If you want a perfect example o’ what the Orwellian form o’ “freedom of speech”, — a concept whose vagueness makes it perfectly flexible for manipulation to only apply to one’s allies and not one’s enemies — the recent Stanford controversy where students protested an advertisement speaking event Stanford held for a conservative judge, — the only details for which are highly emotionally-charged & politically-charged “they said, she said, he said…” which are useless for any attempt @ an “unbiased” interpretation o’ what happened, beyond unquestionable proof that the judge himself acted unprofessional & insultingly toward the students, so, @ worse, ’twas some tit-for-tat energy — which, predictably, led the amazingly-interconnected rightwing media, so similar & generic they may as well be AI generated @ this point, to parrot the same whinging outrage, which also, predictably, led Stanford to bow down in obsequiousness, as self-defeating liberals always do, & forced all their students, e’en those not involved in the protest, to waste their time attending a freedom o’ speech lecture — a good lesson on how they’ve wasted their money on an institution whose inflated price is based purely on its superstitious aristocratic reputation, not genuine materialistic value, as this university is apparently so legally incompetent that they don’t realize that freedom o’ speech is a regulation on governments repressing speech, not ordinary students protesting a speaker @ a private event, none o’ which involves the government @ all, other than that a member o’ government is the speaker, the s’posed victim. I guess in Soviet America the 1st Amendment protects the government from having their speech suppressed by the dangerous people. Indeed, many conservative & “libertarian” — who show their true stripes by only defending the speech o’ a curséd government official gainst the speech o’ ordinary people when it’s conservative — commentators point out that this is a private institute as a rebuke gainst the left-wing defense o’ the right to protest, blatantly ignoring the fact that this should obviously nullify the judge’s right to speech just as much. You can tell when someone’s just simping for Trump’s remnant dynasty when they either don’t notice this obvious contradiction or deliberately ignore it & care mo’ ’bout the propaganda points spamming their outrage gives their team. & there’s a surprising lot o’ people doing so ( to be fair, this is probably ’cause most leftists are selfish & don’t want to dirty their dignity by getting involved in this political clickbait @ all & have been deliberately ignoring it ).
What’s most notable, tho, is the response o’ 2 conservative judges to this clownshow: threatening to “boycott” Stanford & not hire clerks from them. What’s interesting is that with all the whining ’bout the fake free-speech violation o’ the ordeal, there’s no protests ’bout this clear case o’ government officials threatening to punish a private institution for its ideological policies — a clear violation o’ the 1st amendment in terms o’ 1 o’ its main goals, preventing this clear attempt @ extortion to try & force this institute to employ policies that these judges want outside o’ law. ’Gain, I want to summarize American “freedom of speech” philosophy to those who haven’t gotten it yet: ordinary people who happen to be leftists don’t have the right to protest governments, but the government, who happens to be conservative, must have their speech protected from the people & have the right to use economic coercion to ensure that the poor government is protected from their unruly public. If these political leanings are reversed, ’course, the philosophy may differ. For instance, I saw no fretting ’bout any free-speech violations with MTG heckled Biden during his speech. ’Gain, this is probably ’cause leftists are too cool & have too much dignity to portray something so insignificant as anything beyond “rude” & conservatives obviously gain nothing by encouraging their own so-called principles to be used gainst them, so they, wisely, either ignored this or reinterpreted their philosophy so that now this case is now an ordinary ( government ) citizen protesting gainst the tyrannical president. Like I said, freedom o’ speech is very flexible & can shift & move depending on the circumstance ( &, mo’ importantly, how it benefits or hurts one’s political allegiance ).
I should add that the judges’ “boycott” is very bizarre: it apparently only includes future students, not current students, which would leave out the very students who protested the speaker in the 1st place. I guess these judges take the ol’ school rule o’ children suffering for the sins o’ their fathers all the way. He also described the protest as “intellectual terrorism”, which is proof that Republicans are mask-off fascists, ’cause that’s the most unironically cliché 1984 cringe bullshit e’er.
The implications o’ this whole ordeal, as well as conservatives’ general whining ’bout “woke” leftists & “cancel culture” are clear: conservatives deem expressions o’ left-wing opinions to be a threat to their free speech, & therefore they must be suppressed. That is the “lesson” conservatives wanted Stanford to take here: the only solution they considered acceptable was that the students who didn’t like what the conservative judge had to say should have just kept their mouths shut & let the conservative monopolize the podium, much as conservatives believe in general that the only acceptable solution isn’t any form o’ compromise, but for the left to bend the knee; & those disruptive anarchists who refused should be disciplined by the institute or that institute will face consequences — they, too, must bow down. This should not be surprising since keen ears will note that when conservatives complain ’bout s’posed free-speech violations, they emphasize their violent hatred o’ leftists far mo’ than any concern ’bout lofty principles. ( There’s also, ’course, the hypocrisy o’ simultaneously banning books in libraries & schools — which doesn’t seem quite so hypocritical when you take as a philosophical a priori that it’s only suppression o’ speech when leftists do it; otherwise it’s just maintaining baseline moral standards — those morals being whate’er rightwing authorities say they are ). When conservatives say they want “cancel culture” eradicated, that’s a dogwhistle for “leftist culture”. It is the left that must be eradicated.
This is how the 1st amendment could easily be interpreted by judges who choose to do so & how a pseudodemocratic country with freedom o’ speech could easily transform into a fascist nation with “freedom o’ speech”. In this scenario, government suppression o’ speech is twisted into preservation o’ ( conservatives’ only ) speech, as the ( leftist ) speech being suppressed isn’t really “speech”, but “disruption”, & we can’t have freedom o’ speech with disruption, so the disruptions must be quelled so the orderly ( conservative minority ) can trade unhinged conspiracies ’bout the invasion o’ the female bathrooms by undercover transcommies have civilized discussions.
Addendum: Judgment Day
Howe’er, I can’t leave it @ that, as I also have to talk ’bout the other hidden philosophical element that many haven’t talked ’bout, the growing divide ’tween the increasingly democratic left & conservatives who still cling to aristocratic “republicanism” — a vague term that has been attempting to reconcile the US’s aristocratic leaders with its democratic populace since its birth. A major controversy here ’mong not just the right wing, but also the “moderates”, is that these disruptive anarchists who listen to that hip-hop & have their pants sagging didn’t just act rudely to a conservative, they acted rudely to a judge. Traditionally, in American media, judges are held in the highest regard & insulting or e’en displeasing judges is grounds for “contempt”, a temporary form o’ weak imprisonment. Daytime television is full o’ shows where straight-talking judges who are ne’er wrong solve the problems o’ their dumb whitetrash & ghetto plaintiffs & defense. &, ’course, the “supreme” court is the highest level o’ law in the land, ’bove the president & legislature, able to nullify laws or actions or e’en invent new defacto laws with no veto power from the other branches, & are also appointed for life — which is to say, they’re dictators. Howe’er, judges have lost a lot o’ prestige in the last few years, thanks to Trump shitting up the court by filling it with particularly imbecilic cronies & unpopular rulings they’ve made ( sadly, not due to the inherent authoritarian nature o’ the US court system ). Since traditionally this obviously antidemocratic judicial system has always been defended on “technocratic” grounds ( & like all “technocracies”, the standards for merit are questionable & largely based on superstitious aristocratic traditions rather than anything resembling science ), this is a major crack in people taking the US’s political philosophy seriously. This has led to a conflict e’en ’mong liberals, ’tween the copium-huffing liberals who still cling to the US’s decaying system, holding the delusion that this s’posedly noble institution s’posedly corrupted by fascism can be salvaged, when it is in fact this institution’s inherent corruption that has helped fuel the rise o’ fascism in the 1st place, & those who actually support genuine democracy who believe in replacing the US’s aristocratic institution with… well, to be honest, like most people criticizing the status quo, what should be the replacement is varied from outright incomprehensible & self-contradictory ( no laws or government @ all, which could only be enforced by the defacto equivalent o’ laws or government ) or very vague ( no solution @ all, just protesting ), to theoretically possible, but unlikely to succeed & would have logistical issues actually making it work ( direct democracy ), to theoretically practical, but difficult to change or replace the law to the point o’ virtually requiring a minor psuedorevolution to carry it out ( elected judges with term limits & veto power o’er their rulings by a’least 75% o’ the legislature, if not just a majority / no judicial system @ all, just a legislature / probably plenty of other solutions I’m not thinking o’ ). As it turns out, trying to fix or e’en just improve a broken political systems, which are complex social mechanisms, specially in a country with 300 million people, is very hard, & unfortunately, ’cause so-called pragmatic moderate liberals still cling to childishly simplistic ideals o’ good & bad — albeit ideals so milquetoast & still so cynical that it makes one wonder what the point is — ( & mo’ importantly, still want to advocate for simple, violent solutions to the problem o’ broken politics in other countries, like China, rather than acknowledge the difficulty o’ improving those systems, as well ), rather than acknowledge that the US has a broken political system that ne’ertheless can’t just be fixed immediately by a sexy romantic revolution, they have to make up whate’er ’scuses they can — usually regurgitating traditionalist cant as if they haven’t been debunked by this point or haven’t become completely irrelevant in the 21st century — to present “their” political system as fundamentally good, just with a few flaws, as to believe otherwise would shatter their view o’ themselves & their role in their society. After all, the propaganda surrounding the American Revolution has embedded in Americans’ minds that idea that tyranny must be fought thru violent, sexy, romantic revolution, an idea that is convenient for war profiteers for gathering support to fund wars for “democracy” abroad. This is a great idea for the average milquetoast middle-class American when it involves other countries, like China, since they’re the ones who have to deal with the violence & disruption, but unacceptable if we include the US, since that would make those same liberals feel morally bound to violently revolt gainst the government ( which would also contradict their already contradictory moral tenet gainst “extremism”, — ’nother vague term that can be twisted into anything — since in their minds violent revolt in other countries isn’t extremism, nor was the original American Revolution ).
Judges have themselves, ’course, reacted to their fall in prestige not with humility, but in typical authoritarian fashion by those born & bred to believe that they have the divinely-given right to be worshiped, by lashing out @ the “mob” for daring to believe they, mere mortals, can be equal to their divine kings. This is what “intellectual terrorism” is: the threat o’ the mob gainst the aristocracy — or rather, the threat o’ democracy. This is specially ironic, given how corrupt the current supreme court is, with Clarence Thomas just recently getting into controversy for accepting undisclosed trips ( gifts ) from conservatives & his refusal to recusing himself from trying cases where his own wife has clear special interest1. Unsurprisingly, the court’s reaction to this obvious corruption isn’t shame, but the laziest o’ ’scuses — ¿& why not? They’re dictators — they don’t have to defend themselves with words so long as the military will dutifully do so with guns.
The real question isn’t why the courts act this way — it’s obviously in their interest to do so. The real question is why so many “liberals” would defend the “freedom o’ speech” o’ a member to this corrupt, unjust, undemocratic, unmeritocratic, authoritarian institution, who hardly lacks the means to have their voice heard, specially in the courtrooms they control with an iron grip, o’er the rare instances in which ordinary people can have their words heard.
Footnotes:
1 That article, unsurprisingly, notes that the Supreme Court has “resisted establishing its own code of conduct”, ¿’cause why should supreme dictators deign to do so when e’erything they do is just by their own whim?
Anyway, you came here for the bitch fit, so here it is:
Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name.
This “attacking” — as hypocrites who try to weaponize the empty meme o’ “cancel culture” as a sad, impotent Orwellian political tool to silence dissent call “criticism” — was aimed @ articles whose authors were “outed” by The New York Times themselves on the articles themselves, so it’s The New York Times who were the real doxxers here.
This attempt to twist this letter, which barely focuses on the writers beyond a couple name drops as details & focuses entirely on the scummy machinery that is truly responsible for these articles’ existence, is such a pathetic & transparent digression.
That policy prohibits our journalists from aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy.
You have to admit, executive editor Joe Kahn — ¿am I doxxing him in my hurting his fragile feelings attacking homicidal manslaughter gainst him by revealing his well-known name — has the balls o’ a Fox News anchor to lie in such a transparent way. ¿Who is he trying to fool that no other New York Times contributor has had ties to advocacy groups or involved themselves in politics? For fuck’s sake, the open letter itself pointed out that many o’ the op-eds were by people who were part o’ antitrans advocacy groups — tho unlike these people, who proudly announce their ties to LGBT, ’cause it’s something a civilized person would do, these cowards hide their ties ’cause they know they’re terrible people for it. So what Joe Kahn means is that journalists can’t align themselves with pro-LGBT advocacy groups, but they can align themselves with hate groups. This fits perfectly with The New York Times’s “ethics policy” o’ supporting bigotry. Being gainst bigotry obviously violates that policy.
We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.
¿Does Kahn have so li’l respect for his own paper that e’en he doesn’t think it deserves to be italicized, or did the typewriter he wrote this on not have a way to italicize text?
The New York Times, by its very nature, must attack others sometimes, so this “ethics policy” is just “don’t bite the hand that feeds”, which is laughable as an “ethics policy”, but arguably just as laughable as a threat, since that shriveled hand is barely feeding shit with what a slum newspapers are now.
Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written.
This is so hilariously sad. It amazes me that people try to portray these papers as serious or intelligent with shit like this. Yes, keep telling yourself in the mirror you’re important, New York Times: a’least there’s 1 person who believes it. What’s e’en better is the middle-school level diction here. ¿“Deeply reported”? ¿What does that e’en mean? That’s what a teenager says when they want to seem like they’re saying something important, but have nothing to say.
The journalists who produced those stories nonetheless have endured months of attacks, harassment and threats.
Which, if this did happen, — Kahn doesn’t provide any evidence, which is par for the course for The New York Times —would’ve happened regardless o’ the letter, since your paper was what revealed their names. It’s cute that Kahn thinks that these contributors imagined up this idea that these stories were transphobic, when many other news outlets were already shitting on you.
Like all “cancel culture” hypocrites, it’s 100% “rules for thee, not for me”: I can shit talk anyone else I want, but anyone who criticizes me e’en the slightest is a vicious villain. Like they say: can’t take the heat, get the fuck out o’ the kitchen. The fucking nerve o’ this spineless worm to peddle hateful propaganda & then act indignant when it’s thrown back @ him in the most polite, tepid way possible. What a coddled, spoiled brat. But it’s no surprise: this is the attitude one gets when one is spoiled rich, ne’er having to actually deal with real world problems, living in a coddled bubble o’ yes-men.
The letter also ignores The Times’ strong commitment to covering all aspects of transgender issues, including the life experience of transgender people and the prejudice and violence against them in our society.
Which is, ne’ertheless, not worth as urgent a memo or any leash-pulling on the disobedient worker slaves as polite talkback gainst The New York Times — ¡the real victimized minority!
A full list of our coverage can be viewed here, and any review shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false.
There is no list here, so that is accurate, as The New York Times’s sloppy agitprop doesn’t deserve to be called “coverage”. Considering all the other newspapers — who are in no interest to support the proles, lest their own drones revolt — are pointing & laughing @ your transparent transphobia & you’re the only 1 so fervently defending your own paper, no, I don’t think any review backs you up, bud.
We have welcomed and will continue to invite discussion, criticism and robust debate about our coverage.
’Cept this criticism, ’course.
Even when we don’t agree, constructive criticism from colleagues who care, delivered respectfully and through the right channels, strengthens our report.
“Your criticism is only valid if done privately, so I can squash it & punish you ’way from public view”.
We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.
Well, then you’d better go rush in some barely-educated college students, ’cause 180 o’ your employees just fucking did.
We live in an era when journalists regularly come under fire for doing solid and essential work.
“Like these journalists daring to take us to task, & being threatened for not obediently following our corporate line”.
We are committed to protecting and supporting them.
Small print: so long as they only say what The New York Times tells them to say.
Their work distinguishes this institution, and makes us proud.
Yes, it distinguishes you as a bigoted, draconian institute proud o’ your own farts.
What a cesspool o’ a company. In an online era where anyone can bullshit up their own “paper” online or on social media & probably get mo’ views, — certainly anyone who has the clout to work with an o’errated paper like The New York Times — ¿why would anyone subject themselves to being slave drones for these pigs? I hope most o’ these contributors start their own papers & tell The New York Times to stuff it up their ass.
The article starts with a bunch o’ vague platitudes ’bout trans deserving safety, too, which seems nice, ’less you have mo’ braincells than The New York Times’s editors & follow the links to find the extra caveats @ the end that say, “but trans people still get an L”. This op-ed claims that these carefully cultivated quote mines they made up just now are ignored by “a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups” — truly the spookiest spectres haunting the globe — who actually read the original full quotes & had the audacity to call Rowling a, ¡gasp!, “transphobe”. That’s obviously hate speech & these people should be cast from polite company for their insidious attempts to cancel famous children’s book writer. Hilariously, in the very next paragraph, the writer acknowledges that this “noisy fringe” includes The Leaky Cauldron, “one of the biggest ‘Harry Potter’ fan sites”. That’s an awfully popular “fringe”.
The next paragraph has the predictable topics o’ “cancel culture”, harassment & doxxing, the latter 2 o’ which are, indeed, terrible when they happen to anyone. This article doesn’t have any complaints ’bout it happening to anyone else, tho, — including those “powerful” transgender rights activists & LGBTQ “lobbying groups” ( the 1 type o’ lobbying group The New York Times doesn’t jerk off to ), as well as average trans people who just exist, most o’ whom have far less money to protect themselves than Rowling, nor do they have the arbitrary loyalty that so many o’ these arrested-developed journos still obsessed with children’s books have for this rando celebrity to spew all this propaganda on the public. Moreo’er, it has no relevance to the topic o’ transphobia: if a white supremacist gets harassed, — & some almost certainly have been — ¿does that validate white supremacy? ¿Could Rowling not scrounge together a mo’ educated brown-noser that a’least knows what “ad hominem” attack logical fallacy is & do The New York Times lack the basic high-school education to realize how infantile this article is? ( The answer to the latter is definitely “yes” ). If The New York Times wanted to write an article on the problem o’ harassment & doxxing in general & how it corrodes public debate, that would be good ’nough; but melding it directly into the issue o’ trans issues is peak intellectual dishonesty.
But after that we get the real meat o’ this article: grifting this guest writer’s podcast series, “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”, which is just Rowling whining ’bout how she’s the only person who’s been threatened in the universe. Yes, it’s a refreshing take to look @ the bigot’s perspective on things & completely ignore the most threatened minorities — that’s what we call looking @ both sides, ’cept we only look @ 1 side, since trans people aren’t famous & rich ’nough. Sorry, ¿did I say this was refreshing? I meant refreshing like water that’s been left in the sun all summer long. It would actually be refreshing if The New York Times let the dirty underclasses get a single word in edgewise.
This op-ed writer goes to the deranged comparison o’ Rowling to Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed by an Islamic zealot after an Iranian head o’ state declared a fatwa on Rushdie decades ago. Last time I checked, no trans head o’ state e’er declared an official fatwa on Rowling — in fact, last time I checked, there have ne’er been trans heads o’ state @ all, that’s how big & powerful they are. Still, this is “a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers” are “demonized” — that is, ’gain, criticized. The conclusion is obvious: no one is allowed to criticize writers e’er. If you e’er criticize a writer for their opinion, you’re basically leading them to be stabbed to death. Meanwhile, this op-ed writer, who is clearly demonizing LGBT activists by depicting them as violent maniacs, isn’t endangering them. See, it’s only dangerous when the uppity lowerclasses open their mouths gainst their celebrity royalty; when these cissies slander vulnerable groups in the most cowardly & idiotic ways possible, that’s just “having an opinion”. Only famous celebrities have the right to have opinions; average social-media users should keep their mouths shut & be “civil” ( read: obedient to the upperclass ).
And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.
If we translate “her actual views” as “my whitewashed version o’ her views manipulated to make her look better than she is”. I find it funny that this op-ed complains o’ censorship when she herself censored Rowling’s real words to cut out the inconvenient stuff, like “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists” & describes caring ’bout trans rights as “scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow” — literally parroting the same rhetoric rightwingers use gainst all women’s rights issues. Granted, it’s easy to see how someone as dense as the average New York Times writer could fail to comprehend the passive-aggression ’hind Rowling’s empty, vague platitudes & skewed perspective, deliberately downplaying the threats toward trans people & deliberately exaggerating the threats toward the most important class, her.
So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia?
Clearly it’s ’cause those people read her full words on trans people & not your carefully-crafted quote mines.
The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.
This paragraph is fascinating, since, unlike the rest o’ the article, which has tried to clean up Rowling’s transphobia, here it’s just laid right out — ’long with just plain ol’ sexism. She unironically says Rowling supports “sex-segregated prisons”, like an edgelord on Reddit bragging ’bout how they thought Jim Crow was actually a good thing, O, here comes all the controversy, I’m such an individual. I hope these prisons are “separate, but equal”, since anyone familiar with history knows how well that works. We could just keep e’ery individual isolated & keep down violence for e’eryone, but that would waste too much tax $ on the shameful enterprise o’ treating humans humanely, so let’s just indulge in superstitious traditions & assume that gay people don’t exist & ne’er commit sexual assault — prison rape certainly isn’t a common trope, since separating people by arbitrary chromosome layout genitals I don’t know any coherent way to define genders has done such a great job.
What a “biological woman” is is vague, anyway. ¿Are physically transitioned trans people included? ¿How is this measured? — with the utmost science, I’m sure, as well as genital-groping, ¿since how else would anyone know, &, mo’ importantly, how is it anyone else’s fucking business? This is why society rightfully considers people who obsess o’er “biological” gender fucking gross: it’s literally defining people by body parts that nobody else should be caring ’bout ’less we’re actually having sex. If anything, trans people seem to be mo’ enlightened, since they seem to think beyond just tits & cocks.
& then we have the sudden swerve into an imaginary strawman in the middle with the whole “‘people who menstruate’ in reference to biological women”, which contradicts the immediately preceding statement ’bout trans people being all ’bout “self-declared gender identity”, without any biological element @ all. It’s almost as if Rowling’s being deliberately strict & deliberately gatekeeping people based on criteria that’s simultaneously narrow & vague. Shocking that people might think such a person is an asshole, specially when that criteria isn’t based on any scientific knowledge, — Rowling being a writer o’ children’s fantasy, not a scientist ( & while I don’t have the time to do a thorough investigation myself, most o’ the scientists I’ve seen talk ’bout this issue have a much less hamfisted approach, shockingly ’nough ) — but on this rando’s kneejerk feelings. If The New York Times had any intellectual integrity they would spend mo’ time talking ’bout scientists’ opinions on trans issues, not yet ’nother blowhard celebrity, but we already established that they have no credibility, so here we are.
Then we have “incendiary comments about transgender people”, which doesn’t sound transphobic.
You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.
But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.
These statements are contradictory & show that the writer is either so stupid that she doesn’t know what transphobia e’en is or hopes that her readers don’t. This is like people who say, “I’m not racist, but…”. You can assert till your face is blue that you’re not a transphobe, but people are still going to call you a transphobe, ’cause people decide for themselves whether or not you’re a bigot, you don’t get to decide for them. Not only does constantly saying, “I’m not a transphobe” not dispel people o’ that view, it makes the mo’ likely to believe it, since actual “not transphobes” don’t need to constantly declare that they’re not transphobes: they show, don’t tell. In fact, we don’t call people “not transphobes”: we call those people trans supporters, in the same way we use the word “feminist” ’stead o’ “not sexist”. ¿Would Rowling declare herself a trans supporter? Well, that answers the question, doesn’t it.
The “vocal trans activists” part is specially rich. These morons have been filling social media with their mental diarrhea for years, but have the audacity to call other people loudmouths. You wrote a multithousand epic ’bout 1 fucking person, ¿& you’re not 1 o’ those vulgar “vocal activists”?
She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing.
But she does explicitly support “sex-segregated prisons”, which doesn’t include transgenders — ¡so I guess that means Rowling’s so progressive, she doesn’t believe trans people should e’er go to jail! ¿What bathrooms does she believe trans people should use? If the answer isn’t, “public bathrooms should be broken up into individual stalls for e’eryone ’cause sex-segregated bathrooms is a superstitious barbarism”, then there’s no answer that won’t be transphobic — or sexist, for that matter.
Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”
How ’bout I not take pampered randos who have no stake or credentials & ’stead ask actual scientists or trans people. While I’m @ it, ¿why don’t I ask a bunch o’ white male journalists whether or not antiaboriton laws are sexist & read the article, “20 Sexist Donald Trump Quotes We’re Done With”. After all, he tells e’eryone he’s not sexist & believes some women have troubles in their lives ( for instance, he agrees with Rowling on the dangers o’ trans people ), so he can’t be sexist, ¿right? I love the Twitter user who quipped “Serious question: do you think that there are *right* witches that should be burned?”. I should note that having done the most basic research I could bother to do, I found that this rando ran something called “TERF Anonymous”, so clearly they’re an expert on what is & isn’t transphobic, just like I always make sure to ask what the leader o’ the Klan thinks when I think something I say might be insensitive to black people. If this article has informed me o’ anything it’s that all these people being literally murdered for s’posedly being transphobes when they’ve done mo’ for trans people than anyone are laughably terrible liars.
For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed.
Yes, that’s the quality o’ Rowling’s writing for you. I don’t know why you’d subject yourself to such torture.
Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.
Yes, that certain kind o’ person is “not a fucking idiot”, which is a class that, unfortunately, doesn’t include this op-ed writer. ¿What does this transgender character do, by the way? Surely if ’twas a positive representation, you’d be itching to go into details. I’m guessing the fact that you don’t is an indication that you’re hiding very gross transphobic depiction & are once ’gain, what we in the business call, “lying your ass off”.
This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.
Hey, look, ’nother irrelevant comparison. ¿& did you know that Kanye was criticized for saying Bush didn’t care ’bout black people? That means people who criticize his flagrant antisemitism are also wrong. Duh, I understand how logic works.
Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases.
Yes, now that Rowling’s a bigot, too, she can finally enjoy Harry Potter. ¡Whew! ¡What a relief!
¿What are these “biases”? ¿Being a “Rowlingphobe”? Yes, ¡somebody please think o’ the Rowlings!
She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling —
Jesus fucking Christ, that sounds exhausting to listen to. ¿What obsessed neurotic wants to spend 9 whole hours interviewing some rando children’s fantasy writer? She’s not e’en a great fantasy writer. If ’twere LeGuin, maybe — she wasn’t a bigot, for 1.
— the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy —
What a load o’ horse shit. Rowling has babbled on & on her spicy hot takes on transgenderism for years.
— explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.
Harry Potter embraced species-based slavery as “what’s natural for them” & made fun o’ the 1 person who revolted gainst it, had essentialist morality where someone born in a “corrupt” way is naturally evil & people are sorted into the evil camp & born as a bootleg white supremacist ’cause they have an ugly name like “Draco Malfoy”, & has a chosen-1-by-birth protagonist. Harry’s an “outsider” only till his birth superpowers makes him save the day & then e’eryone loves him. Harry Potter is only progressive to the most regressive morons — which is to say, Americans & Britons.
All o’ this is to say, Rowling isn’t a liberal, she’s a reactionary, primitivist, superstitious ( for example, she’s Christian, which is not only superstitious, but inherently patriarchal ). This ’splains her weird “separate but equal” view on gender & her discomfort with “unnatural” genders. Much as she’s uncomfortable with the idea o’ a hero who doesn’t have certain blood make them the chosen 1 or their name indicate how bad they are, she’s uncomfortable with humans taking control o’er their own gender. Furthermo’, her weird obsession with segregating traditional women — a better term than “biological” women, since there’s no science ’hind her conception o’ “real” women, only ol’ superstitions largely inspired by The Bible — & men: unlike materialist leftists, who rightfully view male supremacy as not being inherent to men’s physical gross penises but to the artificial nature o’ their superior political & economic power, which is in no way integral to their biology, & believe that the solution is to eliminate political & economic equality ’mong genders so that men don’t have power o’er women, Rowling believes there are integral differences ’mong genders that makes true intermixing ’mong them impossible. ( This has the added benefit o’ this neoliberal continuing to support the political-economic system that reinforces this inequality o’ power ).
This is ultimately why I find the idea that trans women are men trying to cynically game the system ridiculous if you have an actual left-wing perspective: men have nothing to gain by becoming women. The idea that trans women want to sneak into women’s bathrooms to creep on women is ridiculous when you realize men have mo’ power to do this than trans women: society has already poisoned the well on trans women ’nough that e’en going near a “biological” women or a women’s bathroom is deserving a lynching; men already have plenty o’ scuses for going into women’s bathroom, including just barging in & not caring ’bout the consequences. The idea that trans women are trying to sneak ’way women’s “benefits” is based on the rightwing delusion that minorities get special benefits; if anything, it should be trans men who are seen as trying to game the system ( tho a liberal should praise this, as men don’t deserve their advantages, anyway ); but this is ne’er the case, for the obvious reason that despite Rowling & other transphobes’ rants ’bout society s’posedly catering to trans people & “erasing” women, the vast majority o’ e’en trans supporters, much less transphobes, still view trans women as separate from traditional women & trans men as separate from traditional men & it’s obvious that trans men will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that traditional men get, & trans women will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that rightwingers claim women have. The unquestionable fact, given all the statistics on how much mo’ likely trans people are to be violently attacked or sexually assaulted, is that trans people are a lowerclass, have-nots, not some privileged class that transphobe liars claim in the same way sexist “men’s rights activists” claim women have imaginary privileges o’er men or white supremacists claim black people have imaginary privileges o’er white people.
If anything, it seems less like Rowling is interested in gender equality, viewing it as futile, as a gender essentialist, & is ’stead jealous o’ the supremacy men have o’er women & want to create a class lower than women to abuse in the same way men abuse women. It’s no different from the bitter poor whites who cling to capitalist economics: they give up on class equality, but since nobody wants to be the lowest class, they sooth themselves by keeping black people lower than them, & thus are horrified by the idea o’ racial equality, leaving poor whites in the lowest class. Trans women being kept separate from traditional women is the only way to keep traditional women from being the lowest class for those too cynical to believe in true equality.
1 o’ the best ways I can frame this is to ask 1 simple question: ¿which side are trans people on? ¿The left or right? ¿Which side is almost entirely gainst trans people? There’s no coincidence: bigots gainst 1 class o’ have-nots tend to hate all have-nots. Rowling only finds the appearance o’ feminism cool ’cause it benefits her; e’eryone else can get fucked. She’s not a leftist, but that all-too-common artificial form, political narcissism; & we’ll not be surprised when later she’s revealed to be hanging out with rightwingers, as political narcissists tend toward the rightwing.
This is far from the only time Rowling has been ’fraid o’ genuine rebellion gainst authoritarianism: ¿remember her hatred o’ actually pro-labor Corbyn ( ’cause he would raise her taxes, unlike nice neoliberal war criminal Tony Blair )? ¿Remember her tepid withering before Israel boycott with weak ( & hypocritical, since I doubt she’d say the same ’bout South Africa under Apartheid ) platitudes?
I should add that “empathy toward one’s enemies” is self-defeating slave-morality tripe typical o’ “turn the other cheek” Christianity that mo’ oft than not enables authoritarians by dampening fighting back — as Jesus did when he tried to distract Jews from genuine revolt gainst their Roman imperialists in favor o’ fake spirituality bullshit & as “centrist” saboteurs do when they continually attempt to needle the left or moderate liberals ( ne’er the right ) into “compromise” or decorum with political opponents interested in neither — tho, also typical o’ Christianity, it’s fake & hypocritical, given Rowling’s deliberate downplaying o’ trans problems for the sake o’ feeding her own pity — & “the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends” is literally valorizing favoritism, which is contradictory to an equal, just democratic society, which should put the primacy o’ justice o’er giving advantages to one’s buddies. Only backward savages hold these as great philosophical ideals.
The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology
Nobody but transphobes call treating trans people humanely as “gender ideology”. By definition, anyone who has an opinion on gender has some “gender ideology”. As John Maynard Keynes would have said, those who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any gender ideology are usually the slaves o’ some defunct superstitions. So it’s rich — & narcissistic — o’ Rowling to claim that her ideas aren’t “ideology” — they’re just the truth — completely unproven “truths” by a mediocre fantasy writer, not an actual scientist.
— such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context.
Rowling doesn’t believe trans people should be treated equally in law, e’en tho equal treatment under law for e’ery human being, no matter who they are, is a fundamental principle o’ liberal democracy, putting her in the similar camp as those principled people who don’t believe women should be treated as “indistinguishable from men in virtually every legal and social context” or that blacks should be treated as “indistinguishable from whites in virtually every legal and social context”, also known as “fascists”. It’s shocking that so many people with firm beliefs in liberal equality & democracy might be disgusted by someone whose political beliefs regarding trans people are fundamentally incompatible with basic liberalism.
Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?
’Cause she’s a grifter who makes money off outrage clicks.
“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.
None o’ which is helped by Rowling’s attention party, since they’re not the ones who get the 9 hour podcast, she does, & those who do get to be a part o’ Rowling’s boom box are carefully curated to be sure they’re sufficiently in agreement with Rowling on trans issues. If Rowling actually respected other women’s opinions, she would include a variety o’ opinions, including the many women who are trans supporters ( in fact, most polls show that women support trans rights mo’ than men ), not just those “with similar views”; the fact that she only shares her platform with women “with similar views” spotlights that these other women are only valuable insofar as they glorify Rowling’s views. After all, this podcast isn’t titled, “The Witch Trials of Women”, it’s “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”. The s’posed harm to other women is only a problem in how it harms Rowling.
Also, you have literally been saying that Rowling was being silenced, but now admitting that she isn’t being silenced — ’nother transparent lie.
All right, I’m sorry, but I can’t read any more o’ this article. It just goes on & on & on, & it’s nothing but pitying & valorizing & Jesus fucking Christ, Rowling could be Mother Theresa & she wouldn’t deserve so much fucking ego stroking. I don’t give a fuck ’bout what some celebrity actor that you yourself admit is biased ’cause, by your own words, their “careers Rowling’s work helped advance”; I don’t care what some other journos in your circlejerk say. Nobody likes journos or care ’bout their uneducated opinions. Nowhere in this entire article does this braindead op-ed writer quote a single scientist or cite any actual biological science, despite their gross obsession with strangers’ biology, nor actual trans people. ¿They couldn’t find a single trans person who was, like, “O, Rowling’s not transphobic”? Look @ all the black people or women Fox News can bribe into pretending Republicans aren’t Nazis. Rowling has to be the biggest transphobe in the world if this op-ed writer writing, like, a whole novel as big as Order of the Phoenix trying her best to make this random idiot sound like the world’s savior can’t find 1 trans person to vouch for Rowling.
For someone who talks up what a feminist she is, there is barely any talk o’ anyone other than Rowling & how mean ol’ critics are saying mean things. There are maybe a few carefully curated examples o’ privileged journos — the only class that matters, apparently — having to write for different papers, but that’s ’bout it. As bad as it is for anyone to get death threats from obsessed weirdos, — which Rowling was probably already getting several years earlier after she killed Dumbledore — it seems like skewed priorities to treat it as the biggest issue facing feminism, specially when it’s matched by downplaying & delegitimizing trans-supporting women getting death threats. I guess “feminism” is now “only some women matter”. Women get harassed & threatened for any opinion under the sun, but The New York Times apparently felt like “not treating a vulnerable minority group like trash” was the only 1 worth defending. Plenty o’ women get death threats & gross comments ’bout being prostitutes for talking ’bout birth control health insurance policy; it seems less like Big Trans is the problem & mo’ that there’s a lot o’ gross sexists out there & trans people have fuck all to do with it. ¿But why should The New York Times criticize sexism & possibly offend the many sexists who read ( or write ) their articles when they can attack a much mo’ politically weak demographic ’stead?
Actually, there’s 1 paragraph I want to point out:
Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”
1st, I love the hypocrisy o’ trying to use rando journos’ knee-jerk opinions as shallow as book review blurbs as “evidence”, but rejects far mo’ detailed, wellspoken opinions by other journos as “embarrassingly credulous”. So, the evidence that this opinion is right is limited by the litmus that the people providing the evidence believe this opinion is right. That’s known as “circular logic”, ’nother logical fallacy this uneducated writer & The New York Times don’t comprehend.
¿What beliefs will be “proven right”? This article has been vague & been throwing round words to get round the obvious contradiction ’tween “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message” & “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists”. Those beliefs definitely aren’t “trans people are people, too, & deserve to be treated equally under the law”, nor are they beliefs unrelated to trans people, so they’re almost certainly transphobic, & I’m going to bet that they’re not going to be “proven” right in the end, since it’s mostly ol’ boomers like Rowling & this writer who believe it, while millennials & zoomers o’erwhelmingly support trans rights — to the point that despite many o’ them growing up with Harry Potter & worshipping this o’errated series, many have now become jaded o’ Rowling ( for good reason ). Sounds to me like it’s a losing side supported primarily by dinosaurs who will be dead in a couple decades.
Sorry, there’s 1 mo’ paragraph I want to point out:
In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.
Note to Americans: The Guardian is, as much as revile them, generally considered liberal ( liberal ’nough that, howe’er stupid they may be, aren’t baseless ’nough to cater to transphobes… well, ’cept for that concern troll letter they posted, giving voice to a totally-not-transphobe & not to a trans person @ all, since The Guardian can’t e’en not be terrible in this case); The Telegraph & The Sunday Times are conservative. Shocking that conservatives are mo’ accepting o’ bigots than liberals. You’d think hard-core feminist J. K. Rowling would be loath to work with such sexists who support abortion limits, but apparently tolerating sexists is better than tolerating trans people. I’m sure this is ’cause leftists are so darn intolerant o’ bigots, unlike rightwingers, who are tolerant o’ e’eryone ( who shares their bigotry ). This isn’t surprising, since, as stated, Rowling’s feminism is thin as thread, & despite the thin facade o’ liberalism Rowling wears to attempt to be hip with the millennials, — which has stupendously failed with e’en their masses o’ raving Harry Potter fans feeling alienated from her transphobia — her integral philosophy is inherently conservative in its reduction o’ humans to biological forms & reduction o’ morality into simplistic biblical ideals with no basis in complex concrete reality.
So we have 2 articles that are full o’ lies so transparent, they must be made o’ glass. This is no surprise from such flagrant liars as The New York Times, a newspaper only for the most gullible o’ pseudointellectuals.
As someone who has written a review or 2, I’m fascinated by the art o’ reviewing in & o’ itself: not just the conclusions they set out, but also, specially, the arguments they set forth to try & back up those conclusions & how persuasive they seem to me. This is why I’ve written a few attacks gainst reviews in which I agree with the conclusion, such as an inane praiseworthy review for my favorite video game, Wario Land 3. This comes from my schooling, which ( probably to avoid getting sued for potentially violating freedom-o’-speech rights ) was openminded ’bout just ’bout any kind o’ conclusions, no matter how revolting, so long as one made a sophisticated attempt @ backing one’s arguments.
Thus for today I will go all the way & look @ reviews for a book I’ve ne’er read, some 2021 books called “Sorrow & Bliss: A Novel”. Yes, it really has “A Novel” as the official subtitle, & no, I have no idea why.
In case so many of the rest of the books on this list haven’t given readers enough anti-science egomania, this idiotic, carpingly condescending story of a woman with a “mental illness” that mainly seems to turn her into a too-online Twitter-hole ought to make up the difference.
This is an all-too-common example o’ 1 o’ my least favorite types o’ terrible reviews: 1 that focuses so much on conclusive opinions & not ’nough on textual evidence or examples &, worse, is so vague in its criticisms that e’en after reading the review I have no idea what kind o’ book this e’en is. Granted, less than 50 words is way too short for an adequate review for anything worth reviewing, since it leaves no room for detail. I think, ironically, the person who wrote this review is “too-online”, as he assumes I’m familiar with whate’er Twitter bullshit he’s vaguely alluding to. Unfortunately, beyond copypasting the poems I post on this blog into Twitter with a grunt & then leaving ( which I’ve stopped bothering to do now that I’m convinced Musk will be the death o’ it ), I don’t do hardly anything on Twitter ( & I suspect hardly anyone will within the next 5 years thanks to Musk ), so I have no idea how this “Twitter-hole” ( ¿why is there a hyphen there? “Hole” is a separate word, not a suffix ), nor what “anti-science egomania” this book has or why this reviewer puts scare quotes round “mental illness”. ¿Does this reviewer who tries to imply that he’s pro-science deny the existence o’ mental illnesses — which is to ask, is this reviewer a psychology-denying crank, which is certainly not what I or any civilized human being would consider “pro-science”?
Ultimately, this review is just a bunch o’ cursing disguised as intellectualism by the use o’ vaguely-alluded implications. Being “anti-science”, an egomaniac, carping, condescending, & “too-online”, do, indeed, sound bad, but one can’t be sure if they truly are bad without understanding how they are these things & what the reviewer thinks makes this book “anti-science” or what he interprets to be an example o’ the vice o’ being “too-online”. This is a common tactic for people with unpopular opinions who want to disguise their unpopular opinions as general-held sentiments. Thus, “believes that depression is a real mental illness”, which is something with which all civilized people agree, is turned into a generally-hated dog-whistle “anti-science” much in the way rightwingers turn “treats black people humanely”, which, ’gain, all civilized people think is good, into “woke”, which sounds bad & ridiculous, e’en if most couldn’t tell you what it’s s’posed to mean.
Tier: D
So intrigued by this antireview that failed to give me any information, but, ironically, made me mo’ curious to see what kind o’ book would inspire this vague mess o’ ideas, I had to look up the book on Amazon — specifically its blurb.
In this reviewer’s defense, while I must emphasize ’gain that I have not read this book & cannot adequately review it myself, the blurb doesn’t inspire confidence in me. I can definitely say that the blurb is poorly written:
Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.
A common vice o’ modern literature ( that is literature o’ today, not modernist literature, which is some o’ the best literature out there ) is relying on childish choppy sentences. This paragraph is particularly fragmentary, since the different sentences don’t e’en connect. Most o’ this paragraph is empty details stripped o’ any importance. “She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel”. Cool. ¿Who cares? E’eryone is “going to write a novel”, & writing a book ’bout a tortured “genius” middle class white person struggling to become an uppercase-A “Artist” is the most cliché & uninteresting concepts for a book. Meanwhile, bringing up that our protagonist used to live in Paris, but now lives in a gated community, which she hates, but can’t bear to leave, is some unironic 1st-world-problems & exhibit #200,000 o’ how detached from reality upper-class Americans are. That said, there’s no indication o’ “anti-science” in this book so far; & honestly, the concept o’ a book ’bout someone who “creates internet content for no one” is the least uninteresting part o’ this blurb & could be an entertaining topic for a book if done with self-effacing humor & without the bathos-inducing melodrama that this blurb is so far exhibiting.
The blurb continues:
Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain—why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people.
This paragraph just insults the reader’s intelligence, pretending that hardly anyone has e’er heard o’ this concept o’ “depression” before. So far it seems like 1 o’ the 47 words o’ the previous review was right: “egomania”. This blurb tries to pass off our protagonist as the world’s only sufferer from depression, e’en tho that is far from the truth. Usually books ’bout depression are written for others with depression in a way o’ creating resonance & understanding, making them not feel ’lone; but this blurb’s use o’ alien diction to depict depression as this 1-o’-a-kind mutation o’ the protagonist does the opposite: as someone who does have depression, it turns me off, & it feels mo’ like an exotic exhibitionist performance put on to thrill people who don’t have depression — which is a gross, dehumanizing thing to do. I can’t tell, since the previous review was so vague, but maybe this was also what Donaghue meant by “condescending”: it certainly feels condescending to people with depression.
With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has.
Speaking o’ vague language: ¿what does it mean for Martha’s parents to be “chaotic”? ¿Is that a euphemism for “abusive”? Also, I certainly hope this Ingrid person literally abandoned Martha & didn’t “abandon” her in a metaphorical way by dying, since the protagonist would look like a selfish asshole for complaining ’bout how she suffered for someone else’s death.
It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin.
“It feels like the end but maybe”’s missing comma is a legit grammatical error in an official blurb for a mass-published book.
I’m sure many o’ the hot-shot commercial publisher types I’ve read from would say that this is a well-written blurb, but I disagree. Then ’gain, I think their perspective is that the obnoxiously intelligence-insulting way this blurb is written is “attention-grabbing” to the masses o’ idiots in the same way jingling keys would be, whereas as someone who doesn’t find jingling keys particularly fascinating, I find it, well, obnoxiously intelligence-insulting, so this is probably why I wouldn’t make a good publisher, since my instinct is to criticize the masses for being idiots, which isn’t liable to make the masses o’ idiots want to buy my stuff, whereas the effective way to fleece them is to pat them on the back for their idiocy & indulge them.
But we haven’t gotten to the bottom o’ the swamp yet: that would be the editorial reviews.
“Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I’m always hoping to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know.” — Ann Patchett
Drinking game: take a drink e’ery time we see “brilliant” or [insert adverb] funny. Enjoy that coma from alcohol poisoning.
But this review doesn’t just spew clichés, but also mangles them: ¿what does “brilliantly faceted” mean? Nobody uses that phrase. The phrase is “multifaceted”, not just “faceted”. “Faceted” by itself doesn’t mean anything in this context, & it isn’t made any mo’ meaningful by the addendum o’ an empty superlative before it.
We also have laughably exaggerated metaphors, making it sound like the reviewer has an online fetish for being “engulfed” by literature.
The most shocking thing is that this blurb was written by a real writer & the daughter o’ 1 o’ the most imaginative writers who had a very distinct voice to his writing. I guess you can’t inherit literary genius. My only hope is that Ann crapped this out in a minute for whate’er quick buck they were offering.
Tier: E
“Completely brilliant, I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it.” — Gillian Anderson
This reviewer judges this book to be “completely brilliant”, as opposed to those which are merely partially brilliant. Then we get a comma splice, & after that redundant padding: Gillian doesn’t just think e’ery woman should read it, but also e’ery girl. ¿Why stop there? Maybe e’ery female, lady, gal, lass, miss, madame, femme, & any other synonym you could find should read it, too.
Tier: F
“An incredibly funny and devastating debut. . . . enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing.’” — The Guardian
It says something bad when a newspaper as shoddy as The Guardian provides 1 o’ the least inane review o’ the pack. There’s still plenty o’ trite, empty phrases ( “madcap energy” ) & empty, repetitive superlatives ( “sensitive & heartfelt” ), & the reviewer fails to describe this book in a way that distinguishes it from millions of other books, that could also be described as “funny & devastating”, or the many books that vaguely involve “try[ing] to make amends & change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing’.
Tier: D
“Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt . . . Martha’s voice is acerbic, witty, and raw.” — Booklist (starred review)
This is the closest a review came to having anything resembling a specific example from the book to make it stand out from any other book, the conflict o’ struggling with “inaccurate” diagnoses & medications — tho this does make me rethink my earlier interpretation o’ our 1st reviewer’s criticism o’ “anti-science” & makes me wonder if, quite the opposite, he was criticizing this book for exhibiting depression-skepticism or skepticism toward the efficacy o’ antidepressants ( I don’t feel bad for the misinterpretation, since, as I said, he refused to give a concrete example to back up their vague criticism o’ “anti-science” ).
Tier: C
“Meg Mason’s unflagging comic impulses drive this novel about the havoc a woman’s mental illness wreaks on her marriage.” — Shelf Awareness (starred review)
A common vice o’ reviews, specially editorial reviews, which are far too short to give useful information, is trading meaningful critique based on examples o’ the text with empty but poetic ( & that poetry is mo’ William McGonagall than Kobayashi Issa ) diction. If this reviewer wrote “This book ’bout a woman’s depression ruining their marriage is funny” ’twould say ’bout the same thing, but they try to hide such an empty conclusion with laughably o’erwrought purple prose as if they were describing Conan the Barbarian wrestling the ermine-orbed serpent or Moses parting the red sea with his rod aloft: this book isn’t just funny; its writer’s “unflagging comic impulses drive this novel” like a school bus.
Tier: D
“Brutal, tender, funny, this novel—a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations—came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book.” — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
’Nother common design pattern for automated review generation: “[adjective], [adjective], [adjective]…]. & if that wasn’t ’nough, we end 1 o’ the tritest, most ridiculous exaggerated praise e’er: claiming that the work “changed” the reviewer. Unfortunately, these works ne’er change these reviewers into people with any form o’ imagination or critical skills o’ analysis.
I mean, I love Donkey Kong Country’s music, too, but I can’t remember any philosophical epiphanies or major life decisions I’ve come to that were inspired by the bubbling melodies o’ “Hot Head Bop”.
Tier: E
“A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humor; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company
This novel is truly comic, as opposed to those fake comedic posers. This review is notable in that it makes a point specific ’nough to be outright wrong: tragicomedy is, in fact, not rare @ all, but goes all the way back to e’en The Bible, & probably earlier ancient literature, too.
Tier: D
“A quiet and achingly beautiful love story. . . . LOVED it. Masterfully written. And powerful.” — Elin Hilderbrand
More o’erwrought prose. I hate it when a book is so beautiful it gives me aches. To wrap up our bathos, we have the high superlative “masterfully written” followed by the much weaker “also, ’twas powerful, too”. “This book is genius & also pretty darn swell”.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!” — Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
The other cliché to add to our bingo card is comparing a work to ’nother work — tho I love how this reviewer twists 1 o’ her comparisons by addending, “yet completely original”. Yes, this completely original work that can only be described by saying it’s like other works. I’m also not sure what “arch” humor is & have a sneaking suspicion that this reviewer doesn’t know, either.
Tier: E
“Funny and tragic.” — Jojo Moyes
Give Jojo credit: this says what all the other reviews say in just 3 words.
Tier: D
“I really loved Meg Mason’s SORROW AND BLISS, which is sometimes very sad and often very funny and ultimately hopeful.” — Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over, via Twitter
OK, to be fair, this 1 adds “& hopeful”, too.
Tier: E
“So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel. What a debut.” — Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety
Calling a book “deeply affecting” is like describing my chair as “strongly sittable”: it may be true, but doesn’t mean much.
Tier: F
“A gorgeous, heart-rending book.” — Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy
¡YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, SORROW AND BLISS!
Tier: F
“SORROW AND BLISS is brilliant. A comic gem that will also break your heart.” — Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time
I’m surprised it took this long to encounter a review describing the work as a gem or some kind o’ jewelry.
Tier: F
“Evocative and hopeful.” — Book Riot, “5 Contemporary Literary Fiction Books That Are Game-Changers”
Generic & meaningless. That’s a great way to describe a book that is purportedly a “game-changer”. Nobody’s e’er written a book that’s evocative or hopeful till Meg Mason invented the concepts o’ evocation & hope in 2021.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” — Sara Collins, Costa First Novel Award-winning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
¿Why do you abuse the people you love?
Tier: E
“Sharp yet humane, and jaw-droppingly funny, this is the kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound. A masterclass on family, damage and the bonds of love: as soon as I finished it, I started again.” — Jessie Burton, New York Times bestselling author of The Miniaturist
“Spicy, yet sour, & nose-pickingly readable, this is the kind o’ review you will want to shove into the mouth o’ e’eryone you know. Jessie has a spectacular skill for adverbs & using commas, & her understanding o’ how much zestiness a reader can take is insightful. A Raid: Shadow Legends on drama, diction, & the love triangle o’ adjectives: as soon as I ate it, I ate it ’gain.” — J. J. W. Mezun,The Mezunian bestrepelling author o’ A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic ).
Tier: D
“Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.” — Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
¡Irrelevancy, your honor!
Tier: F
“Examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator’s mental illness on her closest relationships. . . . Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha’s experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. . . . An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” — Kirkus Reviews
They’re not surprising, but these god damn adjectives still get me. You can’t just have regular ol’ clarity: it has to be the “pitiless” kind, like it’s a stronger palette swap in the latter half o’ Dragon Quest. Since we’ve established that the blurb a’least thinks Martha is the only person in the universe with this exotic mutation as-yet unnamed & undiscovered by all the brightest scientists, I’m doubtful o’ the “without either condescending” part. & since Martha apparently complains ’bout how agonizing it is to live in a gated community that they just can’t bear to leave, ’less Martha is given the guillotine by the proletariat by the end o’ the book, I think the author probably does let her off too easily.
Tier: D
“The book is a triumph. A brutal, hilarious, compassionate triumph.” — Alison Bell, cocreator and star of The Letdown
¿Was this review written by Lionel Fanthorpe? “This review is repetitive. A repetitive repetition that repeats & repeats & says the same thing they say ’gain & ’gain & doesn’t say anything else but that which has been said before & nothing mo’ but what was said before”.
Tier: F
“This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant—the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” — Bookseller+Publisher
I’m glad that the reviewer alerted me that this book is a “real” romance, as opposed to all those fake romances that are truly ’bout martian conquerors. I always hate it when I buy a book with some sexy shirtless man on the cover & it’s just blasting cyberpneumatic cannons @ the Xythnians from Kyklocks. ¿How will my cyberpneumatic cannon shoot off then?
& they let you know that this is a modern love, involving mental illness, which didn’t exist before 2021. ¿Virginia Woolf? ¡Ne’er heard o’ her!
Despite all this, this is 1 o’ the mo’ in-depth — a’least as in-depth as any o’ these Hallmark card reviews get — reviews. Note how it makes a comparison to ’nother writer, but qualifies it by noting specific differences ( which is mo’ meaningful than just saying “but also completely original”, which is just straight-up contradictory ). Granted, it’d be better if the claims o’ being “less self-conscious” & “more mature” were qualified with examples & elaboration, since we’re still taking the reviewer on their word & they’re still relying heavily on vague superlatives. & the rest also devolves into a list o’ superlatives, with the hint that it this book s’posedly goes into greater depth into the complications o’ middle-class families than some unnamed general standard being the closest to what we might call actually giving meaningful information. Still, based on our now subterranean standards this is up on the higher tiers.
Tier: B
“Improbably charming . . . will have you chortling and reading lines aloud.” — People
( Laughs ). E’en the reviewers are vague: we don’t e’en get a specific person cited for this review, but some vague “people”.This gives a new perspective to the phrase “¡The people have spoken!”.
I like how “People” starts by laying out their expectations that this book would be shitty, setting up the gravel-level standards this book apparently surpassed. Presumably, these low standards were based on reading the blurb.
This review carries out the impressive feat o’ being both vague & clearly wrong: it libels me by claiming that I will “chortle” — ’cause our failed poet reviewer can’t use a basic word like “laugh” — & read lines ’loud, which I would ne’er do for e’en the funniest book, simply ’cause reading lines ’loud while laughing noisily in public is something only a peak douche bag would do, & reading lines ’loud & laughing to yourself while ’lone is something e’en a deranged lunatic like me would consider too bedlamite.
Tier: F
Below these reviews my eye caught the author bio, &, well…
Meg Mason is a journalist whose career began at the Financial Times and the Times of London. Her work has since appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Times (UK), and the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts. Born in New Zealand, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters. [emphasis mine]
So we can confirm that Sorrow & Bliss: A Work o’ Literature Comprising Abstract Latin Letters that Combine to Form Abstract Concepts Physically Bound in the Form o’ a Codex is an author self-insert book so transparent that the author couldn’t e’en be arsed to change the name o’ the magazine they worked for to 1 o’ its carbon-copy competitors.
Bonus: Mo’ Bad Reviews
Our 1st reviewer, Steve Donaghue, also wrote a list o’ worst 2021 nonfiction books, & it starts pretty funny:
10 The Chief’s Chief by Mark Meadows (All Seasons Press) – On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Mark Meadows publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on All Seasons Press for giving him a book contract.
Kind o’ low-hanging fruit for a worst-book choice, — specially since the rightwing grift machine pumps out these doorstops e’ery year — but I can’t disagree, & it’s only #10. ¿What’s next?
Tier: B
9 The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (Regnery Publishing) On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Josh Hawley publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on Regnery Publishing for giving him a book contract.
I mean, I can’t disagree…
Tier: B
Unfortunately, Donaghue gives ’way the game when he makes a mistake copy-pasting the review for the Peter Navarro book & using for the Jim Jordan book, as he blames Peter Navarro ’gain. Or maybe he just really hates Peter Navarro & decides he wants to blame him a 2nd time just to be sure.
Some o’ the other items are weirder, tho…
6 The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro (Broadside Books) – Very smart and very lazy Ben Shapiro takes a legitimate social issue – the rise of the authoritarian Left – and lavishes pan-shallow unoriginal platitudes on them while cloaking the whole mess in the fascists talking points of the very monsters who consider him a useful idiot.
1 o’ the great thing ’bout using these vague superlatives or invectives is that I have to play guessing games regarding what the person is trying to e’en say. Now, from Ben Shapiro that’s no surprise, since like most fascists he deliberately communicates in shibboleths to disguise bigotry as profound, complex thought. But Donaghue, who portrays himself as vaguely antifascist & spent half his reviews criticizing what many fascists considered to be a feather in their cap, seems to have different goals. One may expect him to be o’ the Enlightened Centrist™ tribe who feels the need to balance out their outrage @ a Republican attempt to outright o’erthrow the US government by manufacturing an imaginary leftist equivalent. Perhaps he portrays the “Black Lives Matter” riots as the equivalent, despite the fact that these riots presented no threat to the US government beyond being an international embarrassment — & if that’s the case, then we’d have to consider nearly e’ery American who vacations to other countries as an equal evil to the Trump Putsch. ¿But, anyway, would e’en an Enlightened Centrist™ consider Shapiro to be “very smart and very lazy”? I’m hoping Donaghue takes his brilliant “rap isn’t music ’cause my daddy told me it isn’t” & the way he embarrassed himself in front o’ a BBC conservative by being too crazy e’en for him — which adds him to the list o’ Americans who are an international embarrassment — as examples o’ him just being too lazy to unleash that intelligence that he’s keeping very well hidden.
It’s not that I’m in denial that there exists an authoritarian left; but when I think o’ “authoritarian left”, I think o’ Leninists, & I don’t see any big Leninist movement on the verge o’ seizing the US capitol & setting up the American Neobolshevik Communist Party as the dictatorship o’ the proletariat, no matter how many jokes ’bout guillotines I make. As we’ve established here before, we can’t e’en get Biden to do something as symbolic as raising his fist & shouting, “¡Down with the bourgeoisie!”, while still doing their bidding, no matter how funny ’twould be. Maybe Donaghue took some downers & fell asleep while watching a Russian Civil War documentary just after US news & mixed them up in his mind. It happens to me sometimes, too. But given some o’ the other things he’s written, I get the sneaking suspicion his idea o’ “authoritarian left” is just some irrelevant few randos on Twitter calling him a racist ’cause he refused to capitalize the B in “black people” — which is to say that he is “too-online” & needs to stop spending so much time on Twitter & mistaking the idiots on it as relevant to greater society.
Complaining ’bout the “rise” o’ the authoritarian left also really undermines Donaghue’s attacks gainst Trump as a fascist — a clear rightwing authoritarian. ¿Is it reasonable for him to be alarmed that the left should become authoritarian as a counterbalance to the right’s growing authoritarianism, or is Donaghue 1 o’ the many delusional Americans who thinks reality spawns from dreams & wishes & not power & that sternly protesting people willing to use violence & underhanded tactics will magically make these tyrant-wannabes no longer a threat? After all, when fascism rose as a threat in Europe, the allied powers acted in many ways that almost anyone would consider “authoritarian” — far worse than a few randos calling other randos racist for not spelling “latinos” “l@t!n%”, like any progressive L33tspeaker should. ¿Would not Donaghue consider FDR, who interned Japanese Americans & heavily censored newspapers, radio, & e’en letters, an example o’ the “authoritarian left”? ¿Would he say the same ’bout Winston Churchill, who also censored media while the UK was fighting fascists? Also, ¿didn’t Donaghue outright call for publishers to refuse to publish works by Trump supporters? ¿Isn’t that censorship, & thus “authoritarianism” — a far greater form o’ authoritarianism than calling other people bad names, which, in fact, is not authoritarianism, but merely using one’s freedom-o’-speech rights to express their opinion of others? It seems reasonable that in an America where violence gainst minorities is on the rise that jokes ’bout black people go from being harmless edgy comedy to a means to recruiting mo’ fascists, & that it’s a reasonable reaction by the left to feel added urgency to employ whate’er means don’t full-on violate freedom o’ speech, or e’en defacto suppression o’ speech thru economic means, to try & stifle & undermine this tactic, which, ultimately, is for the goal o’ subverting e’en the pseudodemocracy that the US has. But I guess it’s mo’ important that Donaghue ne’er has to fear being called a racist, which is literally lethal to white people, than it is for white people to endure the slightest inconvenience to prevent fascism from coming to power. Expressing one’s disdain for fascism is all one needs to do to make it topple @ its foundation in the fantasyland o’ people who live purely in the world o’ books & not political reality.
But it gets worse…
5 Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin DiAngelo (Beacon Press) – I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the author of White Fragility could write a book more virulently racist in just one lifetime, but this noxious volume – in which she makes clear that all white people are racist genetically, regardless of upbringing, education, or outlook (Klan members will find such claims familiar-sounding, only in a slightly different context) – does the trick.
This review devolves into outright malicious lying, & one can easily see this simply by reviewing the Amazon blurb:
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. [emphasis mine]
Dr. DiAngelo — who is a white person, & so can shit-talk crackers just as much as I can, just like black people can use the N-word — nowhere blames genetics for racism, but white people’s social conditioning. This makes sense when you consider that Dr. DiAngelo is a sociologist, not a biologist. Mo’ importantly, she distinguishes it from the bitter hatred o’, say, a Klansman, as a different kind o’ racism caused by an unintentional harm caused by ignorance. It is Donaghue who decides to be triggered by being called a well-meaning accidental racist, as if this “offense” is anywhere close to the kind o’ spiteful, actually threatening speech that hardcore racist white people spew ( ¿does DiAngelo recommend harassing white people with depression & urging them to kill themselves in her book, which is what white supremacist groups like Stormfront actually did to people after Trump won the election? ), & rather than do what a smart person with any dignity would do & just shrug it off & say, “¿What are you gonna do?”, he stupidly gives in to the bait & reacts in the most extreme, idiotic way possible, literally reacting to the accusation o’ being racist with the schoolyard comeback, “¡No, you are! ¡In fact, you’re such a superultramega racist that you’re just like those Klansmen who murdered & intimidated black people for decades… ’cept, you know, you haven’t actually murdered anyone or intimated anyone or have done anything but make a few white people feel a li’l queasy”. It shows an amazing lack o’ self-awareness that a white person would unironically attack without e’en the slightest sense o’ humor a book called “White Fragility”. “¡Can you believe these bullies called me a whiny bitch!”, he whinily bitched. I would venture to argue that the idiocy that Donaghue portrays here is mo’ racist gainst white people like me since it does far mo’ damage to our reputation than some guilt-fetishing honkey, whose worst crime is actually probably annoying black people with her constant Jesus-like faux-humility, as if constant apologies & longwinded treatises on made-up jargon acronyms like BIPOC help black people with real problems, like being shot by white supremacist police or poverty — albeit, none o’ which are on the same level o’ enormity as people on Twitter calling Donaghue mean words.
Donaghue could’ve gotten sympathy by merely calling this book dumb & useless; but portraying it as an extreme form o’ racism comparable to Klan lynchings is a ridiculous form o’ both-sidesism that helps the very fascists he pretends to be fighting gainst. Trying to conflate minor misdemeanors gainst white people as equal to the worst acts o’ racist terror gainst black people is the precise tactic that fascists use to justify white supremacist terror as “defense” gainst “the authoritarian left”.
Anyway, this review o’ reviews has gone on way too long. Get the fuck out o’ my house so I can take my pants off.
So it’s settled: Democrats keep the senate ( thank you Masto for saving me from waiting till December to confirm this point ) & Republicans take the house. I’m not sure why people are making a big deal ’bout this: I remember for most o’ summer people were predicting this same outcome, save maybe that Republicans would’ve had a much mo’ formidable win till a bunch o’ troll Republican polls came round & 538 for no logical reason @ all let their trolling pollute their polls. Or maybe that’s not what happened. ¿Who cares? Polls are a waste o’ time.
Moreo’er, I’m not sure why Democrats are hopped up on so much copium ’bout the official fascist party doing less well than expected. Many have compared these midterms to the 2002 midterms wherein Republicans beat historical precedence & kept the house & regained the senate despite having a newly-elected president 2 years earlier, the only time such a thing happened other than in 1934 with FDR, which many credit to 9/11 “bringing the country together”. “Ne’er forget” Americans seemed to have forgotten so soon that we had a 20’s version in 2021 with 1/6, ’cept the difference is that whereas Democrats had nothing to do with 9/11, Republicans had much to do with 1/6. If anything, one should expect that Democrats should have succeeded better this year than Republicans did in 2002, but I guess inflation is mo’ important than protecting e’en the flimsy ’scuse for democracy the US has. To paraphrase Ben Franklin: Americans who are willing to trade democracy for the sake o’ cheaper prices deserve & will get neither.
I should add that while moderate liberals like to emphasize the effect the Dobbs judgment had on the midterms, they don’t acknowledge that the Democrats’ weak loss means that there is no chance that Democrats will be able to pass a bill legalizing abortion — which means that the end result is still a loss for liberals.
So, yes, if one is delusional & believes that nothing has changed, Democrats’ weak loss should seem astounding & a good sign for the future, given that nothing changes. But those paying attention & knowing ’bout the mechanisms Republicans are setting in place should be able to see that howe’er li’l Democrats lost the current battle, they already lost the longterm war. & while Democrats may not have lost by that much, democracy has definitely lost.
The only truly positive sign is that Republicans, in their utter lack o’ consistency other than their desire for winning & having power, have taken a sudden turn gainst Trump & are starting to favor DeSantis, which could lead to a civil war that could hurt Republicans’ chances o’ winning presidency, a’least, in 2024 ( granted I’m doubtful o’ either being able to beat Biden in 2024 — Trump already lost in 2020, after all ). This is too bad, since Trump made a good point that he was the 1st president in a “long period” to go “decades, decades” without war in his 4 years o’ president. Any president who magically turns 4 years into “decades, decades” has to be impressive.
But I’m not so sure: as established, Republicans only care ’bout winning, not ideological purity, &, having such a lack o’ independent thought ( as evidenced by all the Washington State Republicans being clones o’ each other & the fact that Republicans just spew the same unfunny dadjoke memes where’er they are ), so they’ll probably just vote for whoe’er the Republican candidate is, regardless o’ who it is, e’en if not Trump.
¡Ne’ertheless! Regardless o’ the actual consequences o’ this election, Republicans are anusaching ’bout it, & thus it is our satirical duty to dunk on them. That’s right, this year we’re not going to waste our time looking in @ Daily Kos… ¿who else did I look in @? ¿The Nation? ¿r/politics? Democracy Now’s ’bove vulgar racehorse shenanigans & Counterpunch should just have ’nother copypaste article ’bout how e’ery election is just a victory for capitalism. Anyway, we’re not interested in seeing these freaks jerk themselves off o’er this minor win. We want to see some moaning & groaning. Thus, I must dig deep into the sewers that is rightwing media.
’Course we can’t go an election without a li’l conspiracy theorying:
THEY DID IT AGAIN! Two massive unexplained ballot drops gave Gretchen Whitmer the lead in Michigan – They ran a ‘Drop and Roll’ in Michigan pic.twitter.com/VIxjQVYgdh
¡Gasp! ¡Look @ those tall lines! ¿What does it mean? ’Course, anyone halfway literate in graphs — which, tragically, doesn’t include Republicans — will clearly see that Whitmer had the lead long before those circled parts & that the jumps applied to both candidates, so they’re nugatory, anyway.
Anyway, this person, who claims to be “[j]ust an average Joe who loves God, America, Airplanes and Racing”, but apparently doesn’t love reality, had this special scientific insight:
Straight lines are ALWAYS man made. They do not occur in nature, and they NEVER occur normally in reliable data results. If you do see a straight line its a red flag and a sign of human intervention.
Officials in Arizona told CNBC today that they are “prepared to work through Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas as well.” That means results by New Year’s in a race that was held in early November. That seems late. How late is it? Well, by comparison, the results of the 1862 midterm elections, which were tabulated by candlelight without machines or even electricity in the middle of a raging civil war, were clear before the end of the week. That was the entire country. Arizona is a single state, which, by the way, is a fraction of the size of Florida, which, as you may have noticed, counted its votes in less than a day—so did Brazil, an entire country.
1st, considering states are counting votes simultaneously, there’s no difference ’tween the entire country counting votes vs. 1 state; 2nd, votes are still being counted by hand; 3rd, the US has mo’ than 10 times as many people as then; 4th, elections were corrupt & run by boss machines back then, so it’s laughable to use the notorious 1800s as an example o’ good elections. ¿Would he rather have elections like the 1876 election, where it was decided by backdoor agreements?
That seems embarrassing, if not like a full-blown emergency. Counting the votes isn’t some added extra you get from government if they have a surplus, like fighting climate change or bringing equity. Counting the votes is a core function of government, along with law enforcement, maintaining the roads and keeping the border secure.
Since the new government doesn’t form till January, I’m not sure why taking an extra week is a problem, nor how it indicates any suspicious activity. If anything, it indicates higher standards. Handling voting for an entire country o’ 300 million in just 1 day is the stupidest idea in the world & is bound to lead to errors. If Democrats wanted to steal the election, ¿why would they bother prolonging things? ¿What good does that do? Like, we already have well-established examples o’ ballot stuffing in the country from the aforementioned 1800s boss machines & the mid 1900s, & they didn’t involve election delays ’cause the perpetrators were smart ’nough to realize that you can stuff ballots in just 1 day & that looking suspicious for no extra benefits is a dumb idea.
Efficient elections are the reason you pay taxes, but Arizona doesn’t seem to have them.
It most certainly is not why I pay taxes.
Don’t ask, commands CNN. If you’ve got questions about this or any other election, no unauthorized questions. Instead, watch CNN or if you don’t have cable, simply trust your local officials.
I’m not sure who Fox News is eluding to that I should trust. I’m totally sure Fox News are advocating for anarchism, since there’s absolutely no one I can trust, & therefore valid elections are impossible now. It’s not as if we have organizations that o’ersee these elections & that there’s too many people in these organizations to keep a tight lip on the conspiracy. Keep in mind, e’ery terrible thing the US does gets leaked thanks to organizations like WikiLeaks, but this vote steal is as tight as any government scheme e’er produced — well, outside o’ Bush doing 9/11, ’course.
Speaking o’ Bush, ¿is his Proust-loving speechwriter writing Carlson’s script? “If you’ve got questions about this or any other election, no unauthorized questions” is right up there with “you won’t get fooled again”.
They’re doing their jobs. They’re doing it right. Really CNN? Can we get a little more reporting on that? How right are they doing it?
Yes, I expect exact mathematical figures on the objective unit o’ rightness & the precise % o’ rightness. If it’s not ’bove 80%, which electionologists have measured to be the minimum level o’ rightness to reach the natural rate o’ rightness, then it’s not right ’nough & Trump instantly becomes president, as per the constitution.
¿Was CNN really constantly badgering their drooling watchers, “The elections are going fine. We swear no conspiracies are going on”? ¿Do they also host weekly segments informing their brilliant viewers that JFK’s assassination was not, in fact, an inside job? “We’re going to have to rate that Biden is an alien trying to steal your blood with his fluoridated water is a ‘Pants on Fire’ debunked fact”.
It’s pretty funny, but we digress.
I mean, it’s only funny if you’re an idiot & find basic civic mechanisms confusing.
Then there’s the most amusingly stupid explanation of all: bad candidates were the problem. That’s all over Twitter. All the Twitter pundits are telling you now the candidates were subpar and that was the problem. Candidate quality matters. Well, of course, strictly speaking, that is true. The quality of a candidate does matter, but really, how much does it matter? Well, let’s see. Joe Biden got elected president two years ago from his basement. John Fetterman became a U.S. senator last night. Does anyone think John Fetterman was a quality candidate? Is that why he won, because they had quality candidates on the left? Do the voters of Pennsylvania really want a brain damaged candidate who’s never had a real job? Did they think he was more impressive than the guy who spent his career doing heart transplants? Probably not.
I take back what I said ’bout the scriptwriting thing: there’s no way a literate human wrote this babbling. ¿How the hell can someone sound so befuddled while robotically repeating the same memes as e’ery other conservative clone? “¿Do people really not want to support a party who calls stroke victims ‘brain damaged’ just ’cause that party is full o’ repulsive toxic waste in flesh form? That can’t be right — must be ballot-stuffing”.
OK, I can’t stand reading this anymo’. ¿Has Living Bowtie always been this incoherent? It’s amazing that “brain-damaged” Fettuccineman sounded mo’ articulate during his fracking question than Bowtie has thru this whole article. ¿Who the hell can tolerate watching this e’ery day?
’Cause you get mo’ clicks by endlessly repeating yourself, he continued this shtick in a microfiction that seemed like ’twas AI-generated titled, “Democracy is a faith-based system… but who could believe in this?”. Democracy is not faith-based; legitimate democracies involve o’ersight from independent, international organizations like the UN. The fact that an American would say something so stupid shows how Americans know nothing ’bout democracy, which is why they have their idiotic electoral college & senate system & have made their system so that the legislative branch, the most important branch, is the most dysfunctional, while the supreme court, the least democratic branch which is just appointed for life, is the most powerful. ¿Guess which side is adamantly gainst independent o’ersight o’er US elections? So, ’gain, the big question: ¿who are Americans s’posed to trust when it comes to elections? The obvious unstated answer Fox News wants is that Republicans get complete control & can declare elections howe’er they fit like Putin. Those are the only 3 options, since Carlson acknowledges that he doesn’t believe a bipartisan solution is possible: Republicans control the election system, Democrats control the election system, or they’re o’erseen by objective, independent outside sources like e’ery other democracy.
When you look at these things like abortion, it’s popular. And you can thank the Jewish media for that. Abortion is popular, sodomy is popular, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives — it’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good. That’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. It sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.
r/conservative, who spent most o’ the past 6 years stanning for Trump, have now turned round & are blaming him for their loss, since as anyone who has e’er met conservatives know, they hate personal responsibility for their own failures & will literally rewrite history in their head & pretend they always hated Eurasia & loved Eastasia.
Modern Voltaire, hoardpepes, who hoarded all the pepes, so you know he’s wise, has this rebuttal:
I agree with hoardpepes: I have no reason to care ’bout founding American values or rights like slavery & the right o’ the supreme court to nullify anything any o’ the other branches do by mere whim & have no reason not to prefer free shit. Maybe if Republicans started offering free shit ’stead o’ garbage like shit that people in the 1700s — who had no taste — like people would like them for once.
But while many are blaming Trump, The Federalist has someone else to blame: ¡time to ditch Mitch McConnell!. The entire basis o’ the criticism is that McConnel didn’t follow Newt’s patented “let shit burn” policy & didn’t refuse to raise the debt limit, which The Federalist themselves acknowledge probably would’ve just led Manchin & Sinema to agree to a Filibuster change to prevent a shutdown & didn’t stick to his principles ( as if McConnell e’er had principles ) & didn’t stick to his threat to sabotage the chip bill, which nobody took seriously, since the businesses that pay Republicans like McConnel benefited from the bill. If anything, Republicans who like to complain ’bout China taking our jerbs & the precariousness o’ Taiwan should be embarrassed they hadn’t passed the chips bill themselves under Trump. As it turns out, McConnell is only gangster when he has a senate majority ’hind him. ¿Who’d have thought?
A Democrat Party that props up an elderly man with obvious signs of mental decay to run as the party’s presidential candidate cares only about power. And voters casting their ballots for the same man, or the even more cognitively challenged Democrat candidate who just won the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat, see only one thing: the “D” next to the candidate’s name.
I love how e’en in the article trying to whine ’bout how e’eryone else slanders them as being shitheads the writer couldn’t avoid being a shithead & mocking someone for having a stroke. The secret to why people voted for a man who had a stroke that left them with temporary mental weakness rather than a TV-show host who is just naturally stupid is that they have this thing called “empathy”, a foreign concept to Republicans who would rather whine ’bout their, & only their, problems, as if they matter. If you have to whine ’bout how nobody likes you, that just gives people mo’ reason to dislike you.
The establishment press likewise plays for team Democrat, and conservatives won’t change that even if they nominate the most milquetoast moderate candidate willing to don a scarlet R.
Theoretically, since Republicans haven’t done that.
Enter stage right, 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The 2012 presidential contest also showed that the Democrat Party, its loyal members, politicians on the left side of the aisle, and the press don’t really care about a candidate’s demeanor either. Then-vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s clownish behavior during his debate with his Republican counterpart, Paul Ryan, went ignored in the main, and the media continue to overlook Biden’s bullying behavior.
¿Why are we still talking ’bout 2012? I’m sorry Jr. Paul “I Don’t E’en Realize Rage Against the Machine Are Leftists” Ryan got fucking slayed by Biden harder than Eminem slayed MGK, but if you can’t handle a debate, stay out o’ the rap battle. That’s not bullying, that’s doing your job.
[Ignore paragraph o’ Big Hunter’s Emails]
Younger conservatives who didn’t live through the Reagan presidency can be excused for thinking Democrats are open to the right kind of Republican. But for those old enough to remember the ’80s, “come on, man.”
As the r/conservative forum & the recent voting results showed, younger conservatives are a mo’ endangered species than mountain gorillas.
The left trashed Ronald Reagan until Democrats needed to destroy George W. Bush, at which time the Gipper became the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever to serve as a Republican.
( Laughs ). This kind o’ pathetic hero-worship is sad. ¿Could you imagine a leftist calling Obama “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever”? ¿Which side is antigovernment ’gain?
Yeah, Reagan was so kind & warm when he hired an administration that made gay jokes ’bout AIDS victims, & had been in so many scandals that there’s a Wikipedia article dedicated to it, including bank bailouts long before Bush made them famous & the infamous Iran-Contra scandal, wherein his administration illegally funneled weapons to fascists in Nicaragua, leading him to have the name “Teflon Ron”, since no matter how many illegal things he did, conservative media still refused to criticize him, since they have no standards, evidenced by their choice for “warmest” president.
And now Bush has been remade the consummate statesman. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
No, Bush is still reviled e’en by conservatives as a war criminal who tanked the US economy.
So going back to the 1st paragraph:
Donald Trump is neither a kingmaker nor the palace’s HR director charged with hiring the next court jester. He didn’t make the Republican Party, and he didn’t destroy her fortunes.
This is wrong. Thanks to shambles Bush left the Republican party in, Trump was necessary. After all, his only competition were Jeb Bush & Ted Cruz, candidates that nobody liked. Most conservatives predicted Clinton would win long before the conservative primary finished. It was only when Trump made his surprise win that the Republican party bounced back.
’Course, a large part o’ that bounce back is ignoring history, so it’s no surprise that The Federalist is trying to ignore history, since it’s the only way to make the Republican party look good after Trump broke what he resurrected.
Democrats have since refurbished this strategy by preemptively branding any potential Republican opponent the spawn of the current evil-incarnate titleholder. We saw this with Democrat and media attacks on Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which began while Trump still resided in the White House and long before DeSantis rode the only true red wave to victory on Tuesday.
Yes, they preemptively attacked DeSantis for no reason whatsoe’er, who had no connection to Trump. That’s why Trump endorsed him in 2018, after all. & it’s not like Democrats attack DeSantis for things he does, like that Disney fiasco or Martha’s Vineyard fiasco.
Conservatives need to vacate their state of denial and accept that the Democrat Party and its politicians, voters, and paramours in the press will attack and reject any Republican put forward. And so will faux Republicans; in fact, that is how you can recognize them.
Awesome, then we’re in agreement on something.
They will push false scandals, misrepresent positions, peddle narratives to the disadvantage of Republicans, brand negative news about Democrats as disinformation, demonize the person and his (or her) voters — and they will never like us or vote with, or for, us.
Note that nowhere in this article has The Federalist provided any evidence o’ any “false” scandals. In fact, this entire article lacks any evidence @ all that is not incestuous links to themselves, which lead to mo’ sourceless thinkpieces, nothing e’en coming close to resembling sources. The only exception is a link to The Week, which they argued gainst as “incorrect”, but don’t go into details for why it’s “incorrect”. This writer would get an F @ my high school for their utter incapability o’ backing up their claims. They literally think they can say “nope, this is wrong ’cause I say so” & that it matters. No wonder nobody takes you guys seriously.
So support your candidate of choice, but realize that come 2024, to the polarized Democrats and their media mouthpieces, the Republican presidential nominee will be either Trump or Trump 2.0.
Cool, their solution is to sit round & pout & do nothing.
If they really wanted to make Democrats look bad, all they have to do is write, “Look @ how pathetic we are & Democrats still lose to us half the time. Imagine how pathetic that makes them”.
Nothing Newsmax said ’bout the election is interesting, but they do whore out their own documentary for 1/6, where they whiteknight the people involved in the attempted insurrection & complain ’bout their mistreatment, which, if true, is the tastiest karma considering the mistreatment Republicans wrought gainst middle-easterners in Guantanamo Bay, a prison that Republicans like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Real crimes were committed by protesters on Jan. 6. Yet, in the aftermath, the political party in power weaponized the Department of Justice, FBI, and other agencies — leading to unprecedented civil-rights violations of U.S. citizens who engaged in those protests.
¿How ignorant or dishonest do you have to be to call 100 or so people being mistreated “unprecedented civil-rights violations of U.S. citizens”? ¿Have they ne’er heard ’bout black people? “Like, yeah, all those lynchings were bad & all, but they’re nothing compared to a few white people not being able to clip their nails”. The only thing that makes this “unprecedented” is that it’s white conservatives being fucked for once; Republicans are fine when black people are mistreated all the time or Vietnam protesters or
I thought ’bout diving into the cesspool Truth Social, but they want my email & phone #, & fuck that. This may ’splain better than the midterms why their shares are falling fast.
Meanwhile, we have this perfect example for why nobody should take Twitter pundits ( or any pundits ) seriously when they make grand armchair theories ’bout what will win elections ( which makes one wonder why they’re giving this amazing advice ’way for free on Twitter & not charging millions for this priceless advice ):
For the record, I actually know the 1 true trick that works for winning elections, which is to promise to have the government subsidize free Taco Bell e’ery Friday to e’ery American citizen ( when elected blame conflicted legislature for the failure to pass the Taco Bell bill ); show up as a wrestler on WWF, the World Wildlife Fund; stand up gainst half-assed remakes o’ classic video games; & spend e’ery presidential speech talking ’bout what small penises & vaginas e’ery other politician has. I am awaiting my Pulitzer now.
Finally, the New York Post gives us the news we always wanted to hear: “Florida Man Makes Announcement”:
Think Murdochs are done with Trump? This morning's Foxnews website: lead story DeSantis (not Poland)–Trump's announcement is 3 levels down–underneath Fetterman and Madoff, next to the Gender Unicorn! pic.twitter.com/gjdgOKvF8T
But to those who worry that Trump may be too ol’ to run, being the same age as Biden, who was frequently lambasted for his age, when he became president, Fox News has you covered: “People age @ different rates”. So Fox News thinks Trump is a time-traveler. That’s nothing out o’ the ordinary for them.
Anyway, that’s all I can tolerate o’ this nuclear waste. Hopefully that will be all for any political content for… hopefully till November 2023, but I don’t think The Atlantic will be able to wait that long to release a stupid article defending water poisoning or paedophilia or something.
Whether the Democrats manage to eke out a hopelessly debilitated slight majority unable to pass anything ’cause 1 Democrat doesn’t like it or leave a slight Republican majority that will spend the next 2 years trolling Democrats & also not getting anything done, we can all agree that we have a victory for photography from The Rolling Stone:
I don’t know if they just take video & pick out the best clips or if they’re just that good @ getting the perfectly awkward photos, but chef’s kiss, either way.
& he has good reason to cheer ( I think that face he’s making might be cheering ): by his own count — since these are certainly not the #s anyone else sees in our mortal realm — he received 219 all-caps “WINS”, which are quadruple the value o’ lowercase “wins” & 175% the value o’ titlecase “Wins” & only 16 titlecase “Losses”:
This gives me the great opportunity to do what I neglected to do in 2020:
Apparently Boebert didn’t lose quite yet, & may end up winning, which means that all the news stories I read were full o’ lies. You can tell how shocked I am.
I have to say, beyond the pure joy o’ seeing conservatives angry, which, admittedly, is worth cheering ’nough, I don’t know why Democrats are so excited. It looks like Republicans may still take both the house & the senate, & the claims that the Republicans failing to do well during a year like 2022, when there should be a wave, & thus this means they’ll do e’en worse in 2024, shows a remarkable lack o’ self-awareness: if 2022 can be a ne’er-seen-that-before-greetings-from-Germany-kick-cancer’s-butt election year, ¿why can’t 2024? After all, e’eryone expected Democrats to cream Republicans in 2016 & they failed miserably. I don’t see how the outcome o’ this election means shit for 2024, other than mo’ Democrat governors & mo’ Democrats in state legislatures means electoral advantages for Democrats in future elections.
Boebert has been wrong ’bout many things, but she’s right here — we are calling them losers.
While it’s still round, I’m just going to put this here, which, 538, to their honesty, still keeps up, so we can laugh @ them if they’re wrong. Or, if they turn out correct after all, laugh @ the armchair theorists who constantly whine ’bout polls. Either way, we get to dunk on people.
But regardless o’ how relatively well Democrats do this year, we can still say a’least that New York Centrist Democrats known for pragmatism are utter failures. Considering this is the same wonderful state that gave us Trump, Rudi Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, or hell, e’en Hillary Clinton, since she deserves half the blame for the disaster that was 2016, I can’t say I’m surprised that they would find mo’ terrible politicos with which to self-own themselves.
I received a wondrous omen yesterday when I decided, out o’ curiosity, to make my yearly peek into DailyKos & was greeted with this powerful combination:
I knew it’d be a suckerpop anime girl who would finally save US democracy.
All the signs indicate that the forewarned red tsunami — not the sexy communist 1, but the fake fascist 1 masquerading in blood — will not come, but that the house will turn red, but the senate may stay blue. To be truthful, I’ve mostly ignored the polls, since polls ain’t shit, & e’en mo’ than polls, I’ve ignored armchair-theorizing pundit hacks who mistake their own petty hatred o’ Democrats ’cause Sanders, given a role in the current Democratic regime, was robbed o’ his rightful primary victory lost ’cause most young people are dumb & lazy & don’t bother to vote in primaries with the general sentiment of ordinary Americans who don’t give a rats ass ’bout Sanders or socialism & probably blame some vague form o’ Sorosian socialism they were told is causing all this inflation by their favorite YouTube channel or they mistake the general sentiments of ordinary Americans as being sick o’ all this mean civility ’tween mildly patronizing Democrats & murderously crazy Republicans, ignorant o’ the fact that most Americans don’t give a shit, they’d probably love to see government officials bash each others’ brains out with hammers. If these liars truly believed in bipartisanship & bothsidesism, they would advocate for sacrificing Mitch McConnel’s wife to the hammer, too, but as it turns out, e’eryone lies when they say they support bipartisanship ’cause, as it turns out, bipartisanship is the dumbest thing in the world.
Much mo’ fascinating is the statistic I found that 60% o’ Americans have election deniers on their ballots, which is to say that only 60% o’ candidates have finally reached enlightenment & have realized that till the Engelsist Magical Socialist Party’s candidates win e’ery election, e’ery election is a fraud. I can only assume that when the deniers win they’ll attempt to insurrect themselves, since surely they wouldn’t only deny election results where they don’t win — no, not my honest pals, the Republicans.
The 1 e’eryone had been looking @, to the point that apparently a New Yorker tried to vote for Dr. Oz: unsurprisingly, real candidate whose only major electoral flaw was having a stroke, & thus having their clearness o’ speech only slightly better than the average Republican, beats clownshow TV doctor.
Many are noting that wacky Trump-favored candidates like Oz are losing in places where a sane Republican would’ve won, which leads me to reconsider e’eryone’s claim that Democrats deliberately funding these crazy candidates was typical bad Dem strategy.
I still fret that I didn’t make optimal use o’ my most recent Halloween Break, including wasting a day working on that weird Voter’s Pamphlet post that wasn’t that clever; but I can a’least feel better that I didn’t waste the most important day, Halloween itself, publishing the most revolting form o’ COVID-denial apologetics from 1 o’ the most deranged economists — & we’re talking ’bout economists, the realm that gave us such serious ideas as that forcing woman to let incels rape them ( or giving incels sexbots ) is the same as income redistribution — in the world.
That article is “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”, written by some economist named Emily Oster, who I will ’ventually show you has o’erthrown Noah Smith as emperor o’ troll economists.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.
I want to remind you that this is s’posedly an “economist”. I spent COVIDtime reading books, which you can do very easily inside, ’cause that’s how you learn ’bout things, something this “economist” should have tried.
We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.
¿So this person’s family are such idiot-savants when it comes to visual abilities that they can see a tiny hand signal before them, but not full-sized humans approaching them?
¿What relevance does this ridiculously contrived fable have to do with anything?
Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
Check off on the bingo card, “Makes up bullshit exaggerated story wherein the protagonist runs into Jack-Chick-worthy strawmen who want to disembowel anyone who doesn’t obey the tribal ways o’ The Mask”. I live round Seattle, 1 o’ the most leftwing places in the US, & people didn’t say shit if they encountered someone without a mask — probably ’cause they presumed they were right-wing extremists & didn’t want to hear them start ranting ’bout the Illuminati. E’en if most people round you do think you’re assholes for not wearing masks, they were probably smart ’nough to realize that yelling @ you wasn’t going to magically make you not assholes anymo’, but would probably make you dig your heels in further — as the existence o’ this article proves.
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking.
I’m going to need a big, fat, fucking citation needed for that. ( Fun fact: if you compare newspapers like The Atlantic to my stoner blog you will find to your shock & horror that I oft cite sources mo’ than they do, ’cause newspapers oft like to just coast on their pretend authority than follow basic academic standards ).
Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway.
Yes, that’s ’cause you weren’t wearing real masks, you fuckface.
But the thing is: We didn’t know.
“¡It’s Fauci’s fault my family were all hopeless dumbasses!”.
I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID.
If she had any self-awareness, such reflection would have been, “Wow, it sure is impressive that they hired me to teach a class on a subject I know absolutely nothing about. The US sure is a meritocracy”.
We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.
Read: “I wasted my class’s time & money talking ’bout shit that has nothing to do with science”.
To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high.
This writer shows herself to be just as ignorant o’ linguistics as biology: a consensus is universal — it’s an inherent part o’ its definition. If it’s not universal, it’s mere majority, not consensus.
2nd, e’en a fervent supporter o’ democracy like me has the awareness to realize the unfortunate truth that objective, materialist science isn’t based on fucking elections. The fact that the average slackjawed moron, fed junkfood misinformation like The Atlantic, thinks children have magic COVID immunity doesn’t make it true, anymo’ than the fact that 81% o’ Americans believe there’s an invisible man in the sky who runs e’erything makes it true. Americans are dumb: their opinion is worth less than a coin flip.
Nowhere does this “economist” e’en try to look into alternatives that could serve both problems, which would’ve been real compromise, ’cause that would require some semblance o’ curiosity & independent thought, which almost all economists lack. People ( read: right-wing hacks ) assume that falling education came from children not being physically next to each other, & not the lack o’ preparedness or lack o’ resources from skinflint governments drugged up on the religion o’ “Fuck the Poor” capitalism. Hell, the psychological trauma o’ COVID could’ve by itself caused the decline; there’s no proof that the decline wouldn’t have happened if schools didn’t close, or that it wouldn’t have been worsened by children’s fears — whether based on realistic facts or exaggerated — o’ getting COVID themselves. Indeed, the fact that schools that stayed closed longer didn’t have worse effects than those that didn’t & the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics’s own conclusion on the data imply this. This is specially since the worst effect was on math, which is the subject that should need physical presence the least & can most easily be handled with computers. Also, Americans have always been hopeless @ math — which is amazing when you consider what a STEMlord country it is & that Americans are e’en worse @ liberal arts like sociology, philosophy ( I can’t name a single good American philosopher ), &, as seen here, economists ( also no good American economists — all the English greats, like Adam Smith, Keynes, & Joan Robinson, are from the UK, while we’re stuck with Paul Samuelson, Milton Fucking Friedman, & Paul Krugman, which is like comparing bands like Nirvana & Alice in Chains to Nickelback & Creed ).
But, yeah, it would have made mo’ sense to cost mo’ lives so Americans can become slightly less terrible @ math.
Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
This is the lamest o’ Appeal to Perfection fallacies e’er. Either way people were @ risk, so this was a case o’ the “least bad scenario”. The FDA themselves continued recommending the J&J vaccine as better than nothing. Only a mental child would think that during a deadly pandemic nobody should e’er have risks or make mistakes when rushing e’er.
Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
Also an unproven claim & irrelevant: people who are “working in earnest” but know they know nothing o’ biology are still dangerously irresponsible. If I hijacked a a tank “for the good o’ society”, nobody’s going to give a shit how earnest I am, other than whether or not to have me sent to an asylum.
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat.
I can’t fucking believe this tremendous misunderstanding o’ how both objective reality & humans work. That’s right, all ideas are a guessing game: people who used their knowledge o’ biology, which is based on peer-reviewed studies & centuries o’ information, just “guessed right”. When I make a website @ work, it’s not ’cause I studied programming for years & know how the web works; I just happened to be lucky that day & can maybe feel the reason to gloat for my good gut instinct. This is the kind o’ idea only someone with no knowledge or skill in anything could think — pathetic & spiteful. The idea that this smug asshole trying to manufacture a “truce” when her side is clearly the wrong side o’ history is accusing people who were trying to prevent deaths o’ just wanting to gloat is colossal projection.
Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.
“Me, for instance”.
All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet.
Yes, policies that are life & death for millions is just culture war bullshit, but empty civility & decorum are vital.
& you yourself are writing on the internet. But sure, it’s e’eryone else who’s a crybaby.
These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive.
You’re right, but you decided to write this article &, e’en mo’ perplexing, The Atlantic decided to publish it, so here we are.
And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.
No, but it is a mental failing, &, mo’ importantly, insisting you’re right with whate’er disarray o’ propaganda articles you wrote or whate’er inklings you made up in your head when you know you have less knowledge than experts who spent decades studying this subject is a moral failing, as you’re putting your pride as a “free thinker” ’bove actually helping society.
Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
This is completely contradictory: by this writer’s own perspective, all decisions are based on luck, there is no free will, & therefore whether or not we move forward is out of our control, just as whether or not taking a vaccine was apparently a coin flip. In these times o’ uncertainty, whether or not “treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others” prevents us from moving forward could be right or could be wrong, & those o’ us who think that insulting idiots like this writer will help us “move forward” could be right, & if we’re not, well, we’re not to blame, ¿’cause how could we know? ¡There’s too much uncertainty! I love this implication that complex sociopolitical philosophical issues are far simpler than hard, materialist sciences like biology. Yes, this idiot’s simplistic, trite moralizing is rock solid, but how viruses & vaccines work is pure witchcraft.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.
¿Why not? ¿Is officially pardoning an insentient disease any worse than Roger Stone? No, ’course not — they’re the same thing.
We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation [—]
As we will see, this writer is 1 o’ them.
[—] while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.
Nope, ’cause they had a very easy choice: listen to the people who did have knowledge. Their preference for listening to charlatans o’er actual scientists is a social failing, & the kind o’ person who makes this mistake is going to make the same mistake ’gain & ’gain & will continue to be a burden on society, evident by the fact that this idiot, having not been content to cause harm in the world by their idiocy, is still writing articles.
Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips.
¿What? That’s a very hard accomplishment, since your family’s hiking tricks made no sense other than that you were bored & couldn’t be bothered to read real science.
But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.
Keep in mind, e’en if we accept the assertion that the spread o’ COVID outside is mitigated by wind ( which is not the same as impossible ), we’re comparing the mistake o’ killing people to the mistake o’ not letting people enjoy the beach. The latter is sad, but hardly criminal. The fact that this writer thinks people who might have cost people time in the rays might have just as much to apologize for as people who helped people die is deranged & I’m amazed that this writer can have such lack o’ sense o’ shame that she can show her face in public, much less write for a newspaper, without having to wear a paper bag o’er her face. ( ¿But are paper bags truly effective @ protecting disgraceful people from their deep shame? There’s a lot o’ uncertainty ).
Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.”
Note that she only argued that kids were not @ high risk, so she made this recommendation with the full consciousness that she was putting teachers, specially ol’ teachers, @ risk o’ dying, & therefore, it is, in fact, accurate to call her a “teacher killer”, since she admits right here to knowingly recommending a scenario that would lead to mo’ deaths o’ teachers. But, ’gain, since COVID-deniers have no free will due to all that magical postmodern uncertainty, she can’t be a teacher killer, or anything, truly, since e’erything is in our minds.
It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high.
It is much mo’ important that we pay our respects to the dead feelings o’ this rich, spoiled fauxeconomist who has no place writing ’bout biology @ all than the people who died, declares virulent narcissist.
And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Then maybe you shouldn’t have written this article.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
“Anyway, fuck the millions who died & the millions mo’ with lifelong health problems. Let’s focus on my personal bugbear”. I specially love how irrelevant high-dosage tutoring vs. extended school years is & how it’s focused on “cost-effectiveness”, rather than efficacy. Any halfway knowledgeable economist should know that the US wastes their money on the stupidest shit right & left & that any talk o’ “cost-effectiveness” is futile.
Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up.
Yes, let’s try to solve a problem by deliberately refusing to examine the roots o’ said problem. To be fair, that is how economists typically try to solve economic problems, which is why they suck @ that, too.
Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach[.]
They can start by recommending all their patients to stay ’way from The Atlantic & only read actually informative news sources.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.
There’s a reason this 2nd sentence isn’t a standard saying: it’s complete nonsense. It’s only doom for the jackasses who made these “mistakes”. After all, ostracizing these people & news sources will create disincentives from fostering misinformation in the future, thereby making it less likely to happen in the future. You’d think an economist would know that, but as we’ve discussed many times, economists only understand personal responsibility when it comes to lowerclass people. Normal people should, ’course, be fired for bad results, but when an economist makes “mistakes”, we shouldn’t fire that economist from e’er writing for our paper, but continue giving them opportunities ( & thereby taking that opportunity from others ), despite doing nothing to merit it. This is the kind o’ meritocratic capitalist system that economists like this, who benefit quite well from it, strangely support a lot.
But despite its prominence, Oster’s work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.
¡Le shock! ¡An economist accepting bribes awards for their studied work from rich, “libertarian” organizations — which, in their hate for government involvement, obsessively spend their money on influencing government; “laissez-faire” isn’t French for “rich people control people like dictators” for no reason — to give false authority to pseudoscience that benefits them! ¡But Volcker told me that the only asset economists had was their credibility! Well, Oster sold hers for a quick quid.
Note that liberal fascist The Atlantic ’gain gives a voice to someone under the patronage o’ the far-right — “liberal” media @ its finest.
Still, that’s hardly the worst thing one could —
But the headline statement in the new AAP report is the oft-repeated mantra that “no amount of alcohol should be considered safe in pregnancy.” Media reports have seized on this statement to renew a debate about the dangers of light drinking during pregnancy. Rather than acknowledging the obvious dangers of heavier drinking and working to address the circumstances that lead to it, we are back to discussing whether pregnant women should be shamed for having a half a glass of wine on their anniversary—or any old night.
To me, this highlights the very real downside of recommendations like this one, which do not involve any nuance. The bottom line is that while there is clear evidence of the dangers of heavy drinking—especially binge drinking—in pregnancy, the same cannot be said for low levels of alcohol consumption. As even the AAP report acknowledges, there is consensus on this issue. A large share of OBs in the U.S. report telling their pregnant patients that some alcohol is fine.
OK, that was a weird opinion to die on her sword for, but —
Emily Oster re-examines the stats on AIDS in Africa from an economic perspective and reaches a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about the spread of HIV on the continent is wrong.
O… O, dear god, no…
[T]to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does — as an investment. So if you’re a software engineer and you’re trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it’s important to think about how much it costs. It’s also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there’s no point in adding more functionality into version nine.
I want to note that she isn’t e’en right ’bout software versioning here: for most software, version 9 would continue to receive updates, mainly security updates, for plenty o’ time after version 10 comes out, ’cause people don’t all update to the next version right ’way. Some can’t ’cause new versions usually introduce incompatibilities with other software. Considering the newsworthy controversies o’er decades-ol’ Windows operating systems finally having their support ended e’ery time it happens, I’m surprised she didn’t know this.
But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that’s a costly investment in your health.
I wish I were surprised, but, yes, this truly is how many economists think. This is what happens when economists think economics is nothing but math & whate’er gut instincts they come up with, ignoring all other sciences. Yes, eating a cookie ’stead o’ a carrot is just like having sex with someone who might have AIDS, ’cept all the many biological ways it’s completely different.
Actually, despite what many online have been gossiping ’bout, this talk isn’t ’bout how spending money on AIDS treatment is a waste o’ money, but spending money on AIDS education is a waste o’ money compared to… decreasing trade — which is, admittedly, a shocking admission from a mainstream economist, who usually consider trade to be the best thing e’er fore’er. There seems to be no talk o’ decreasing spending on the general problem o’ AIDS in Africa. TED Talks probably demand far higher taste than vulgar The Atlantic & Time, so she couldn’t go full mask-off ( pun not intended ).
That said, the talk does end rather tastelessly:
But more than anything, you know, I’m an academic. And when I leave here, I’m going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. And the thing that’s most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There are more things that I think that I want to do. And what’s really, really great about being here is I’m sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can’t wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.
I have ne’er seen someone so excited & eager ’bout people dying o’ AIDS.
Anyway, her arguments are debatable, considering the simplistic assumptions in this admittedly short talk —
This shift in focus raises the question: Is treatment the right solution? In my work I have assumed that our goal in the face of the epidemic is to maximize life. In other words, to save the most years of life with the funding available. Once I decided this, the cost-benefit calculations that economists are so familiar with told me how.
As cold and callous as this may sound, after comparing the number of years saved by antiretrovirals with years saved by other interventions like education, I found that treatment is not an effective way to combat the epidemic. It may be that my conclusions are best laid aside in the name of morality and compassion. But in making the tough decisions about how to spend limited resources, we should understand the economic consequences of our choices.
Ah, here we go. Now, Forbes, they allow you to go full sociopath. There can be no nobler death than to sacrifice yourself to capitalist efficiency, specially if you’re poor.
That’s obviously a wrenching question. But if we choose treatment, we must know what we are giving up. The tradeoffs are there whether we want to face them or not. What economics can do is tell us–in numbers, in black and white–what we give up and what we gain.
We recently developed a simple, easy solution: give up dumbass loser Elon Musk throwing his money down the drain on Twitter so he can shitpost Bill Gates pregnant memes, pour Twitter down the drain like rancid milk, & give that $44 billion to AIDS treatment. I love how economists try to contrive these imaginary tough decisions as if the world doesn’t waste 99% o’ its resources on the dumbest shit. Economists would make their jobs a lot easier if they just recommended giving up shit like Elon Musk — hell, that’s a win-win.
Anyway, I’m intrigued by this new development o’ 4chan Science, clearly meant purely to troll & bolster itself on its clickbaiting audacity rather than any serious thought ’hind them. I thought the era o’ edgelordism might’ve been o’er, but I was wrong. ¡There was just too much uncertainty! Hopefully we can agree to an amnesty toward those who mistakenly believed that the era o’ edgelordism was o’er & that ’twas safe for us to leave our homes without being subjected to cringe.
Unlike the average American forced to stand in line for hours like a common animal, I’m lucky ’nough to receive my ballots in the mail, & thus have already voted & can just spend next Tuesday doing my brave American duty: making unfunny jokes ’bout people round the internet babbling ’bout the election & ’ventually making fun o’ Democrats when they fail yet ’gain. But that’s for next week. Accompanying these ballots are these pamphlets full o’ ads for the various politicos running. Normally I ignore these the same way I ignore Coke when they assure me that their product is sweeter than all the others, we pinky swear; but out o’ morbid curiosity I decided to look thru them this time, mainly to laugh @ how inane they are.
The main pamphlet starts not with candidates, but with “advisory votes”. Let me lightly translate the pamphlet’s own description in Mezunese:
Advisory votes are the result of Initiative 960, approved by [idiots] in 2007.
Advisory votes are non-binding. The results will not change the law [& are completely useless].
They always pass anyway, ’cause most people know how inane these votes are. They all follow the general pattern o’, “The legislature increased, without a vote of the people, a tax on ______, costing _____ for government spending”. It is, indeed, strange that these here “representatives” as they call them that we elect to “represent” us go round making decisions without a vote from the people — ’cept the votes they received when they won their role as representative in the 1st place, ’course. Sounds undemocratic to me.
& yet somehow I doubt the people ’hind this initiative would’ve been all that concerned ’bout the legislature making decisions regarding, say, criminal law, without asking the whole population their opinion 1st, e’en tho the consequences there are far greater than idle rich landowners having to pay an extra $2 a month on their $700,000 McMansions, specially since taxes & economic issues are, if anything, mo’ technical &, being so math-intensive, require better integration with other policies to not cause problems. Also note that there are no advisories for cutting taxes, e’en tho that could seriously impact other policies. Children getting bad educations, limiting their earning potentials or e’en their ability to avoid being preyed ’pon by scams, due to cuts in school funding or poor people becoming homeless ’cause their government assistance was cut is far less dire than that extra $2 on idle rich landowners’ taxes. It’s almost as if these advisories aren’t based on any logical or just principles & are just a part o’ a political-economic religion constantly shoved into our faces by a media dominated by rich people who just-so-happen to benefit from said religion.
Anyway, these advisory votes are boring & nugatory, anyway, so we’ll skip them for the meat o’ the candidates. That’s right: get your tierlist sheets ready.
But before we start, I made this drinking game:
Take a drink any time:
A candidate mentions “common sense”.
A candidate mentions “strong community”.
A candidate jerks off parents, & not in a sexy way.
A candidate talks ’bout crime, gas prices, or their inflation fetish.
A candidate fails to mention any concrete solutions for solving these 3 problems.
A candidate complains ’bout “partisanship” or brags ’bout being “bipartisan”.
A candidate mentions that they have kids & run a small business
A Republican candidate has no electoral experience, but “runs a small business”, which is what I also like to say when I waste a weekend smoking weed & writing blog posts.
1st we have the only senate race this year, Patty Murray vs. Tiffany Smiley — yes, her last name is truly “Smiley”. Patty Murray has been senator since I was 1 years ol’ & is a boring Democrat, so we won’t talk ’bout her, but ’stead talk ’bout her competitor “Smiley”:
Elected Experience
No prior elected experience, but —
Ah, a good start. OK, I’ll let them finish:
No prior elected experience, but an extensive background building coalitions and working with members from both parties to enact legislation reforming the Veterans Administration and improving veterans’ health care.
Well, that makes up for the lack o’ experience. I totally want my state to use up 1 o’ their only 2 Senate seats on someone who only cares or has experience with veterans’ issues — certainly an important issue, but not worth trading, say, economic expertise.
Other Professional Experience
Triage nurse, full-time caregiver, President and Co-Founder of “Hope Unseen,” veteran’s advocate, mother of three growing boys.
I’m glad that she specified that her sons were growing; otherwise I’d worry that her children had some rare growth disease that probably really does exist & makes me look like an asshole for making a joke ’bout it. I don’t vote for candidates who don’t have children with pristine genes.
But I’m most glad that they listed “traige nurse” 1st. You know, like how they’ll be nursing this government, ¿amirite? ¿Right…?
Education
Whitworth College- Bachelor of Science in Nursing
¿What the fuck is this sad ’scuse for a dash here? It’s just a hyphen & it’s attached to the left side but has a space on the right? ¿Did that college not teach you proper punctuation? They taught me, which is why I go all the way & use the utmost correct punctuation, like always starting my questions with an upside-down question mark.
These credentials are also inconsistent in punctuation: the 1st 2 end in periods, but the 2nd 2 don’t. Contrast that with Patty Murray, who consistently forgets to end her credentials with periods. Murray’s only flaw is her weird decision to write “&” in the ol’ fashioned way, “and”. This is what happens when your government is full of ol’ dinosaurs.
Anyway, let’s get to the picturesque statement:
Tiffany Smiley grew up on a farm in rural Washington and dreamed of becoming a nurse. When she married her high school sweetheart, Scotty Smiley, and achieved her goal of becoming a triage nurse it seemed she’d achieved her version of the American Dream. That dream was shattered in April of 2005 when she was informed that her husband had been blinded by a suicide car bomber in Mosul, Iraq. At 23, Tiffany quit her nursing job and flew to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to be by Scotty’s side.
People have been talking this & that ’bout the risks o’ voter fraud ( this is always & only true when the Englesist Magical Socialist candidate doesn’t win, ’course, which ne’er happens ’cause they’re drunkards the bourgeosie has sabotaged their fate down to their atoms ); ¿but who’s going to investigate the troll who snuck this blurb for a Dean Koontz novel in as a “candidate” for the Washington state senate1?
At Walter Reed, Tiffany had to stand up to the federal government and fight for Scotty, his dreams and the care he had earned. For Tiffany, her experience with the military bureaucracy highlighted the challenges facing many service members and their families. Tiffany became their voice, going to Capitol Hill and meeting with anyone who would listen to her. She built coalitions with members from both sides of the aisle which ultimately resulted in real reform of the VA to help the catastrophically injured and their caregivers.
This is all very vague. ¿What was the federal government doing to Scotty Smiley that he needed to be fought o’er, as well as his dreams? ¿Was it just half-assed health care? The whole US has that — that’s not a veteran’s thing. You’d think Smiley could “triage” this criticism o’ the shoddy health care her husband received with the shoddy health care Americans all o’er receive in “infamous country with worse health care than vile communist Cuba”, but strangely candidate who prefers a political party that has expressed nothing but indifference toward the US’s health care problems would rather babble on ’bout cliché topics like “spiraling gas prices” ( no mention o’ the spiraling ecological calamity tied to that very same gas — a much bigger cost ) & inflation, 2 complex economic topics this nurse knows nothing ’bout, hence why nurses don’t make the best senators — tho, to be fair, they’re probably better than TV celebrities as presidents:
Drawing on her experiences as a veteran’s advocate, Tiffany will build coalitions and work for policies that improve public safety and protect Washington families, combat spiraling gas prices and the inflation that’s hurting the middle class and address the homeless crisis plaguing our communities. Tiffany will be a strong supporter of our men and women in law enforcement whose sacrifices keep our streets safe and allow Washington communities to thrive.
I didn’t know experience in being a veteran’s advocate was related to “public safety” & “protect[ing] Washington families”, which translates to “will whiteknight & abuse their government influence to shelter from the law lawless police who commit racially-targeted extralegal murder”.
I would also love to know the specifics for how she will “address the homeless crisis plaguing our communities”. I’m sure by the way she uses disease-laden language that it will be with great sympathy toward the homeless & won’t just be forcing them onto buses to California so it’s their problem now.
From a small farm in Eastern Washington to the nation’s capital, Tiffany will be a voice for all of Washington.
No she won’t, ’cause there’s no chance in hell this idiot’s winning.
While I appreciate the effort to write this airport novel blurb, which does stand out a bit from the other candidates, Smiley loses many points for devolving back into the same talking points as the other Republicans, which is made worse by the fact that they’re irrelevant to the original scene.
Tier: C
Next, we have the representitve seat for district 7. The Democrat candidate is Pramila Jayapal. She has not held her seat for as long as Patty Murray, but she’s just as competent, if not moreso, & therefore is boring.
’Stead, we want to talk ’bout the exciting Republican challenger, Cliff Moon — yes, that’s really his fucking name; this is the same state that once had a candidate named “GoodSpaceGuy”, who is apparently notable ’nough to have a Wikipedia article.
Elected Experience:
None
Well, a’least he’s honest & to the point here. ¿Aren’t people without experience s’posed to a’least make a half-assed attempt @ trying to twist their lack o’ experience in some positive way on their résumé?
Other Professional Experience
Consulting Oceanographer, Water Resource Engineer, Corporate President of Moon Construction Company
All vital skills for being a senator.
All right, let’s just get to the statement:
I am running for Congress because someone needs to represent normal, everyday, hardworking Americans. I am a hard worker and have always provided for my family in the greater Seattle area.
¿You know that joke where ol’-ass Steve Buscemi puts on a backward cap & says, “Hello, fellow kids”, & nobody takes him seriously? We need a version where it’s some rich guy dressed in a Levis & a checkered shirt, like Mike Rowe or “Joe the Plumber”, saying, “Hello, fellow working class Americans”.
Which is to say, no, Mr. Moon, you are not a hard worker, you’re a lazy corporate president. You’re not fooling anyone.
I am frustrated with the current situation. Our moral compass has been displaced.
Just retrace your steps to where you last had it or check under the couch cushions. We don’t need to waste a representitve on such a petty task.
Common sense has been exchanged for political correctness.
This guy’s so ol’ he’s posting dank memes like “political correctness”, when the term e’eryone uses now is “woke”. I can’t wait till 2025 when he discovers the term “SJW” & is shocked when all the hipster fascists are using some new inane term for the basic concept o’ “not fascist”.
I am a normal American who thinks families are the foundation of a strong community.
BEEP BOOP. THE REPUBLICANBOT IS FUNCTIONING CORRECTLY. I AM NORMAL AMERICAN WHO LOVES FAMILY & FLAG.
I believe that parents have a right to know what their children are being taught.
¿Why don’t they just ask their children? Maybe it’s their own children who don’t want them to know ’cause it’s embarrassing to be learing cool shit ’bout dinosaurs & evolution & grampa tries to interfere ’cause their favorite fantasy novel — which, let’s be fair, is a literary classic that deserves its renowned; but the genre has evolved since then & grampa needs to expand his reading & start reading Discworld, Earthsea, & N.K. Jemisin — insists that humans came before animals — or afterward: The Bible kinda goes back & forth on the subject. Next thing you know these woke schools will be blaspheming on Lord Shakespeare by trying to teach children that Bohemia is landlocked & doesn’t have a coast & making Othello black & having men dress like women — all the ways modern, “enlightened” liberalism has been destroying western society.
Schools should celebrate real diversity, not Progressive ideology, should encourage critical thinking over indoctrination, and should show how America is a force for good in the world.
The latter 2 are literally contradictory, since nobody with critical thought thinks the US is good @ anything but inventing a billion types o’ butter & winning heart disease competitions. Then ’gain, maybe he means the rest o’ America & that we should just acknowledge the US as an exception. I guess Canada & Brazil did a few good things in their lives.
I am a normal American who thinks [—]
Nothing shows critical thinking like repeating “I am a normal American” like an obedient zombie from the 50s. American brains are so polluted by their fascist flagworshipping that they mix up “independent thought” with “servile nation worshipper that would make Hitler jealous”.
[—] that the price of basic goods is just too high. We have seen the cost of gas, groceries and medications eat away at our incomes.
“Back in my day we got milk for only a quarter & a quarter for only a nickel & we walked 45 hours to school e’eryday in the snow & fought mountain lions with our bare feet…”.
This man has such an “ol’ man shouts @ clouds” vibe that he doesn’t e’en recognize that he’s a living Simpsons meme.
The costs have gone up because the ideologues have decided what you should drive, what you should eat, how you should live.
Give this man a PhD in economics, he’s figured out all the problems. Yes, the shadow spirits in their underground liberally-biased caves are brainwashing us to buy o’erpriced cars simply ’cause they were made in America ( that is, Canada ) when smart people know the cheaper Japanese cars are better. That’s why Mr. Moon always makes sure to wear his tinfoil top hat to protect himself from the brainwaves. When he becomes king congress representative o’ the Christian world he will decree that all must wear the tinfoil top hat & that e’eryone will drive SUVs that will cost a nickel each.
I am a normal American who thinks freedom matters.
But doesn’t quite understand what it actually is.
We should be free to say what we want, free to hold unpopular opinions without fear of losing our jobs or be attacked, [—]
Unless you’re 1 o’ those dirty communists, ’course.
[—] free to choose what we listen to, what we read, and when or where we pray.
Note that nowhere in here does he include the freedom to not pray,
Some want to take away our freedoms in the name of safety and diversity.
“I want to take away your freedoms in the name of a celebrity TV show host president emperor king. ¿Isn’t that much better?”.
I am a normal American who desires to represent people that want to raise their kids, work hard, have money left at the end of every paycheck, and who know they can be friends with people who don’t look like them or pray like them.
You ne’er will, tho, ’cause you’re not an ordinary working American, but a pampered spoiled rich person.
This was a boring advertisement that tried as hard as it could be to be generic & repetitive, which doesn’t fit with his last name, Moon @ all. ¡You’re a disgrace to moons!
Tier: D
Next we have district 8’s representative seat. The Democrat candidate is Kim Schrier, ’nother competent, experienced, & therefore boring candidate. Competing gainst her will by Matt Larkin:
Elected Experience
I’m not a career politician. I’ll bring fresh perspectives and private sector experience when representing the 8th District in Congress.
See, this is the kind o’ bullshit spin I’m talking ’bout. Not only does he present his lack o’ experience as not a problem, he tries to pass it off as an advantage. & since Republicans hate competency, since it drills into their minds the truth o’ their inferiority, it would probably work, too, if Washington State wasn’t super blue & didn’t normally elect boring, sane, ol’-school grifter conservatives like Dave Reichert, who are just interested in tax cuts.
No perspective is fresher in a capitalist theocracy like the US than that o’ a business owner, coincidentally what all the Republican candidates are.
Other Professional Experience
Business Owner of a 3rd Generation Manufacturing Company; Associate Director of Presidential Speechwriting in the White House for a former U.S. President; Veteran Attorney licensed in Washington and Oregon; Criminal Prosecutor in Pierce County
Note that he doesn’t specify for whom he wrote his presidential speeches — probably ’cause, as a Republican, ’twas either Trump or Bush, both notorious wordsmiths, & therefore he was too humble to brag ’bout possibly writing the kind o’ Proustian gold as, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we”, or the historic, “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”.
Statement
I’m running for Congress because we all deserve a better, safer, Washington to raise our families in. As a father of 4 young children, Christian, business owner, former White House staffer, and prosecutor, I have a uniquely qualified perspective on the problems plaguing our state.
Yes, no perspective is mo’ unique in the US than a white Christian business owner. To be fair, Christianity is, indeed, a fascinating, exotic religion, which worships a god who is both 1 & 3 @ the same time & is his own son, whom they worship in an arcane faux-cannibalistic ritual wherein they feast on the flesh & blood o’ their god’s fallen mortal carcass. But he’s not going to talk ’bout cool shit like this or that Israelite who chopped his murdered wife’s body into 11 pieces & sent them to the other tribes o’ Israel. The only Christian I will e’er vote for will promise to turn the white house into 1 o’ those badass hell houses — e’en if they’re just a lowly state representative. The President must accept the wishes o’ the people ( o’ only 1/50th o’ states ).
My roots run deep in Washington‐‐‐I was born and raised here.
Hold on, shut the fuck up. ¿What the fuck is that dash? ¿3 hyphens? I’ve seen bootleg-ass 2-hyphens masquerading as a sweet, elagant “—”, ¿but 3? Get the fuck out o’ here. That’s blasphemy. You end up in the 8th circle o’ hell for that sin.
My family has lived here for 165 years. We own a 3rd generation, manufacturing company, employing over 600 people, making products in the USA which bring clean water to people globally.
Lemme guess, ¿is it o’erpriced bottled water the US tries to scam on the Latin Americas after their companies polluted their natural waters?
Washington is heading in the wrong direction. Enabling policies and our crisis at the border have led to skyrocketing crime, homelessness, and drug abuse. Our state desperately needs a leader to tackle these issues.
Yes, Washington state’s border with Canada is a major issue. You have no idea how many o’ those Mounties come in, smoking their legal weed ( which is also legal here ), shiving people in the stomach or tying women to train tracks while wearing a twirly moustache & ranting ’bout Dudley Doo-Right.
We need to give parents back their voices in their children’s education.
They already have voices in their children’s education: it’s called their home, where they raise their children. But they’re too lazy to take care o’ their own children, so what they actually want to do is browbeat underpaid teachers into becoming their parents ’stead, so now ’stead o’ teachers teaching historical facts they have to become their children’s preacher & moralizer & now e’eryone else’s children has to suffer.
We need to lower inflation so families can pay bills and fill their gas tanks.
No, the government needs to ban gas ’cause it’s literally destroying the planet & Americans need to get off their fat asses & walk for once so the US doesn’t win the “Most Heart Attacks” award for the 60th year in a row.
We need to ensure free, fair elections and a strong national defense which starts with energy independence.
None o’ these 3 things are relevant. The 1st 2 may be relevant in a sinister “I will support using the national defense to help Trump pull off a coup”. ’Course, he doesn’t go into detail ’bout the specifics o’ what a “free, fair election” looks like, ’cause it’s a dogwhistle for “I’m a loon who refuses to believe that hasbeen TV celebrity who was perennially under 50% approval rating could lose reelection after he made himself so popular letting people die o’ a disease he refused to believe in”.
Together we will reign in federal spending,
To hell we will.
Make Crime Illegal Again,
No, ¡fuck off! Conservatives are so fucking lame with the billions o’ dad jokes they spew ’stead o’ actual coherent ideas. Here, let me try: “We need policies for folks, not wokes. D-d’ya get it. See, ’cause it rhymes. See, it’s folks, & then wokes — I’ll be here all night, guys, ¡don’t worry!”. I can’t wait till conservatives start talking ’bout fucking “wokeswagons” & bringing up that they’re made by Nazis, & therefore le wokes are the real Nazis, not realizing that in German it’s pronounced “vokehsvahgun”, which sounds badass, I want that car right now & I hate cars.
Maybe to solve the energy crisis & ecological catastrophe we should start the slogan “Make Americans Walk Again”.
If you truly want to “make crime illegal again”, then you’ll surely support the Justice Department arresting the ex-president for his many crimes in office, including inciting an insurrection.
( Psst, “make crime illegal again” is just a dogwhistle for “arrest the blacks” ).
I’m a hard worker
’Nother pampered business owner who doesn’t know what real work is.
it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work!
How ’bout you actually roll up your sleeves & get a real job like shoveling dirt ’stead o’ trying to use your inherited blood money to buy the government. O, wait, that would take actual effort & skill, & you just want to look cool like a worker, not actually be 1.
Larkin almost got me with the beginning clever way o’ twisting his failures as accomplishments, but then pissed ’way all that goodwill with his bootleg em dashes & dad joke slogan.
Tier: E
Next we have the 9th district representative election ’tween Democrat Adam Smith — not to be confused with the OG Adam Smith father o’ liberal economics — & Republican Doug Basler. Adam Smith is a warmonger who’s on the House Armed Services Committee; but all Americans are war criminals, — or as the hip anarchists say in the burbs, AAAWC, which is pronounced like a crow squawk — so Adam Smith, who can’t squawk like a crow, is still boring. So let’s move on to Doug Basler:
Nobody fucking cares ’bout his lack o’ experience — tho I will bring up, to be fair, that he does claim to have supported homeless people with food as part o’ his church, so he is 1 o’ the few Republicans who doesn’t utterly despise the homeless. Maybe.
Anyway, let’s hurry this up, the election’s coming & my 5 readers who don’t live in Washington State won’t know who to illegally vote 20 times for without my unfunny jokes.
Statement
Career politicians are the biggest problem in government today, promising they’ll fix your problems and then, when elected, they ignore you until they need your vote again.
That’s a terrible way to hold a career, since in order to keep that career you need to keep being elected, which is hard when people get pissed @ you & don’t vote for you after your clever li’l trick.
¿Who is the alternative to a “career politician”? ¿A politician who’s honest ’nough to admit out loud that they don’t give a fuck ’bout being reelected & don’t bother not pissing off their constituents?
The 9th District deserves more than a longtime incumbent and tired promises.
“We deserve mo’ than someone with proven experience. We need some rando we found off the street who has no idea what they’re doing”.
¿What promises has Adam Smith failed to keep? It’s not as if Washington State’s Democrats masquerade as conservatives to trick some imaginary conservative majority to vote for them.
When we lose our voice, we can also lose our opportunity at the American Dream.
I’m starting to think these hopeless Republican joke candidates are here only so they can say they’ve technically had their doggerel poetry published.
We elect representatives to maintain a safe environment for our families and children, to protect our borders, our economy, and our constitutional rights.
Nope. Maybe some Washingtonians do, but not ’nough o’ them that their candidates don’t lose. “We, the privileged minority, keep voting for things that the majority have no interest in ’cause it screws them o’er, & then the majority o’erride us & vote for free gay weed & open borders with Canada so they can sneak in when the fascists inevitably take o’er Washington II. That’s undemocratic. Make Democrats Democratic Again”.
…
You know, to be honest, e’en this Republican candidate’s boring & just spews clichés ’bout “food on the table” & “gas in your car” & “dicks in my ass”. Dicks in my ass are ol’, the new hip, wokeness is “vaginas in my ass”. Get with the times, ol’ man.
Tier: Zzzzz…
The Secretary of State are both boring. Any Washingtonian reading this should vote for 1 o’ them, ’course, but that doesn’t mean we should read their statements.
I don’t e’en know who the fuck Bill Ramos is & I don’t think I e’en got to vote for this position, so I’m not sure why this is in my pamphlet, which is specific to my district. But I’m going to assume by his short blurb ’bout “commonsense solutions” ( ¡god damn it, now the Democrats are making me drink! ), public safety ( ¡hey, that’s a Republican bingo phrase! ), housing, reproductive rights, & the like, that he is boring.
As for Ken Moninski…
As a husband, father of two young girls and a small business owner, I understand the struggles many families face.
Moninski was reportedly sued for plagiarism by e’ery other Republican candidate on the planet.
We have watched as our neighborhoods have become less safe, our children have fallen behind in their education, and basic essentials have become more expensive.
When Democrats in Olympia voted to restrict policing, crime increased; when Democrats voted to raise taxes again, families suffered. We need a change. I am running to bring common sense solutions to Olympia that produce real results.
Republicans have a strange conception o’ “common sense”. To me common sense, as well as basic mathematics, is that if you cut the taxes that fund the schools, they will get e’en worse, or a’least not get better. & if not, well, then we shouldn’t care whether or not people lose more or less tax $, since apparently $ isn’t all that useful. It seems arbitrary to assert that schools, & only schools, have the magical property o’ not getting any value out o’ $. Similarly, it’s counterintuitive to think that cutting assistance to the poor, which is paid with tax $, will make it easier for them to get basic essentials.
Anyone who pays attention to the halfway intelligent capitalist economists understand the contradiction: the main conservative policy for driving down inflation, in the conservative Federal Reserve chair’s own words, is driving down spending by making it so that poor people can’t afford to buy things, the very thing this politician is complaining ’bout. This is also the outcome o’ decreasing spending: the only way government spending can logically create inflation is by buying things ( almost certainly for poor people, specially since that’s the spending that conservatives target the most ), so to drive down inflation is, ’gain, to drive down poor spending. I would love to know his magic solution, that doesn’t contradict all conservative economics, for decreasing inflation without decreasing poor spending. Now, I know a way to decrease inflation without decreasing poor spending: redistribute income so that rich people are buying less useless shit without hurting poor people’s ability to buy necessities. But this requires mo’ taxation ( which, by itself, I should add, should logically cut inflation, since it should cut spending by rich people ) & mo’ government spending, so this doesn’t fit in with this politician’s goals.
I should add that I doubt cutting poor spending will decrease inflation, anyway, since by cutting spending, you’re also cutting demand, which drives production, thereby cutting production, as well, which is the main impediment to inflation. The aforementioned conservative Federal Reserve chair & his fellow “serious economists” basically outright admitted that their main goal for driving down inflation is a manufactured recession. Granted, the other major cause for inflation are monopolies, which neither Republicans nor e’en Democrats seem fit to talk ’bout, since the idea o’ markets being competitive — you know, the thing that makes neoliberal distinguish “market” economies from “socialism”, which they merely define as a “government monopoly” — is an alien concept to our economically-incompetent politicians. In fact, breaking up monopolies would probably be the absolute best way to cut inflation, as competition is the main thing that drives prices downward & it wouldn’t dampen demand. But that’s “communist”, which is also “woke”, so a recession it is. That is what the serious people call “capitalist efficiency”: rich people deliberately weakening the economy’s productive capabilities, & their ability to gain profits, just so they can avoid paying probably less than they lose from this productivity loss, just to spite poor people.
Then ’gain, it’s doubtful this mediocre politician has e’en thought 10% o’ these things & just wants to have a ’scuse for cutting taxes & spending so rich people will give him lobby money. I’m embarrassed to just realize that I put mo’ effort & time & detail in that economic analysis I just shit out — which is surely full o’ simplifications & arm-chair theorizing — in a quick joke blog article than this professional politician did for their fucking election blurb. Not only is Moninski not qualified to be representative; he’s not e’en qualified to be published by Penguin Books.
Anyway, Moninski has gotten way mo’ attention from me than he deserves from e’eryone, so let’s move on.
Tier: Zzzzz…
Next we have Lisa Callan vs. Chad Magendaz. Callan talks ’bout keeping neighborhoods safe & helping small businesses & how she doesn’t like partisanship, so she’s basically a sane Republican, which is an exotic way to say “Democrat”, & is a way o’ saying she’s boring. Let’s talk ’bout Chad ’stead:
In an era of hyper-partisan politics, Chad has earned a reputation for building bridges.
Yeah, & he’ll sell it to you if you’re gullible ’nough.
An education champion in Olympia, he doubled school funding while reducing property tax rates for 44% of school districts.
Bullshit. Well, since this person has magically broken the laws o’ math & have increased funding while decreasing spending, surely he’s brimming with excitement to explain his brilliant strategy in detail…
He formed bipartisan coalitions passing landmark legislation on computer science education, innovative schools, electric vehicles, and cybercrime.
¿O? ¿No? ¿We’re just going to talk ’bout irrelevant other shit now? OK. Maybe it’s a trade secret.
The Seattle Times endorsed Chad in all his previous House races, calling him “one of the clearest thinkers in the Legislature” who “brings much-needed moderation and intellectual rigor to Olympia.
Well, they have shit taste, so we can ignore their endorsement.
If this cracker’s so good, ¿why did his ass get unelected in 2017? ¿Where’s his genius math formula to explain that problem?
Hold on, I almost missed this:
Other Professional Experience Computer science teacher (Bellevue SD); Software developer (Microsoft, Nike, Panasonic, etc.); U.S. Navy submarine officer
Nobody should e’er let programmers be politicians, since they’re socially incompetent, specially Microsoft programmers, who aren’t e’en good programmers. He must’ve learned his fudging bullshit #s skill show ’bove from Microsoft.
Ah, ¿but what does the Progressive Voter’s Guide say ’bout him that he modestly forget to mention?
Magendanz was proud of his “A” rating from the National Rifle Association during his last campaign, which raises questions about his willingness to keep our communities safe from gun violence.
A gun nut ( surprisingly, no talk o’ gun control anywhere in this pamphlet, ’cause e’en Republicans know gunhumping isn’t popular in Washington ). Nice try, Chad. It’s time to put down your 1st-person-shooters & get serious.
Tier: 🤓
OK, but fuck this nerd, ’cause we finally have an exciting candidate in Republican Stephanie Peters:
Elected Experience
Renton PCO since 2007. No War-Full Stop.
A PCO is basically just a Republican intern. I have no idea what “No War-Full Stop” is s’posed to be, specially what a “war-full” is. I think this is ’nother bastard em dash. I tried looking it up, but couldn’t find any organization with that name, so I think Peters just got so excited to give her opinion that she just spewed it in her experience section for an early treat.
Other Professional Experience
33 years in resource and finance management, auditing, implementing efficiency measures, turning problems into solutions.
This is the same empty padding that e’ery entry-level manager puts on their résumé to pretend like they’ve accomplished anything or have any skills.
Only that which is measured can be improved.
This sounds like something a dictator from a creepy dystopian work would say. Well, happiness can’t be measured, so I guess it must be expunged.
Government is no different. All the money spent in this state needs audited and any felonious usage recaptured and returned. Accountability in government – no matter who!
BEEP BOOP. I WILL FIND ALL THE OFFICIALS WHO ARE SNEAKING PENS HOME & WILL EXTERMINATE THEM.
Government is different in that it’s government & not business, & therefore requires different skills. For instance, what is “efficient” when it comes to running a laundry business turns into “violations o’ international law” when it comes to, say, military managing.
Statement
You have a right to assurance of election security and integrity, and our elected officials have an obligation to provide verifiable information so you can pursue and obtain that assurance.
So tell me, person who has no experience or expertise when it comes to the complex matters o’ elections, what assurances you provide in terms o’ “security” ( ¿does this include security from harrassment by pollwatchers? ) & “integrity” & what “verification” process elected officials are “obligated” to provide.
WA Voters are expected to “Trust the system,” yet we cannot verify that our voter rolls are clean, that our ballot chain-of-custody is sound, that our tabulation process has integrity, that our routers aren’t vulnerable to exploitation, that our systems aren’t being misused, or that our election management system is secure enough to withstand cyber attacks.
I mean, in a way, this in true, in the same way that postmodernists are right when they say that we don’t truly know anything, that all knowledge is merely an interpretation o’ senses. So I guess we should just give up on all elections, since our election system isn’t 100% verified to be proven mathematically correct thru objective science & this genius intern & bookkeeper can’t seem to provide any example for a “verification process” for our voter rolls that they are “clean” — clean o’ what, I don’t know. Call me radical, but I think that all votes matter, e’en those with cumstains on them. Cumstains on your ballot means you love democracy, so if you’re gainst cumstains on ballots, you’re gainst democracy.
Basically, this is all FUD by & for people who must experience this feeling a lot, since there is much unknown to their uneducated asses. I feel like actually reading a book or 2 & not being a moron is a far better solution to their crippling anxiety & uncertainty in this complex, technological world than trying to run for government.
Stand with me…demand change. Trust, but verify.
I think this last sentence came from some political speech generator.
Tier: 🤪
Next we have Steve Bergquist vs. Jeanette Burrage. Bergquist is an ordinary man in an ordinary flannel shirt & is boring. As for Burrage…
Community Service
Currently: Assisting a disabled man with shopping, bill paying and home maintenance[…]
The most entertainment I will get from this blurb is imagining this candidate thumbing this blurb out while standing in checkout.
Statement
Jeanette believes restoring safety in our communities needs to be a higher priority.
Jeanette is wrong: danger builds character, & as e’ery cartoon rich man will tell you, disruption is the lifeblood o’ dynamic capitalism.
She believes we need to restore respect for the role of parents concerning their children.
This is impossible, not the least o’ which ’cause the average parent is too half-assed to respect the role for themselves, much less will anyone else respect these slobs when they just sit there & let their brat scream & kick people on an 8-hour flight.
The State legislature passed a bill requiring all public school personnel to learn oppression-victim identity principles so they can be taught to students.
That sounds like bootleg Marxism, & I am aghast. ¿How much funding must we give these schools till they can afford to teach the real thing? I won’t have my kids learning anything but authentic, homegrown, GMO-free, American-made Marxism. Accept no substitutes ( ’cept teachers — they’re cool ).
¿Why do I have a feeling that this is something this idiot made up ’cause they’re an idiot & a liar? — such an idiotic liar that they couldn’t e’en come up with halfway convincing fake leftist concept. ¿“Oppression-victim identity principle”? That’s not a sociological concept — that’s a mathematical law.
Our children will be taught that their racial identity will determine their lot in life.
“¡They’re not teaching my kids happy lies & now they won’t end up as delusional as I am!”.
Parents should have a greater choice.
“I believe children are possessions, mere objects & slaves, to their parents & have no rights to an indendent life outside their parents & their parents’ tiny cult communes & should be kept ’hind iron curtains ’way from any alien knowledge like a North Korean citizen”. I love the hypocrisy o’ religious nuts who complain ’bout Marxism, e’en tho none o’ these tools could e’en comprehend a page o’ Das Kapital if their lives depended on it, but are in favor o’ forcing children to be subjected to lame-ass religious communes. Imagine choosing lame-ass religious communes o’er badass worker communes where e’eryone smokes weed & speaks German. Conservatives truly have no culture.
Jeanette Burrage will seek out root causes of problems and work with integrity for long term solutions to keep our district a thriving place to live for everyone.
Well, since the root cause o’ all problems, including heartburn, is capitalism, that means she’s going to o’erthrow it. ¡Radical!
This was mediocre, other than the slight spice o’ the CPR — also known as Capricious Pastry Rhino [ update: “CRT” has become such an empty conservameme that I legit forgot its initials & mixed it up with CPR ] — conspiracymongering, which put it down a tier, ’cause she couldn’t e’en be exotic with her mongering.
Tier: D
All right, next is Claire Wilson vs. Linda Kockmar. Wilson wants you to know that she loves “public safety” ( for white people ) so much that she italicized it & actually provided a realistic # & a specific economic policy she implemented, which many studies say is effective for fueling employment & decreasing poverty, & therefore wrote a better blurb than e’eryone else, & therefor is boring. As for Linda Kochmar…
Do you feel safe? We have vehicles being stolen, rampant shoplifting, drug-addicted homelessness, repeat criminals not being arrested, drive-by shootings, and violence in our schools.
¡Fuck that nerdy shit when we can talk ’bout shootings & crimes &… ¿drug-addicted homelessness? I didn’t know concepts could be addicted to drugs, but apparently Seattle’s love for drugs is so immense that it’s gone to that extent. It’s time to boycott Rockstar if they don’t make a Grand Theft Auto game in a Seattle parody already. I mean it — quit fucking around.
We can’t live this way!
Speak for yourself: I’m doing just fine. After the last mission I accomplished I already got my own car spray lot & finally got those pigs from blocking me from accessing Bainbridge.
Do you feel your current Legislators have let you down?
No — that would require me to have expectations o’ some kind, which is a strange thing to have for government officials.
My opponent voted for many of the failed policies that have brought us to this current chaos.
Um, ¿are you not e’en going to address the study I just linked to? You’ll ne’er win our debate this way.
I’ve fought for public safety, attracting living-wage jobs, and educational opportunities for you.
Unfortunately, you win these kind o’ positives thru the right economic policies, not thru hand-to-hand combat, so none o’ this fighting accomplished anything.
I’ve fought for common sense solutions to the problems affecting our community.
They’re so commonsense, she doesn’t e’en have to list them.
I’ve fought against raising taxes and for government living within its means.
Yes, I’m sure this noble representative’s living in a slum & living off ramen noodle with all that lobby money they make & “government living within its means” doesn’t totally mean “poor people get fucked while I get rich”.
Government must be transparent and accountable to the people.
What she means is “transparently full o’ shit” & “accountable for giving me lots o’ money”.
The hard-working families in the 30th District deserve better than rising inflation and soaring crime.
MezunFact Corp judges this as “Pants on Fire” lie.
When I am elected again to the Legislature, my heart and soul, my experience, and determination will be to represent you!
¿But will her run be pacifist or genocide?
I want to point out that her opponent is also a frail ol’ woman, so the opening screed ’bout Grandma Wilson’s radical antifa drugcrimelordism is specially funny.
Tier: D
Next we have Jamilia E. Taylor vs. Casey Jones. Taylor isn’t a hockey-mask wearing vigilante who hangs out with mutant ninja turtles, so she’s boring. As for Casey Jones…
Elected Experience
Not a career politician. Endorsed by Stand Up Federal Way, Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs, Federal Way Police Officers’ Guild, Federal Way Police Lieutenant Association, Des Moines Police Officers Guild.
Yeah, he’s not 1 o’ those filthy politicians, but a police officer, who solve problems not thru underhanded tactics but thru violence, which is much better. Well, I have good news for you, Casey Jones: once the militia Qanons finally bother to topple o’er the Democrats Jenga tower & set themselves up as Dictators for Life, we won’t have any more o’ these filthy career politicians anymo’ as the police will just run e’erything for us in what we call a “police state”. ¿Now doesn’t that sound nice?
Other Professional Experience
Current police commander. Prior police lieutenant, detective, and officer with assignments as a school resource officer, SWAT member, and bicycle officer.
This guy is jizzing so hard on all things police that he e’en mentions being an officer o’ bicycles. I, too, am sick o’ all these bike gangs, running o’er citizens e’erywhere, not staying on their side o’ the street, & honking loudly.
Almost certainly, you or someone you know has experienced increased levels of crime [—]
This is, in fact, 100% wrong.
[—] such as open-air drug use [—]
That’s only a “crime” if you’re a fucking square.
Radical groups have taken over policy development in Olympia.
¡Awesome!
These same groups have prevented officers from arresting criminals who needed to be arrested.
Clearly they didn’t need to be arrested if they weren’t arrested & the world hasn’t blown up, so you’re clearly being o’erdramatic.
Let’s send a first responder to Olympia to fix this mess.
Let’s send a loudly biased man to steal our tax $ & give them to his buddies in the police.
Tier: 💀
OK, I’m getting tired o’ these clones, so I’m just going to skip ’head to Chris Vance, who has no party preference. Let’s see what exotic stands he takes:
I’m running for the State Senate as a moderate independent because extremism and partisanship is out of control in our political system, too many politicians in both parties have let us down, and voters deserve more choices.
Unfortunately, I only vote for radical independents.
State revenues are up; we don’t need to raise taxes. But schools are still dependent on local levies. Our school funding system is unstable and unfair. Crime rates are increasing while police, prosecutors, jails and courts are underfunded. And there are major gaps in our transportation system.
Remember, this is an “indepedent”, which means, “liar”, which means, “Republican”.
Not only was this as lame as almost all the other blurbs, ’twas a dishonest bait-&-switch. & I can’t abide by a dishonest politician.
Tier: E
OK, here’s an interesting 1: Karen Keiser vs. Marliza Melzer. Keiser has been a state senator for 26 years & is competent & boring. ¿But what ’bout Melzer?
Our current career politicians have no problems lying, destroying our economy, taxing us out of our homes and vehicles, supporting pro-crime policies, and policies that sexually groom our young children while at the same time labeling concerned parents as domestic terrorists [emphasis mine].
To paraphrase the wise Kurt Cobain: if you think teaching kids sex ed is “grooming”, you are a closet paedophile.
Tier: 😬
After a bunch o’ unopposed candidates, who we don’t need to discuss, we have Democrat Sharon Tomiko Santos vs. Republican John Dickinson. Sharon Tomiko Santos has been state representative since 1998 & is competent & boring. As for John Dickinson…
Take big steps to legalize cannabis; restore Comet Lodge graveyard; develop the LoWay on ADA compliant Chief Si’ahl trail as passed by City and community in 08231999, for less advantaged. Big steps for only one term as term limits for elected officials are needed.
¿Who would vote no to restoring graveyards & mountain trails thru cities?
Unfortunately, Dickinson got so high he missed out on the fact that cannabis has already been legalized in Washington State. Also, 1-term limits is 1 o’ those ideas that sound cool to edgelords who hate government but is laughably disastrous.
Pro life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness driven by a trust in truth, justice, and reconciliation without the current Animal Farm Speak that destroys our representative government, guides this campaign to fix our woke, broke, and a joke of an education system while giving six thousand dollar credits to each household.
& then he loses me. I love how he complains ’bout “Animal Farm Speak”, but then spews literal government propaganda from the Declaration of Independence ( much as halfhearted atheists think Jesus, who wants to destroy the world in a cataclysmic holocaust o’ literal hellfire, was Way Cool™, faux-libertarians think George Washington, slaveholder, was Way Cool™ ). I’m sure George Orwell, who hated empty phrases that get repeated ad nauseum by people o’ the same party would have loved the word “woke”, specially when used as a ’scuse to plunder school funds for regressive economic policies that sound cool if you’ve ne’er read an economics book in your life but thought Milton Friedman was Way Cool™ ’cause he liked, like, freedom, man, & hated that Federal Reserve he heavily inspired.
Tier: 🎄
Next we have Tana Senn vs. Mike Nykreim. Democrat Tana Senn spends ¼th o’ her tiny blurb talking ’bout her brats nobody wants to hear ’bout & is competent & boring. Mike Nykreim o’ the Election Integrity Party doesn’t wait till you’re done reading their party affiliation to let you know that they’re a lunatic.
Other Professional Experience
Just “Bing” my name, plenty there on the web. Just please take the time to read our statement below.
Perfect proof that this is a mad man is that they think anyone uses Bing anymore or that anyone talks ’bout “binging” people in these here burbs we’re rocking. I’d Yahoo somebody before I Bing someone — fuck, I’d Dogpile someone before I Bing someone. Nobody’s binging anyone round here.
Also, I don’t feel like quoting the whole thing, but he lists his marriage as “community service”. I’m not sure if that’s his alien understanding o’ being “cute” or a hackneyed “marriage, ¿whattayagonnadoboutit?” Honeymooners granddad joke.
You have a right to assurance of election security and integrity, and our elected officials have an obligation to provide verifiable information so you can pursue and obtain that assurance. Washington voters are expected to “Trust” the system, yet we cannot verify that our voter rolls are clean, that our ballot chain-of-custody is sound, that our tabulation process has integrity, that our routers aren’t vulnerable to exploitation, that our systems aren’t being misused, or that our election management system is secure enough to withstand cyber attacks.
Stand with us….. demand change. Trust, but verify!
Wait a fucking minute… ¿Am I feeling déjà vu?
Stephanie Peters:
WA Voters are expected to “Trust the system,” yet we cannot verify that our voter rolls are clean, that our ballot chain-of-custody is sound, that our tabulation process has integrity, that our routers aren’t vulnerable to exploitation, that our systems aren’t being misused, or that our election management system is secure enough to withstand cyber attacks.
Stand with me…demand change. Trust, but verify.
He e’en copypasted the slogan “Trust, but verify” & used scarequotes round “trusting” the system like some boomer who listens to Rage Against the Machine & doesn’t understand their politics. I guess he did add 3 periods to his elipses.
That confirms it: these are Twitterbots set up by Trump to troll the Washington State election. I don’t see any checkmark anywhere on this pamphlet.
Tier: 🤖
That’s all I care ’bout writing ’bout now. I’d make a funny tier list graphic with the candidates’ goofy faces, but most o’ the tiers I used aren’t e’en real tiers & I have 1 hour to post this before antifa shoots me & burns my house down & inflates my prices.
Democrats are going to have to give up their “biggest losers” hats to the Ukrainians who wanted to stay a part o’ Ukraine in Donetsk, Luhansk People’s Republics, Zaporizhzhia, & Kherson, who lost greater than Ralph Nader did in US elections with only 2% o’ the vote in the former 2, 7% o’ the vote in Zaporizhzhia, & a slightly better score than Nader, 13% in Kherson, in totally valid, genuine referendums that would determine whether or not these places would voluntarily join the Federation that just-so-happens to be militarily occupying them. In normal times you would think a vote gainst your own nation would a’least be a somewhat close race, — for example, Americans are so delusionally patriotic that they’re willing to risk their lives so their beloved country can swipe oil & not e’en lower said oil’s price for ordinary consumers, & Britains will so earnestly sacrifice themselves for patriotism that they’re willing to eat British food — much less in favor o’ a country that is invading you & killed many people you knew.
These #s are interesting in that it shows that the Russian government isn’t e’en trying to hide what a sham this referendum is — presumably as a show o’ mocking force. A halfway competent organization trying to genuinely fake a referendum would have the modicum o’ subtlety to make the election close. After all, this is how Dark Brando Sando the Bando — a word just as totally valid as these referendums — stole Light Trump the Pump’s massive dumps with his underground magnets & USB slots. They — the Russian government, not Dark Brando Sando the Bando — might as well have declared the results as the infinity symbol or the poop emoji. It’s basically a shitpost.
Still, the US midterms are only a li’l mo’ than a month from now. Democrats may take back their crown & somehow lose the house, & maybe e’en the senate if they’re truly on their F game, to the lamest insurrectionists in the world.
