Sad but true. There is nothing that brings men from differing cultures and ideological philosophies together quite as effectively as the urge to put those wimmins back in their place.
LOL. No need for a Not All Men. I won’t speak for rfc, but I was more generally referring to how, as Ms. Ono put it, women are the n-word of the world. So the easiest way to bring a dissenting group of people into accord is to refocus their hostilities toward a traditional joint target.
I really hate that lyric, and Patti Smiths “Rock and Roll Nigger” - mostly because people will read that and not really THINK about the word, what it means, and how it’s fucked up Black Americans for so damned long…and instead make comments like these - https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100044173897018&story_fbid=1476392135712828
Agree. The use of the word was wrong for all those reasons. And Smith's use was a completely unacceptable trivialization. But Ono's observation itself was accurate.
No. The IDF lewdly posing with Palestinian lingerie was symbolic revenge for Hamas' criminal rapes and femicides of Oct. 7th, and I am sickened by the near-universal dehumanization and brutalization of women worldwide.
On the home front, it's been a fact for *years* that the #1 cause of death for pregnant women is partner homicide. New stats show that those figures rise in states where abortion is illegal. Now combine that with the inability of red state women to get medically appropriate gynecological care and the picture gets even more grim.
It is dispiriting to have one's humanity continually mocked, denied, and/or brutally violated.
Husband buys a gun, tells himself (and anyone who will listen) that it's to "protect his family" against Willie Horton comin' in through the bedroom window. Later uses it to murder his wife, or commit suicide, or the kids find the gun and one of them ends up dead, the other traumatized for life. But those outcomes aren't so much fun to think about, whereas that imagined scenario of the well-placed bullet hitting Mr. Horton right in the forehead is one he plays out in his head, endlessly.
I can’t find the stats, but the number of guns bought for “home protection” that wind up being used for suicides, or deliberately shooting a family member, or the accidental shooting of the gun owner or a family member, greatly outnumber the instances where it is successfully used for “protection.” A burglar coming through the window might be the safest guy in the house.
Ah, but statistics, who's persuaded by those? Not gun enthusiasts, that's for sure. But the story you tell yourself where you're the Big Hero, you can never get enough of that.
Yeah, you know how it is, you shoot a burglar breaking into your house and then just bury him in the crawlspace because you don't want to bother the cops with a lot of paperwork.
It's the same "thinking" that kept lynching from being a Federal crime until 2022: we are going to protect our Pure White Women by any means necessary.
Who can hate the Beatles, or the Stones, or Michael Jackson, or Madonna, or Sinatra? LOTS of people do, believe it or not.
Not everyone likes everything.
Also, I never said I “hated” her - I don’t have that time to waste, I simply don’t think she’s that talented…especially when she stooped to use “Nigger” in her song, which I think was wrong to do.
Why didn’t she say “A Rock and Roll Kike”, or Spic, or Beaner, or Mick, or any other racial epithet?
We all know why, and I think she was wrong for exploiting it in order to gain attention.
“they must learn…to stifle their emotional reactions to what, in the hot blush of youth, seems like obvious, horrifying injustice, and nurse these stifled reactions until they become cold grievances against future generations of protestors whose outrage will feel like a harsh rebuke against their own cowardice.”
Ouch and yes. Reading editorials in the NYT, looking at what they choose to cover and how, and looking at many of their opinion columnists, you have to wonder exactly who the fuck the Right is referring to when they talk about the “liberal media.” But of course baseless invective and not accuracy has always been the Right’s calling card. The NYT has no such excuse.
I believe Biden used to tell a story about walking with a friend on campus in '68 or so and seeing some students occupying an administration building, and saying, "Just look at those assholes." So this paragraph is an uncomfortable fit for some people who don't even work at the Times.
Gee, it's nice to find out that my Attorney General wants to charge students with a KKK law that is rarely if ever used against the KKK. Bookend that with the Secretary of State vowing to keep Biden off the ballot and it just makes me proud to be a Buckeye.
Well it is nice to know that we no longer have to worry about creeping fascism, it's more like it's galloping I'd say.
Oh, wouldn't it be extra-ironic if it was an ANTI-MASKING law? Because the AI bots writing this simulation-of-reality we're all "living" in are some lazy, lazy bots.
I confess: too triggering and upsetting for me to read. Clearly a Me problem connected to another Me problem.
Anyway, the fucking Times...
Joe Kahn's huge display or... uh... honesty? in his interview last week is old news. It's just part of the incredible reality that the junta replacing Pinch, Baquet and Bennet is so much worse. Of course, it's been years since corporate gave a fuck about news; now it's subscriber growth by any and all means possible. Meanwhile, the percentage of subscribers getting and reading the news is a mystery. Well, actually, simply not disclosed.
OTOH, I seem to be heading to grave certain that our exceptional nation's exceptional elite news media are literally harmful to the nation, so...
Anyway. How bad is the editorial/op-ed side? This bad:
No, not running the piece. That's of course bad be on the political side Penn has never, ever done anything not harmful.
Nah, it's the author's bio: no reference to running No Labels (his wife is mostly the face of the organization). In the name of any god (or dog if dyslexic or just know better, what kind of shit show operation does that?
The voice of the establishment does.
Which is to say the reality of the news/opinion side of the outlet is so upsetting just seeing a satire piece is upsetting.
Obviously, and of course I hope, YMMV.
Again, just a Me problem. No offense to management or the audience in any way intended.
They should just identify these guys as "a concerned citizen" or "John Q. Public." Either that or say "read the internet to find out what this guy is actually up to, if you have time, ha ha."
I find "highlight name, hit search" is a useful procedure. Even with Google's shit AI results, it's usually fairly quickly obvious how much toxicity the writer's hiding/having hidden.
It's hard to describe the small jolt of joy I get from seeing the Times has printed another horrible editorial that I'm not reading because I canceled my subscription years ago.
You're protesting by sitting in or camping out? Carrying signs or shouting slogans? You're doing it wrong! Indeed, by exercising your right to free speech, you're jeopardizing that right! So SFTU and go back to class!
You're "protesting" by ransacking the Capitol, beating police officers, and looking to kill members of Congress or the Vice-President? Now that's how good Americans express their political views! Sure, you've been convicted of insurrection by juries of your peers. But we at the FNYT are working hard--so very very hard--to get Donald Trump back in office so he can pardon you from these unfair and scurrilous charges!
I'm a big fan of how the French protest. No peaceful tent encampments for them. If legislation is passed that gives them one day less of annual time off or if a 2 cent tax is imposed on the purchase of mussels, they are out in those streets blocking off bridges and setting police cars on fire. They know how to really put the "unrest" into civil unrest.
Recently, protestors dumped 300 lbs of manure outside Nancy Pelosi's home with a sign that said "No More Bullshit." This is some France-level protesterationisms...
While Hillary Clinton did an interview where she chided today's univesity students for "Not being educated in history."
Did she mean like the history of how students protested against apartheid and turned out to be right about that, or the history of how students protested against the Vietnam war, and turned out to be right about that? Or does she mean the more-recent history of when students protested against the Iraq war and turned out to be right about that too?
[patronizing laugh] “Oh you simple child. You just aren’t intelligent and worldly enough to understand. As I once remarked to Henry Kissinger at a lovely cocktail party….”
I get where Hill is coming from, interests not allies, diplomacy, blah blah. The depressing thing is they all believe explaining this to the public is a losing proposition, leaving them with "Israel's right to defend itself" as a tattered fig leaf, pissing off the people who know it is bullshit. Both Operation Enduring Freedom and the US position on the current Gaza abbitoir had bullshit justifications, but the first was eagerly embraced, while the second is fooling no one. I guess Democrats need to get better at lying? Elect Trump, the man knows how to lie!
The odd thing about leaning on "Israel's right to defend itself" is Israel failed to do that when it had the initial chance. "Israel's right to avenge itself" doesn't quite ring the same...
Isn't the line "Israel's right to defend its EXISTENCE"? Like the continued existence of a nuclear-armed Israel was ever in doubt. Gotta kill all those Palestinians or they'll march on Tel Aviv and hang Bibi from a lamppost.
6 of 1, you say toe-mat-toe. In any formulation, it is a simple "because I said so" meant to end discussion. Even assuming the strategic fruits of "destroying Hamas" are worth it, how does this bloodbath destroy anything but what little good faith Israel may have had left? The only way Israel's actions make sense is if their goal is to de-populate Gaza completely. Otherwise they're stuck with hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to go and nothing left to lose and a strong motivation to strike back, hard. And a Hamas leadership ready to fund them.
People are STILL protesting Nancy Pelosi? Do they know she's not even House Minority Leader any more? Or is the problem that Hakeem Jeffries lives in one of THOSE neighborhoods where they're afraid to drive the poop truck?
The French have mastered the art of protest. Piss off the farmers, and you’ll find tons of rotten potatoes and spoiled milk dumped in your streets, and traffic blocked by tractors. And they’re not deterred by prim commenters at the Times or LGM scolding them that they’re “doing it wrong” or “making things worse.”
And the irony of the Times, which has portrayed the student encampments as only slightly less dangerous than the Taliban, accusing anyone else of "making things worse" is pretty rich.
As an active participant in the campus and off-campus demonstrations of 1968 (and 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, etc.) I sometimes wonder if we gave the world Nixon and Kissinger. We were right about the war, but was the rise of corrupt Republican politics the lasting result? Enabling another Trump administration would be worse, no? Republicans are objectively worse on the subject of the Gaza war and Hamas promises continued terrorism and Netanyahu is personally corrupt and his war plan is blind to civilian deaths but sure, call Joe Biden a genocide enabler and ignore all of that. That’s my reaction to the student protests; their most lasting effect could be to complete America’s transition to fascism, if in fact they have any lasting impact on the Middle East, which frankly I doubt.
The counter-argument is that this is 2024 and not 1968, and although our nation was riven then by a generational divide on the Vietnam war, opposition against what Israel is doing in Gaza is the majority view among both the youngs and olds.
As I note elsewhere, Republicans are simply better at lying. The lie behind Operstion Enduring Freedom was a noble crusade for freedom from an epically cruel villian. The lie behind the US support of Israel is one of omission, describing the slaughter of civilians as only "defending itself". Not too noble there, no heroic narrative.
As right in the big picture as Hunter Thompson’ description of HHH as a figure who should be ‘shoved in a goddamn bottle and sent off with the Japanese currant.” It would have been a better timeline if Humphrey won.
Back in the day someone—it may have been James Simon “Strawberry Statement” Kunen—wrote of Humphrey “I know the man is ten years ahead of his time, but his time was 1948.”
There are people who argue for Sirhan’s parole, but the case can be made that his bullet ultimately killed a lot more people than RFK, which seems to me a persuasive if not necessarily compelling argument for keeping him on ice.
Well, if that had happened we never would have learned of the horrifying CIA conspiracy that killed his father and his uncle! Was Double Sirham HYPMOTIZED???
I preferred Gene McCarthy, which wasn’t going to happen any more than Elizabeth Warren. It’s ok to advocate for better and settle for least worst. That’s politics
Periodic reminder that Tom Cotton has taken to the editorial page of the New York Times to demand the government use military force to crush protesters.
Vietnam, Apartheid, Iraq, Climate change, gay marriage, legal weed. Now, I know two points make a straight line, but SIX points? Nothing you can do with that, too much data, no pattern to be discerned here.
The arrogance and self regard of the Times is fatal to actual journalism...
Kahn noted polls and the salience of Immigration: but makes no move to notice the decades long nativist/anti immigrant agitprop operation; or why those most concerned, indeed, terrified by immigration are the most malinformed. The Times ain't gonna set them straight, when it's got an anti Biden trope to flog.
It's comfort with anti Trans opinions, and failure to talk to many actual trans folk and their supporters, assures the Grey Lady will be on the popular side of treatment of America's Most Hated most hated minority.
Maybe Sulzberger comes by it honestly.
I knew Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, slightly. She bought a couple of pieces of my work, and we would say hello when I was doing committee stuff. She even had me and a couple of other artists whose work she bought to lunch. It was a somewhat stiff occasion.
She was rather virulently anti union, not particularly liberal socially , and thought she was a “protector of my city.” Their paper’s conservatism was of its time .
And there, she was aristocracy.
Her son, Andrew Golden, wrote Memoirs of a Geisha.
People forget Adolph Ochs got his start in Tennessee, from a family of Confederate sympathizers.
Interesting. The American Brahmin class, to which nearly all the decision makers at the NYT likely belong, may embrace certain socially liberal positions. But financially they will look after their own interests, always.
And yet the Chattanooga Times was running second to the News-Free Press (locally known as the "News-Free"), a literal rag that was printed on paper one step up from butcher paper and also was, of course, violently racist.
I have to say my actual experience of the Chattanooga papers is limited: my view of it is filtered through the things my uncle, who worked for TVA in the Electric Power division, had to say.
My mom's older sister married Dad's half brother. They lived in Red Bank, and were OK with the Free Press' racism, even if the Times was "more respectable ".
For a REALLY deep cut into the Times fucked-upness, read James Bennet's excuse-making in the Economist, where he laments "the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias."
Ah yes, such a "problem" that "liberal bias." Remember 60 years ago when excessive liberalism led the Times to skew its coverage of the Civil Rights movement towards King and the protesters instead of towards Bull Connor and the cops? A source of deep shame, that must be. Or when liberalism forced the Times to print the Pentagon Papers, another dark day for the Times that people there would rather not speak of? Yes, liberal bias leads you astray at every turn, warning people too early and too much about the threat of climate change, supporting gay marriage just a leeetle bit before everyone else does. Root it out, mercilessly,
A problem I have when I hear people (I exclude Our Gracious Host and we few, we happy few, we band of REBIDers) from the left or right deploring “media bias” is that too often there is a subtext of “I, of course, can see the unalloyed truth of the matter, but the common folk, lacking as they do my own keen powers of discernment, are deceived.”
I don't see bias as being inherently bad. For example, a bias towards the underdog and against the powerful is exactly the kind of bias I'd want any newspaper to have. Maybe it will lead your paper to a Pulitzer-prize-winning exposé of child sexual abuse within the Catholic church that someone later makes into a movie.
Here's an idea: Have your biases, but be open about them. Put 'em on the front page, maybe in a boxed item, call it "Declaration of Principles" or something like that.
"If you saw this happening in, say, Russia or China, surely you would say that the students are at fault." Or at least the Russian or Chinese Newspaper of Record would... Exactly.
Remember as well that while cops are using truncheons and tear gas on protesters, and body slams on people protesting the use of truncheons and tear gas on protesters, those protesters have brought it on themselves by employing weapons which are even deadlier threats to Life, Liberty and Civility: they use... Shaming. Snubbing. Chanting. We wouldn't put it past them to use dramatic irony, metaphor and bathos; they're vicious.
I have here a CIA report that shows these dangerous students may even be armed with FOLK SONGS, and although they have not yet deployed this Weapon of Mass Destruction we cannot wait for the smoking gun that comes in the form of If I Had a Hammer.
"Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug. He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
You're among friends...
I see a way forward in the Middle East, how Israelis and Palestinians can find common ground: peace through vicious misogyny.
Sad but true. There is nothing that brings men from differing cultures and ideological philosophies together quite as effectively as the urge to put those wimmins back in their place.
[Squints] did i do sumpin sexist again
No, you were describing something sexist. Hadn’t heard about the IDF’s suddenly penchant for lingerie.
Odd circumstance within which to come out, yeah...
I didn't know about this either. Truly sickening.
I'm the IDF and I'm OK
I kill all night and I kill all day
Oof-trolling, are we...?
LOL. No need for a Not All Men. I won’t speak for rfc, but I was more generally referring to how, as Ms. Ono put it, women are the n-word of the world. So the easiest way to bring a dissenting group of people into accord is to refocus their hostilities toward a traditional joint target.
I really hate that lyric, and Patti Smiths “Rock and Roll Nigger” - mostly because people will read that and not really THINK about the word, what it means, and how it’s fucked up Black Americans for so damned long…and instead make comments like these - https://m.facebook.com/story.php?id=100044173897018&story_fbid=1476392135712828
Agree. The use of the word was wrong for all those reasons. And Smith's use was a completely unacceptable trivialization. But Ono's observation itself was accurate.
I OVERstand why Yoko used it, I’m a Black American woman. It’s still infuriating.
2 marks for OVERstand.
PS - I can’t stand Patti Smith…not just for that song, but in general.
Also agree -- lots of good reasons, lol.
She’s the Cosmo Kramer of Rock & Roll.
No. The IDF lewdly posing with Palestinian lingerie was symbolic revenge for Hamas' criminal rapes and femicides of Oct. 7th, and I am sickened by the near-universal dehumanization and brutalization of women worldwide.
On the home front, it's been a fact for *years* that the #1 cause of death for pregnant women is partner homicide. New stats show that those figures rise in states where abortion is illegal. Now combine that with the inability of red state women to get medically appropriate gynecological care and the picture gets even more grim.
It is dispiriting to have one's humanity continually mocked, denied, and/or brutally violated.
Preach.
Husband buys a gun, tells himself (and anyone who will listen) that it's to "protect his family" against Willie Horton comin' in through the bedroom window. Later uses it to murder his wife, or commit suicide, or the kids find the gun and one of them ends up dead, the other traumatized for life. But those outcomes aren't so much fun to think about, whereas that imagined scenario of the well-placed bullet hitting Mr. Horton right in the forehead is one he plays out in his head, endlessly.
I can’t find the stats, but the number of guns bought for “home protection” that wind up being used for suicides, or deliberately shooting a family member, or the accidental shooting of the gun owner or a family member, greatly outnumber the instances where it is successfully used for “protection.” A burglar coming through the window might be the safest guy in the house.
Yup.
But cat burglars...I mean, how is that even a thing? Imagine trying to break into a cat.
Piffle If you can break into a song and dance, you can break into a cat.
Ah, but statistics, who's persuaded by those? Not gun enthusiasts, that's for sure. But the story you tell yourself where you're the Big Hero, you can never get enough of that.
I do know it's something like 300 times more likely that that gun will be used in a suicide rather than "home defense".
"greatly outnumber the instances where it is successfully used for “protection.” "
But that's just because those home defenses are wildly under-reported.
Sincerely,
Mary Rosh
Yeah, you know how it is, you shoot a burglar breaking into your house and then just bury him in the crawlspace because you don't want to bother the cops with a lot of paperwork.
It's the same "thinking" that kept lynching from being a Federal crime until 2022: we are going to protect our Pure White Women by any means necessary.
No, but you've somehow triggered an outpouring of hatred against Patti Smith. Who can hate Patti Smith? That's just wrong.
Who can hate the Beatles, or the Stones, or Michael Jackson, or Madonna, or Sinatra? LOTS of people do, believe it or not.
Not everyone likes everything.
Also, I never said I “hated” her - I don’t have that time to waste, I simply don’t think she’s that talented…especially when she stooped to use “Nigger” in her song, which I think was wrong to do.
Why didn’t she say “A Rock and Roll Kike”, or Spic, or Beaner, or Mick, or any other racial epithet?
We all know why, and I think she was wrong for exploiting it in order to gain attention.
I think that’s lazy, and shameful.
“Baby was a black sheep, baby was a whore
Baby got big and baby get bigger
Baby get something, baby get more
Baby, baby, baby was a rock and roll nigger”
“Jimi Hendrix was a nigger
Jesus Christ and Grandma, too
Jackson Pollock was a nigger
Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger”
She a poet?
Yeah, okay.
Funny, now the more I think about it…I AM beginning to hate her!
Thanks Michael!😃
Wow.
It was a matter of time I guess.
Not unexpected, but always a stone drag when a White man explains the “politics of racism” to me in a public forum where people give their opinions.
Exhausting.
The end.
I guess I missed something in today's column...
Truly, we can find wisdom in the old Arabian proverb: “The trouble with dames is that the mouth don’t stop.”
“they must learn…to stifle their emotional reactions to what, in the hot blush of youth, seems like obvious, horrifying injustice, and nurse these stifled reactions until they become cold grievances against future generations of protestors whose outrage will feel like a harsh rebuke against their own cowardice.”
Ouch and yes. Reading editorials in the NYT, looking at what they choose to cover and how, and looking at many of their opinion columnists, you have to wonder exactly who the fuck the Right is referring to when they talk about the “liberal media.” But of course baseless invective and not accuracy has always been the Right’s calling card. The NYT has no such excuse.
I believe Biden used to tell a story about walking with a friend on campus in '68 or so and seeing some students occupying an administration building, and saying, "Just look at those assholes." So this paragraph is an uncomfortable fit for some people who don't even work at the Times.
Amplifying King Toad, amplifying TERFs, amplifying "protesters are Hamas", yup, far-left media indeed...
Gee, it's nice to find out that my Attorney General wants to charge students with a KKK law that is rarely if ever used against the KKK. Bookend that with the Secretary of State vowing to keep Biden off the ballot and it just makes me proud to be a Buckeye.
Well it is nice to know that we no longer have to worry about creeping fascism, it's more like it's galloping I'd say.
Oh, wouldn't it be extra-ironic if it was an ANTI-MASKING law? Because the AI bots writing this simulation-of-reality we're all "living" in are some lazy, lazy bots.
" - whose outrage will feel like a harsh rebuke against their own cowardice"
Yikes! That will leave a mark!
I confess: too triggering and upsetting for me to read. Clearly a Me problem connected to another Me problem.
Anyway, the fucking Times...
Joe Kahn's huge display or... uh... honesty? in his interview last week is old news. It's just part of the incredible reality that the junta replacing Pinch, Baquet and Bennet is so much worse. Of course, it's been years since corporate gave a fuck about news; now it's subscriber growth by any and all means possible. Meanwhile, the percentage of subscribers getting and reading the news is a mystery. Well, actually, simply not disclosed.
OTOH, I seem to be heading to grave certain that our exceptional nation's exceptional elite news media are literally harmful to the nation, so...
Anyway. How bad is the editorial/op-ed side? This bad:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/opinion/joe-biden-swing-voters.html?searchResultPosition=1
No, not running the piece. That's of course bad be on the political side Penn has never, ever done anything not harmful.
Nah, it's the author's bio: no reference to running No Labels (his wife is mostly the face of the organization). In the name of any god (or dog if dyslexic or just know better, what kind of shit show operation does that?
The voice of the establishment does.
Which is to say the reality of the news/opinion side of the outlet is so upsetting just seeing a satire piece is upsetting.
Obviously, and of course I hope, YMMV.
Again, just a Me problem. No offense to management or the audience in any way intended.
They should just identify these guys as "a concerned citizen" or "John Q. Public." Either that or say "read the internet to find out what this guy is actually up to, if you have time, ha ha."
Isn't this Selena Zitos' schtick? Is she working for the Times now?
I find "highlight name, hit search" is a useful procedure. Even with Google's shit AI results, it's usually fairly quickly obvious how much toxicity the writer's hiding/having hidden.
I did that for Zenger ^^up there^^ and discovered that he's a Son of Palatinate!
Which guys exactly, Maestro?
The synapses are burning out en masse from age. Or maybe from the weekend’s solar storm, I don’t know.
Just getting ever slower on the uptake…
It's hard to describe the small jolt of joy I get from seeing the Times has printed another horrible editorial that I'm not reading because I canceled my subscription years ago.
It's the little things...
No, no they can't take that away from me, the way your editorials just suck.
We may never never read again any of your lumpen drek
But we'll always always spit upon your ... uhmm ... neck?
You're protesting by sitting in or camping out? Carrying signs or shouting slogans? You're doing it wrong! Indeed, by exercising your right to free speech, you're jeopardizing that right! So SFTU and go back to class!
You're "protesting" by ransacking the Capitol, beating police officers, and looking to kill members of Congress or the Vice-President? Now that's how good Americans express their political views! Sure, you've been convicted of insurrection by juries of your peers. But we at the FNYT are working hard--so very very hard--to get Donald Trump back in office so he can pardon you from these unfair and scurrilous charges!
I'm a big fan of how the French protest. No peaceful tent encampments for them. If legislation is passed that gives them one day less of annual time off or if a 2 cent tax is imposed on the purchase of mussels, they are out in those streets blocking off bridges and setting police cars on fire. They know how to really put the "unrest" into civil unrest.
Recently, protestors dumped 300 lbs of manure outside Nancy Pelosi's home with a sign that said "No More Bullshit." This is some France-level protesterationisms...
While Hillary Clinton did an interview where she chided today's univesity students for "Not being educated in history."
Did she mean like the history of how students protested against apartheid and turned out to be right about that, or the history of how students protested against the Vietnam war, and turned out to be right about that? Or does she mean the more-recent history of when students protested against the Iraq war and turned out to be right about that too?
[patronizing laugh] “Oh you simple child. You just aren’t intelligent and worldly enough to understand. As I once remarked to Henry Kissinger at a lovely cocktail party….”
Whatever you do, don't ask for a Bloody Mary, they're made with REAL BLOOD.
I get where Hill is coming from, interests not allies, diplomacy, blah blah. The depressing thing is they all believe explaining this to the public is a losing proposition, leaving them with "Israel's right to defend itself" as a tattered fig leaf, pissing off the people who know it is bullshit. Both Operation Enduring Freedom and the US position on the current Gaza abbitoir had bullshit justifications, but the first was eagerly embraced, while the second is fooling no one. I guess Democrats need to get better at lying? Elect Trump, the man knows how to lie!
The odd thing about leaning on "Israel's right to defend itself" is Israel failed to do that when it had the initial chance. "Israel's right to avenge itself" doesn't quite ring the same...
Isn't the line "Israel's right to defend its EXISTENCE"? Like the continued existence of a nuclear-armed Israel was ever in doubt. Gotta kill all those Palestinians or they'll march on Tel Aviv and hang Bibi from a lamppost.
6 of 1, you say toe-mat-toe. In any formulation, it is a simple "because I said so" meant to end discussion. Even assuming the strategic fruits of "destroying Hamas" are worth it, how does this bloodbath destroy anything but what little good faith Israel may have had left? The only way Israel's actions make sense is if their goal is to de-populate Gaza completely. Otherwise they're stuck with hundreds of thousands of people with nowhere to go and nothing left to lose and a strong motivation to strike back, hard. And a Hamas leadership ready to fund them.
People are STILL protesting Nancy Pelosi? Do they know she's not even House Minority Leader any more? Or is the problem that Hakeem Jeffries lives in one of THOSE neighborhoods where they're afraid to drive the poop truck?
The French have mastered the art of protest. Piss off the farmers, and you’ll find tons of rotten potatoes and spoiled milk dumped in your streets, and traffic blocked by tractors. And they’re not deterred by prim commenters at the Times or LGM scolding them that they’re “doing it wrong” or “making things worse.”
Don't fuck with the people who brought us the guillotine.
See, your version is pithier and will fit on a bumper sticker. Aces!
And the irony of the Times, which has portrayed the student encampments as only slightly less dangerous than the Taliban, accusing anyone else of "making things worse" is pretty rich.
and it's the cops' fault for using voitures inflammables!
Voitures Flambé [makes chef's kiss gesture]
Avec cette certain je ne çais BOUM!
Hearted for SFTU.*
*Note: Mister Spellcheck says I spelled it wrong, but if I spelled it right you'd get no hearts, so there ya go...
Something Fucked This Up
Mistakes Were Made.
Things Were Fucked.
As an active participant in the campus and off-campus demonstrations of 1968 (and 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, etc.) I sometimes wonder if we gave the world Nixon and Kissinger. We were right about the war, but was the rise of corrupt Republican politics the lasting result? Enabling another Trump administration would be worse, no? Republicans are objectively worse on the subject of the Gaza war and Hamas promises continued terrorism and Netanyahu is personally corrupt and his war plan is blind to civilian deaths but sure, call Joe Biden a genocide enabler and ignore all of that. That’s my reaction to the student protests; their most lasting effect could be to complete America’s transition to fascism, if in fact they have any lasting impact on the Middle East, which frankly I doubt.
The counter-argument is that this is 2024 and not 1968, and although our nation was riven then by a generational divide on the Vietnam war, opposition against what Israel is doing in Gaza is the majority view among both the youngs and olds.
Last time Pew checked, the kids were indeed all right but the geezers, oy: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/
I stand corrected. Maybe we're not riven by a generational divide on rock music and hair length.
the long and short of it!
As I note elsewhere, Republicans are simply better at lying. The lie behind Operstion Enduring Freedom was a noble crusade for freedom from an epically cruel villian. The lie behind the US support of Israel is one of omission, describing the slaughter of civilians as only "defending itself". Not too noble there, no heroic narrative.
As right in the big picture as Hunter Thompson’ description of HHH as a figure who should be ‘shoved in a goddamn bottle and sent off with the Japanese currant.” It would have been a better timeline if Humphrey won.
Back in the day someone—it may have been James Simon “Strawberry Statement” Kunen—wrote of Humphrey “I know the man is ten years ahead of his time, but his time was 1948.”
Don’t blame me for “The Happy Warrior,” blame Sirhan Sirhan. So nice, they named him twice!
There are people who argue for Sirhan’s parole, but the case can be made that his bullet ultimately killed a lot more people than RFK, which seems to me a persuasive if not necessarily compelling argument for keeping him on ice.
If only he had waited and gone after Junior instead...
Well, if that had happened we never would have learned of the horrifying CIA conspiracy that killed his father and his uncle! Was Double Sirham HYPMOTIZED???
I preferred Gene McCarthy, which wasn’t going to happen any more than Elizabeth Warren. It’s ok to advocate for better and settle for least worst. That’s politics
Periodic reminder that Tom Cotton has taken to the editorial page of the New York Times to demand the government use military force to crush protesters.
Oooh, how dare you remember things! I thought the chemicals we were putting in the water supply were supposed to prevent that!
I thought they were there to turn the friggin' frogs gay.
Save The Frogs!
(sez I, wearing at this very moment my "Hang Loose at Frog Lake" t-shirt, and soon to head to the pond to survey frogs...
Any questions you want me to ask 'em?
The kids were all right then, and they're all right now, too.
Vietnam, Apartheid, Iraq, Climate change, gay marriage, legal weed. Now, I know two points make a straight line, but SIX points? Nothing you can do with that, too much data, no pattern to be discerned here.
Yes, but were they all guilty of the sin of being right *too soon*?
Nothing worse than being preemptively anti-fascist.
The arrogance and self regard of the Times is fatal to actual journalism...
Kahn noted polls and the salience of Immigration: but makes no move to notice the decades long nativist/anti immigrant agitprop operation; or why those most concerned, indeed, terrified by immigration are the most malinformed. The Times ain't gonna set them straight, when it's got an anti Biden trope to flog.
It's comfort with anti Trans opinions, and failure to talk to many actual trans folk and their supporters, assures the Grey Lady will be on the popular side of treatment of America's Most Hated most hated minority.
Maybe Sulzberger comes by it honestly.
I knew Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, slightly. She bought a couple of pieces of my work, and we would say hello when I was doing committee stuff. She even had me and a couple of other artists whose work she bought to lunch. It was a somewhat stiff occasion.
She was rather virulently anti union, not particularly liberal socially , and thought she was a “protector of my city.” Their paper’s conservatism was of its time .
And there, she was aristocracy.
Her son, Andrew Golden, wrote Memoirs of a Geisha.
People forget Adolph Ochs got his start in Tennessee, from a family of Confederate sympathizers.
Interesting. The American Brahmin class, to which nearly all the decision makers at the NYT likely belong, may embrace certain socially liberal positions. But financially they will look after their own interests, always.
"Nice", uncontroversial liberal opinions. The kind of liberal MLK was rightly opposed to.
And yet the Chattanooga Times was running second to the News-Free Press (locally known as the "News-Free"), a literal rag that was printed on paper one step up from butcher paper and also was, of course, violently racist.
I have to say my actual experience of the Chattanooga papers is limited: my view of it is filtered through the things my uncle, who worked for TVA in the Electric Power division, had to say.
My mom's older sister married Dad's half brother. They lived in Red Bank, and were OK with the Free Press' racism, even if the Times was "more respectable ".
This is cold-blooded satire, my dood.
It’s exceptionally good today.
It's our consolation prize. Assholes get to run the world, we get to make fun of them (for the time being, at least.)
'Twas ever thus!
For a REALLY deep cut into the Times fucked-upness, read James Bennet's excuse-making in the Economist, where he laments "the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias."
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
Ah yes, such a "problem" that "liberal bias." Remember 60 years ago when excessive liberalism led the Times to skew its coverage of the Civil Rights movement towards King and the protesters instead of towards Bull Connor and the cops? A source of deep shame, that must be. Or when liberalism forced the Times to print the Pentagon Papers, another dark day for the Times that people there would rather not speak of? Yes, liberal bias leads you astray at every turn, warning people too early and too much about the threat of climate change, supporting gay marriage just a leeetle bit before everyone else does. Root it out, mercilessly,
A problem I have when I hear people (I exclude Our Gracious Host and we few, we happy few, we band of REBIDers) from the left or right deploring “media bias” is that too often there is a subtext of “I, of course, can see the unalloyed truth of the matter, but the common folk, lacking as they do my own keen powers of discernment, are deceived.”
I don't see bias as being inherently bad. For example, a bias towards the underdog and against the powerful is exactly the kind of bias I'd want any newspaper to have. Maybe it will lead your paper to a Pulitzer-prize-winning exposé of child sexual abuse within the Catholic church that someone later makes into a movie.
Here's an idea: Have your biases, but be open about them. Put 'em on the front page, maybe in a boxed item, call it "Declaration of Principles" or something like that.
"We Punch Up, Not Down" is the phrase to use, til next week, when all the ad money evaporates...
I always nut-punch up, but just because that's proper form.
Roy, you conjured up the sententious, Victorian tone of a Times editorial perfectly.
The view from 50,000 feet, without oxygen.
"If you saw this happening in, say, Russia or China, surely you would say that the students are at fault." Or at least the Russian or Chinese Newspaper of Record would... Exactly.
Remember as well that while cops are using truncheons and tear gas on protesters, and body slams on people protesting the use of truncheons and tear gas on protesters, those protesters have brought it on themselves by employing weapons which are even deadlier threats to Life, Liberty and Civility: they use... Shaming. Snubbing. Chanting. We wouldn't put it past them to use dramatic irony, metaphor and bathos; they're vicious.
I have here a CIA report that shows these dangerous students may even be armed with FOLK SONGS, and although they have not yet deployed this Weapon of Mass Destruction we cannot wait for the smoking gun that comes in the form of If I Had a Hammer.
Cop sprays himself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1cq0ccn/nypd_assistant_chief_james_mccarthy_receives/
I believe the acronym LOL was invented for just this moment.
"Even Dinsdale was frightened of Doug. He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."