virtue itself had become déclassé, the stock-in-trade of chumps and/or hypocrites.
I also think that denigrating normal human traits like empathy doesn't fall neatly into the separate categories of tactic vs. actual belief. Why not both? It's the old fake it til you make it theory of behaving a certain way even if it feels less than authentic, and eventually you'll become the person you're pretending to be.
I will say that the MAGA-fication of conservative Christianity isn't as remarkable as some people seem to believe it is. This was always the iteration of Christianity that believed if you didn't allow the True Believers to curtail your rights and behavior, you were de facto victimizing THEM. In other words, they've always lived in Bizarro World.
They're very, very upset about being laughed at. Maybe it's just drawing my attention more lately, but I could swear it's become more common for Alex Jones or Scheißführer or Crowder to describe how "they're LAUGHING AT YOU" as a prime mortal sin of the Left, or of anyone opposing them. They're very very offended at the idea of someone ELSE taking pleasure in their humiliation, even though it's what they do regularly.
First thing I went to while I was fixing breakfast and thinking this essay over was Pigman Limbaugh and his "updates", where he'd introduce a story with a "humorous" musical theme (like "Una Paloma Blanca" for his War Update, or Frogman Henry's "Ain't Got No Home" for the Homeless Update) and then bombastically recount how liberals had been stupid and conservatives triumphant. The entire air of pleasure he'd give to every segment, the smug pronouncements of surety, the assurance that This Was How It Must Be and everything bad that happened to his enemies was an obvious sign of their corruption and evil.
As we all know, the universally pictured sins are made all the more delicious in the act because of the thrill of the deprav-...OK, maybe not depravity, but transgression...
So here we are, watching the cons assign more and more of human activity to the 'Sin' file just so's they can occasionally indulge in the fizzy little thrill of it. Imagine, every once in awhile, Steve Bannon tossing a wretch a coin – would give him an electric buzz he can't get otherwise...
More like he'd toss the wretch a coin that'd turn out to be chocolate-filled, or a metal washer, or aim it so the wretch just missed the catch and the coin went down a sewer grate.
The thing is, American conservatives never had any empathy (outside their immediate circle of family and friends) to begin with. At its core American conservatism is all about being an asshole, which is by definition the opposite of empathetic. But for a long time they had the sense to not say it out loud. But like everything else, that no longer applies. Now they’ve moved on to being out and proud assholes and are just upset that we won’t celebrate them for it.
I'm thinkin' National Asshole Day is on the plate, soon's they don't get permits to drive armored personnel (or do they just call it white guy now?) carriers all over the Mall...
That's why so many "conservatives" latched on to Trump, in my estimation. "He actually *says* the things I think!" Trump is a permission slip for them.
For me, the best book about empathy is Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" which was sliced, diced, and eviscerated in the movie "Blade Runner."
Actually, I had no idea what I had gotten into. The book was sitting in the back of the car that I and a few others were driving from Boston to Philadelphia and back to broadcast a basketball game (ah, the college years), and I read the whole thing. Quite frankly, I didn't understand all of it, but I knew I wanted more. I then read "Now Wait For Last Year," a simpler book, then gradually worked my way back up to the hard stuff.
Many years later I learned "pizzle" was slang for a bull's penis, specifically in the context of making a walking stick out of same (much lacquer is required).
Philip K. Dick was such a great writer that, even though the movie took the exact opposite stance on his theme, the story still worked. The whole point of the book was that androids are not humans and we humans should not be trying to create perfect versions of ourselves -- in other words, a master race.
"One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.
The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution."
Yep, the only two options. So sayeth the people who would do anything to deny gay people the right to marry and have families, and live, you know, "decent" lives.
IF WE TOLERATE A BLACK SANTA, WHAT'S NEXT? A GAY SANTA, MR. AND MR. CLAUS? OR AN IMMIGRANT SANTA? THIS IS THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, IT STARTS WITH THE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WE CREATE FOR OUR CHILDREN AND ENDS IN COMMUNISM!!!
NOW I'm thinking about the folks calling Halloween "Communist indoctrination" because kids get free candy.
What of Santy Claus and his redistribution of wealth? What of this corrupt "giving presents" thing where you're not even supposed to want something in return? They're taking ADVANTAGE of you! And probably LAUGHING!
I'm just waiting for Roy's next sally to Largeo Margeo to include the dude bellowing about how Santa Claus is WRONGWRONGWRONG because Claus must always be preceded by a masculine adjective (ie no "A"). Thus "San Claus" it is! And then Pinsy starts laughing and repeating "Sahn Claoos! Sahn Claoos!" and Trump be chasin' him around the room til he collapses and dies...
They're OK with it because of the Naughty and Nice lists. It's something of a compulsion with them, dividing any population in two, half gets cake, the other half gets machine-gunned.
What he's suggesting is that it's okay to sin as long as your works balance it out, and that's TOTALLY against Evangelical Christian morality - works are pointless in their belief.
It's also the "700 Club Non-Believers" trope, that those of us not saved MUST be doing ALL THE SINS because there's nothing preventing us from doing them. Which I'm also thinking about because I listened to Last Podcast On The Left's series on Satanic Panic patient zero Mike Warnke, and the festival of lies he told about his time in Satanism. (Which is interesting, given I seem to recall very clearly that JHVH had some very harsh words for bearing false witness, but what do I know? Time to go cook up my heroin for the day!)
I try not to hurt people. I find that "Just don't hurt anyone" works for about 99.9 percent of the moral questions that come up. But if your response to "Don't hurt anyone" is "Why not?" then, sure, you'd need some wrathful God to keep you in line.
I had known that Phillip Johnson had expressed admiration for the Nazis early on, but suppressed them, and apologized during WW2.
In the Gospels Jesus tell that YHVH, the Big Guy isn't happy with those who claim to love Him but mistreat, or worse, ignore the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the immigrant "stranger".
"As ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done unto Me."
And they are cast into the darkness...
But i reckon good Republicans needed worry about anything that gets in the way of money making.
The War on Woke is a McCarthyite, Stalinist attack on liberalism and social justice as being Communism and anti business.
I had to look up regnant and I am a better person for it!
I think when the kids starves to death because of budget cuts it's unfortunate but there's no way that we can tolerate the waste fraud and abuse. Maybe we could call their mother's " Angel Moms" like they do when kids fall victim to one of the many homicidal immigrants that are flooding into the country. That would make up for a lot.
I think we're always about one step short of savagery. Some of the southern states are considering paying a bounty for illegal immigrants. The back roads will be full of trailer park Rambo's in their Walmart tactical gear with their Walmart assault rifles hunting illegal aliens. At that point, we're just one final step from scalp hunting.
Also, too - a day late from yesterday's discussion. I think maybe Booth Tarkington might have been a good conservative.
I'm really fond of think pieces like this. Especially when I get to learn new words!
Careful there, bo – yer gettin' perilously close to the Illuterati, and next thing you know, the ghost of Henry Ford'll be comin' round to shake yer hand and engage in deep conversation...
"Some of the southern states are considering paying a bounty for illegal immigrants. The back roads will be full of trailer park Rambo's in their Walmart tactical gear with their Walmart assault rifles hunting illegal aliens."
They want a race war, and they'll be more than happy to shoot their way through Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the pretense of "law and order".
What gets me about these fascist folks is that they profess to be Christians, of any sort. This isn't mere hypocrisy; "Empathy is a Sin" is so antithetical it's something Father O'Brien would accuse Winston Smith of. Depictions of Republican Jesus as an AR-15 toting warrior are bad enough, but making empathy a sin is tantamount to inventing a completely different religion based on a right-wing fantasy of divine permission for their awfulness. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the religion they've got now. (It's kind of how "originalists" turn the constitution on its head to fulfill their own desires.) If empathy is a sin in their depraved creed, then Jesus was the biggest sinner of them all.
Like I said yesterday, laziness and Calvinism: if you're in The Elect nothing you can do is wrong; if you're not in The Elect nothing you can do is right.
Empathy is normal. It's just wired-in to how a healthy brain functions. Now, for a counter-example, suppose a child dies of measles, and you, as the head of HHS, decide to call her parents to console them. Which you do, and then you go on Fox News and say "I think malnutrition might have been involved." Not normal. Broken. Missing important brain-circuitry that normal people have. When you're this broken, you get a diagnosis, and it's "psychopath."
When I worked in a newsroom, my colleague, the late Lance Mannion's wife, known online as the Blonde, would sometimes do a little comedy bit where she would strike a pose, cock her head and tell someone, "I'm looking at you with neeewwww respect! Let's all look at Nancy with neeewwww respect!" And even though I know you already knew what the expression "come a-cropper" means, and were capable of using it in a sentence, I see it misused so, so often that I feel I must call everyone to look at Roy with neeewwww respect. If you'd used the archaic punctuation – 'come a-cropper, because it literally means "become a cropper," or become a farmer, because you've just eaten dirt by falling off your horse – well, then I couldn't say anything, because I'd be in a dead faint. (This knowledge should be filed under Weird Stuff You Learn From Boarding a Horse Next to a Fox Hunter.)
My instinct is to front, but I must confess that though I knew the meaning I never knew the provenance of that term til now. However, my respect for you is already at maximum intensity.
"Boarding a Horse Next to a Fox Hunter" is another delightful euphemism that I think we should all look for a chance to use at the dinner table this evening.
The guy was kind of a jerk, but on this one day he answered every question I had about fox hunting. He was a lawyer, kept two horses, and hunted every Wednesday and Sunday throughout the season (November, or whenever the crops came out of the fields, until March), hauling one or the other mount to Lafayette, Ind., where the club was headquartered. They hunted live fox, only rarely killed one, and he laughed scornfully at the animal-rights argument that it was cruel to the quarry, explaining the lengths the club went to, to keep wild fox in their country: "If PETA really wanted to beat up on people who kill foxes, they'd pick on real-estate developers." But his best story was about when their (relatively) working-class club trailered down to Kentucky or somewhere to hunt with a more high-falutin' one, something they did a couple times a season. The group came walking back afterward for the traditional breakfast, cooling off their horses, and found the driveway of the club lined with grooms, every single one of them Black. Like something out of "Gone With the Wind." The Kentuckians dismounted, tossed their reins to a groom, and strolled on into the clubhouse for a 10 a.m. cocktail. He said the Hoosiers looked at each other en route to tending to their own horses back at the barn and said, "I knew we forgot something."
Now that I think of it, I had another colleague who'd lived with some hippie friends in a rented farmhouse in Virginia. They all dropped acid at midnight, tripped through the hours and were coming down, sitting on the front porch grooving on the cool, misty morning. Then they start hearing this ah-roo, ah-roo, and someone blowing a horn, and about a million hoofbeats, and a full pack of foxhounds and riders passes by, just off the front yard. They sat stunned, and finally one said, "Did that just happen? Did anyone else see that?"
Re the Hoosier story, I had a similar experience 30 odd years ago when I was working for a food industry trade magazine and Brown-Forman invited a bunch of us to their hq to introduce some new line of imported wine they were hawking. After their morning presentation they took us to lunch, which was held in this huge, dark wood paneled room with an equally huge, dark wood table that sat around 50. All the executives and all the invitees were white guys. And standing at what might as well been attention against the walls around the room were at least 15 black men in crisp white uniforms who served us everything. They were wonderful, but I have never had a more uncomfortable meal in my life.
Fair.
This is, like, my latest rant: that the difference between Trump actions and long time GOP goals is insignificant and irrelevant. Trump famously does everything in the shittiest way possible as should be expected from a subhuman monster and low intellect thug. Notwithstanding, he's already ticked off a shit ton of the party's boxes of goals with more to come. (He couldn't even tell my wife to fuck off in a decent, polite sort of way.) And speaking of the party, a lot of the prep work was done by both the Roberts court as well as decades of Democrat whatever exactly -- apathy? support??
And citing Perlstein requires citing yet again his instant classic:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/If he hadn't suffered enough writing the other books, I could be tempted to read a book by him re the Trump era.
And of course the usual rant/whines:
We're headed back to the 1890s; and
we the people chose this freely -- mostly with heads up asses but freely.
I think it quite possible that, if 1890's time travelers show up here in a couple years, they'll realize what a magical time the gilt age really was by comparison...
Obviously, things are much more complicated now but the complexity compared to the 1890s is or will be all for the worse.
The travelers might be amused by the deification of a guy who digs tunnels...underground!
When'd he tell your wife to fuck off?
We’re at NYC’s once famous Vertical Club. The Mrs and Donny are on the indoor track.
This after one of the casinos in bankruptcy filings. She runs up or whatever, tells him she’s excited to meet a celebrity like he and, being overly sensitive she shared that she thought he must feel awful over the filing because she would in his position.
At this point instead of saying anything, he just ran off. Which, besides being dickish, was infantile.
Whatever; I keep telling her that it was because of that that he first thought of running for president — so that he could thereby get back at her.
YOICKS! Even I would consider beyond the bounds of spousely digs...
Speak for yourself, pal.
He was RUNNING???
Probably jogging til the Mrs made nice to the piece of shit.
I’d ask her but she’s having a rough day…
Yeah, conservatives have been on this path awhile. In the last few years one of their favorite slurs has been "virtue signaling," as if the concept of virtue itself had become déclassé, the stock-in-trade of chumps and/or hypocrites.
I also think that denigrating normal human traits like empathy doesn't fall neatly into the separate categories of tactic vs. actual belief. Why not both? It's the old fake it til you make it theory of behaving a certain way even if it feels less than authentic, and eventually you'll become the person you're pretending to be.
I will say that the MAGA-fication of conservative Christianity isn't as remarkable as some people seem to believe it is. This was always the iteration of Christianity that believed if you didn't allow the True Believers to curtail your rights and behavior, you were de facto victimizing THEM. In other words, they've always lived in Bizarro World.
The hurtitude some folx feel when you do not agree with them is...startling.
And their urge to take revenge on you for that disagreement follows very closely on the heels of the hurt.
If you don't join us in our reverence of the Prince of Peace, we have no choice but to kill you.
Look what you made me do!
In their world, they never have any agency - it's always that they were "made" to do some awful thing by someone else.
e.g. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi
They're very, very upset about being laughed at. Maybe it's just drawing my attention more lately, but I could swear it's become more common for Alex Jones or Scheißführer or Crowder to describe how "they're LAUGHING AT YOU" as a prime mortal sin of the Left, or of anyone opposing them. They're very very offended at the idea of someone ELSE taking pleasure in their humiliation, even though it's what they do regularly.
I keep thinking of the term "insubordination".
Bingo. Those doctors who tell you vaccines work THINK THEY KNOW MORE ABOUT HOW THE HUMAN BODY WORKS THAN YOU DO. Harumph.
They have an Inferiority Simple. Not Complex, because, well...
Blood simple, money simple, inferiority simple.
First thing I went to while I was fixing breakfast and thinking this essay over was Pigman Limbaugh and his "updates", where he'd introduce a story with a "humorous" musical theme (like "Una Paloma Blanca" for his War Update, or Frogman Henry's "Ain't Got No Home" for the Homeless Update) and then bombastically recount how liberals had been stupid and conservatives triumphant. The entire air of pleasure he'd give to every segment, the smug pronouncements of surety, the assurance that This Was How It Must Be and everything bad that happened to his enemies was an obvious sign of their corruption and evil.
And then he smoked himself to death. Karma!
When they hate at 'woke', I just take them to be wanting us asleep.
As we all know, the universally pictured sins are made all the more delicious in the act because of the thrill of the deprav-...OK, maybe not depravity, but transgression...
So here we are, watching the cons assign more and more of human activity to the 'Sin' file just so's they can occasionally indulge in the fizzy little thrill of it. Imagine, every once in awhile, Steve Bannon tossing a wretch a coin – would give him an electric buzz he can't get otherwise...
More like he'd toss the wretch a coin that'd turn out to be chocolate-filled, or a metal washer, or aim it so the wretch just missed the catch and the coin went down a sewer grate.
One thing you gotta say about sewer grates: I bet you've never seen a seamstress stuck down there because the gaps in the grate were too wide.
The thing is, American conservatives never had any empathy (outside their immediate circle of family and friends) to begin with. At its core American conservatism is all about being an asshole, which is by definition the opposite of empathetic. But for a long time they had the sense to not say it out loud. But like everything else, that no longer applies. Now they’ve moved on to being out and proud assholes and are just upset that we won’t celebrate them for it.
I'm thinkin' National Asshole Day is on the plate, soon's they don't get permits to drive armored personnel (or do they just call it white guy now?) carriers all over the Mall...
"personnel" sounds dangerously gender-neutral
Not when personhood defaults to white men and fetuses.
Armoured Asshats? At least it's alliterative. And they're illiterate.
July 4, 2026.
And sometimes it doesn't even apply to family.
The empathy for their immediate circle of family and friends is very, very conditional.
That's why so many "conservatives" latched on to Trump, in my estimation. "He actually *says* the things I think!" Trump is a permission slip for them.
For me, the best book about empathy is Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" which was sliced, diced, and eviscerated in the movie "Blade Runner."
Phil is an acquired taste. Fortunately one I acquired about fifty years ago.
Me boyo often quotes "This milk is thoroughly pizzled".
After 50 years ago for me too. I read "The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch" and never looked back.
Damn man! You jumped in at the deep end of the pool. Most impressive.
As you can tell from my boy's quote, my first was 'Autofac'. Still a really damn good short story.
Actually, I had no idea what I had gotten into. The book was sitting in the back of the car that I and a few others were driving from Boston to Philadelphia and back to broadcast a basketball game (ah, the college years), and I read the whole thing. Quite frankly, I didn't understand all of it, but I knew I wanted more. I then read "Now Wait For Last Year," a simpler book, then gradually worked my way back up to the hard stuff.
And here I was thinking I was the only one to adopt that cromulent word into my vocabulary.
(Just noticed Firefox does NOT flag "cromulent" as a misspelled word. Hrm!)
Many years later I learned "pizzle" was slang for a bull's penis, specifically in the context of making a walking stick out of same (much lacquer is required).
Philip K. Dick was such a great writer that, even though the movie took the exact opposite stance on his theme, the story still worked. The whole point of the book was that androids are not humans and we humans should not be trying to create perfect versions of ourselves -- in other words, a master race.
"One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.
The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution."
Yep, the only two options. So sayeth the people who would do anything to deny gay people the right to marry and have families, and live, you know, "decent" lives.
Conservative Christians: All gay men are promiscuous and want to lead degenerate lives by having multiple sexual partners.
Gay Men: We'd like to get married.
CC: Oh, ho ho, no. That's ours.
2 marks for the 'ho ho'
SANTA IS JUST WHITE HE JUST IS STOP IT WITH THE BLACK SANTA
IF WE TOLERATE A BLACK SANTA, WHAT'S NEXT? A GAY SANTA, MR. AND MR. CLAUS? OR AN IMMIGRANT SANTA? THIS IS THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO THE END OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, IT STARTS WITH THE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WE CREATE FOR OUR CHILDREN AND ENDS IN COMMUNISM!!!
Some Christmas parade had Santa wearing a tu-tu (in Amsterdam I believe). You could hear the heads exploding from across the Atlantic.
Heh heh heh. Or ho ho ho, as it were.
ETA: In my head, "ho ho ho" is preceded by "In the valley of the jolly" and followed by "Green Giant".
You've insulted my religion.
NOW I'm thinking about the folks calling Halloween "Communist indoctrination" because kids get free candy.
What of Santy Claus and his redistribution of wealth? What of this corrupt "giving presents" thing where you're not even supposed to want something in return? They're taking ADVANTAGE of you! And probably LAUGHING!
I'm just waiting for Roy's next sally to Largeo Margeo to include the dude bellowing about how Santa Claus is WRONGWRONGWRONG because Claus must always be preceded by a masculine adjective (ie no "A"). Thus "San Claus" it is! And then Pinsy starts laughing and repeating "Sahn Claoos! Sahn Claoos!" and Trump be chasin' him around the room til he collapses and dies...
It's...it's...it's....SOCIALISM!
They're OK with it because of the Naughty and Nice lists. It's something of a compulsion with them, dividing any population in two, half gets cake, the other half gets machine-gunned.
I laughed like a mother f*****
The Puritans were ag'in Christmas and banned its celebration for a while
Wasn't the original St. Nick Greek?
It's a world of black-and-white, populated only with false dichotomies and Hobsonian choices.
Because such a world is the only one in which they can justify their choices.
I think it's the only world view some of them can even conjure up. Really, their brains need to be studied.
Studied? Par-boiled is more like it.
Yeeeaah...I was gonna say "You go first".
...with fava beans, and a nice Chianti.
Hobsonian choices
Butch Hobson whose choices were to make a decent throw to first or to throw it into the seats
Oh, so an original carrier of Roy Smalley Senior Disease. (The next generation would be Steve Sax.)
What he's suggesting is that it's okay to sin as long as your works balance it out, and that's TOTALLY against Evangelical Christian morality - works are pointless in their belief.
It's also the "700 Club Non-Believers" trope, that those of us not saved MUST be doing ALL THE SINS because there's nothing preventing us from doing them. Which I'm also thinking about because I listened to Last Podcast On The Left's series on Satanic Panic patient zero Mike Warnke, and the festival of lies he told about his time in Satanism. (Which is interesting, given I seem to recall very clearly that JHVH had some very harsh words for bearing false witness, but what do I know? Time to go cook up my heroin for the day!)
I try not to hurt people. I find that "Just don't hurt anyone" works for about 99.9 percent of the moral questions that come up. But if your response to "Don't hurt anyone" is "Why not?" then, sure, you'd need some wrathful God to keep you in line.
I had known that Phillip Johnson had expressed admiration for the Nazis early on, but suppressed them, and apologized during WW2.
In the Gospels Jesus tell that YHVH, the Big Guy isn't happy with those who claim to love Him but mistreat, or worse, ignore the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the immigrant "stranger".
"As ye have done unto the least of these, ye have done unto Me."
And they are cast into the darkness...
But i reckon good Republicans needed worry about anything that gets in the way of money making.
The War on Woke is a McCarthyite, Stalinist attack on liberalism and social justice as being Communism and anti business.
And obviously anti American.
We've been here before.
Just not with the most ridiculous clown on G-d's green earth in charge.
We're well into the farce stage of history repeating.
Who left all these size 47 clownprints all over the map?!
(Starring Donald Trumpov as President McCarthy and Stephen Miller as Roy Cohn.)
If McCarthy could have taken tips from reality TV and WWE.
Donald Krasnov, to be accurate.
Just Tovarishch will do.
A. Mitchell Palmer notes, "you bet your anarchist ass we have".
Periodic reminder that A. Mitchell Palmer, the "Fighting Quaker", in his attempt to become President, unleashed J. Edgar Hoover on the world.
"As you have done to the least, you have done unto Me, unless the least deserve it, the leeches!"
I had to look up regnant and I am a better person for it!
I think when the kids starves to death because of budget cuts it's unfortunate but there's no way that we can tolerate the waste fraud and abuse. Maybe we could call their mother's " Angel Moms" like they do when kids fall victim to one of the many homicidal immigrants that are flooding into the country. That would make up for a lot.
I think we're always about one step short of savagery. Some of the southern states are considering paying a bounty for illegal immigrants. The back roads will be full of trailer park Rambo's in their Walmart tactical gear with their Walmart assault rifles hunting illegal aliens. At that point, we're just one final step from scalp hunting.
Also, too - a day late from yesterday's discussion. I think maybe Booth Tarkington might have been a good conservative.
I'm really fond of think pieces like this. Especially when I get to learn new words!
They can warm up for it by hunting pregnant and possibly-pregnant women to find out what's up with their uteri.
Speaking of words, I do a lot of online crossword puzzles and today the word "uteri" was in one of them. First time for that.
First time for the word, the concept, or the opportunity?
First time for the actual word itself to show up as the answer to a clue.
Oh, rent a sense of humor, Peter.
Yeah, Bern's comment went right by me. I'm ashamed.
It's not uteruses?
I'm busy here. I can't spend all day looking up highfalutin words.
"Octopi" would make you think so (Octopusses is the plural), but this one is Greek, not Latin (octo-) so, nope it ain't.
I've read a couple of books on the subject--they're really fascinating critters--and the people who work with them insist on "octopuses."
And they are correct. Octopus is of Latin derivation, and Latin doesn't do plurals that way. Greek does, so 'uteri' is the correct plural.
(Why yes, I am pedantic. Why do you ask?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7__r4FVj-EI
Octopockles!
Uteratii
Careful there, bo – yer gettin' perilously close to the Illuterati, and next thing you know, the ghost of Henry Ford'll be comin' round to shake yer hand and engage in deep conversation...
Not quite what you're suggesting, but it has to be heard. The Cramps - "What's Inside A Girl?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kakftk9XYTg
Like “persiflage”
It Pays To Increase Your Word Power
Thou art showing thine age, Boss. But then Laughter Is The Best Medicine.
Roy oughta know from pay!
Not to mention Life In These United States.
Can a thing be regnant and stagnant at the same time?
Pretty much always, yes.
Regnant, stagnant and repugnant. Meet Trump's cabinet.
Malignant too, and I'm pretty indignant about it.
Pregnant pause...
Regnant, Stagnant, Repugnant, Malignant, Indignant, and Ignorant as the Cabinet of Dr. Trumpiari
(Now I can't stop thinking of how Eisenhower's Cabinet was described as "eight millionaires and a plumber".)
Who was the plumber?
Well, we've had Stagflation; when do we get Regflation?
"I am a better person for it!"
Unpossible!
"Some of the southern states are considering paying a bounty for illegal immigrants. The back roads will be full of trailer park Rambo's in their Walmart tactical gear with their Walmart assault rifles hunting illegal aliens."
They want a race war, and they'll be more than happy to shoot their way through Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the pretense of "law and order".
I had to look up "regnant" AND "persiflage". Roy's columns are both informative and educational!
Well, we're getting a bunch of enthusiastic vigilantes cosplaying ICE personnel, as it is.
Yeah, anda 'Oof' to you, too.
What gets me about these fascist folks is that they profess to be Christians, of any sort. This isn't mere hypocrisy; "Empathy is a Sin" is so antithetical it's something Father O'Brien would accuse Winston Smith of. Depictions of Republican Jesus as an AR-15 toting warrior are bad enough, but making empathy a sin is tantamount to inventing a completely different religion based on a right-wing fantasy of divine permission for their awfulness. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the religion they've got now. (It's kind of how "originalists" turn the constitution on its head to fulfill their own desires.) If empathy is a sin in their depraved creed, then Jesus was the biggest sinner of them all.
"Love your neighbor as yourself." Matthew 22:39
Sorry, bad translation. He meant "blow their fucking heads off."
That's not about giving your neighbor a handjob?
Christianity is so confusing.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass, dude.
...just 25 cents short...
Quoting Leviticus 19:18. Big J was big on that sort of thing.
Made by god. Everything We Do Must be OK.
Like I said yesterday, laziness and Calvinism: if you're in The Elect nothing you can do is wrong; if you're not in The Elect nothing you can do is right.
And you can be explicitly non-Christian! See Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswami. And they used to love the Moonies!
And now they are all in for the Marsies!
Empathy: what the thinking people among us refer to as not being a selfish, short-sighted dick.
See, there's where you went wrong. No way you can hit anything with that dick – the sight needs a huge adjustment!
We're supposed to feel empathy for the owners of all the cats and dogs eaten by Haitians.
Our hearts should be near to bursting over the plight of women's sports programs inundated the flood of trans athletes.
And now we're expected to give a shit about the widow and orphans of the CEO who's job was to deny services to widows and orphans.
I gotta tell ya' I'm almost empathized out.
Sure, I can fake some empathy if it gives me permission to hurt people. I don't have to fake it for very long, do I?
Only til ya make it.
Wasn’t it that asshole Bill Bennett who said something along the lines of “Hypocrisy is better than no morality at all!”?
As Claire said, "The only two choices."
Empathy is normal. It's just wired-in to how a healthy brain functions. Now, for a counter-example, suppose a child dies of measles, and you, as the head of HHS, decide to call her parents to console them. Which you do, and then you go on Fox News and say "I think malnutrition might have been involved." Not normal. Broken. Missing important brain-circuitry that normal people have. When you're this broken, you get a diagnosis, and it's "psychopath."
I blame the brainworm.
Need more data from pre-worm for comparison.
That was a fake to get his alimony reduced
When I worked in a newsroom, my colleague, the late Lance Mannion's wife, known online as the Blonde, would sometimes do a little comedy bit where she would strike a pose, cock her head and tell someone, "I'm looking at you with neeewwww respect! Let's all look at Nancy with neeewwww respect!" And even though I know you already knew what the expression "come a-cropper" means, and were capable of using it in a sentence, I see it misused so, so often that I feel I must call everyone to look at Roy with neeewwww respect. If you'd used the archaic punctuation – 'come a-cropper, because it literally means "become a cropper," or become a farmer, because you've just eaten dirt by falling off your horse – well, then I couldn't say anything, because I'd be in a dead faint. (This knowledge should be filed under Weird Stuff You Learn From Boarding a Horse Next to a Fox Hunter.)
My instinct is to front, but I must confess that though I knew the meaning I never knew the provenance of that term til now. However, my respect for you is already at maximum intensity.
Huh. We useta call falling off yer trail bike into the adjacent shrubberies 'gardening'.
Everything old is new again.
I prefer to call it "having a yard sale", as everything in your pockets/etc goes flying about.
"Boarding a Horse Next to a Fox Hunter" is another delightful euphemism that I think we should all look for a chance to use at the dinner table this evening.
The guy was kind of a jerk, but on this one day he answered every question I had about fox hunting. He was a lawyer, kept two horses, and hunted every Wednesday and Sunday throughout the season (November, or whenever the crops came out of the fields, until March), hauling one or the other mount to Lafayette, Ind., where the club was headquartered. They hunted live fox, only rarely killed one, and he laughed scornfully at the animal-rights argument that it was cruel to the quarry, explaining the lengths the club went to, to keep wild fox in their country: "If PETA really wanted to beat up on people who kill foxes, they'd pick on real-estate developers." But his best story was about when their (relatively) working-class club trailered down to Kentucky or somewhere to hunt with a more high-falutin' one, something they did a couple times a season. The group came walking back afterward for the traditional breakfast, cooling off their horses, and found the driveway of the club lined with grooms, every single one of them Black. Like something out of "Gone With the Wind." The Kentuckians dismounted, tossed their reins to a groom, and strolled on into the clubhouse for a 10 a.m. cocktail. He said the Hoosiers looked at each other en route to tending to their own horses back at the barn and said, "I knew we forgot something."
Now that I think of it, I had another colleague who'd lived with some hippie friends in a rented farmhouse in Virginia. They all dropped acid at midnight, tripped through the hours and were coming down, sitting on the front porch grooving on the cool, misty morning. Then they start hearing this ah-roo, ah-roo, and someone blowing a horn, and about a million hoofbeats, and a full pack of foxhounds and riders passes by, just off the front yard. They sat stunned, and finally one said, "Did that just happen? Did anyone else see that?"
Re the Hoosier story, I had a similar experience 30 odd years ago when I was working for a food industry trade magazine and Brown-Forman invited a bunch of us to their hq to introduce some new line of imported wine they were hawking. After their morning presentation they took us to lunch, which was held in this huge, dark wood paneled room with an equally huge, dark wood table that sat around 50. All the executives and all the invitees were white guys. And standing at what might as well been attention against the walls around the room were at least 15 black men in crisp white uniforms who served us everything. They were wonderful, but I have never had a more uncomfortable meal in my life.
I tried boarding a horse once, but I was in the last group they called and by then the horse was full.
“a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called ‘The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.’”
It takes some really audacious depravity to redefine the Beatitudes as blasphemy.
Parts of the Constitution are now unconstitutional.
Parts?
Well, he's got all these awesome ARTICLE TWO powers, you know that one, it's the first and only article in the constitution.
Well, the conservatives have pretty much gone full Stalinist, so that tracks.
"The Originalistcrats!"
To be fair, lotsa folks back in the day thought The Beatledudes were kinda blasphemy now and again.
"Compassion and its Counterfeits"
Uh... so... compassion's OK, but what you and I have isn't real compassion, it's some liberal "counterfeit" kind?
“Compassion Signaling!”
Everyone knows genuine righteousness is the *real* sin. 🤯
REAL compassion, you know, like what you feel for the girl who came in 5th in the swim meet instead of 4th because of one of those awful trans people.