It’s Friday, at least in my part of the space-time continuum, so here’s an open thread for you all. No trolls, MRAs, Trump fans, etc.
And since I’m posting weirdly filtered pics, here’s a weirdly filtered pic of my cats in their kitten days:
And some random ladies having a drink:
Health update: Earlier this week I saw my neurologist for the formal review of my MRI, which means I also got the measurements for my brain bleed at the time of my hospitalization and how big it is now.
It’s shrunk to about a third of its original size.
dikdik,
Translation: it won’t be that bad… for me.
People suck.
I personally think we should not be shy about telling people that enabling racism by passively tolerating it is effectively the same as actively supporting it. I think people like those you’re describing will just get worse if we coddle them.
That said, I know there are circumstances where you can’t be as aggressive like workplace.
Glad things are coming along VP!
VP that sounds brilliant. I hope it’s as brilliant as it sounds?
Thanks, wwth and opposablethumbs. Yes, it’s a good result – as good as I could hope for, tbh. We’ll see how things look with my next MRI, spring 2017.
@Victorious Parasol
Basically no evidence that the Clinton Foundation was/is “pay to play” despite months of digging by the media (“we haven’t found anything, but questions remain” was the usual mantra).
Besides that, anybody who can complain about the Clinton Foundation and be OK with the Trump Foundation, not to mention the massive conflicts of interest involved in the man’s business dealings AND those of some of his cabinet picks, his refusal to release his tax returns so we don’t know who he owes money to, is either woefully ignorant or just making excuses for taking a political position they were determined to take anyway.
@vp
That’s great news!
Thank you all for your input. It’s just so strange to me that people consider themselves liberal and are so comfortable with Trump. I mean, I get that it affects them less. I just can’t imagine looking at other people suffering and being like “Hmm…. This isn’t real.”
But she also doesn’t believe Bannon is a white nationalist. So I guess facts are just out the window here! So there is really no point to me saying anything. It’s hard not to feel defeated this month. I’ve been calling my reps every week and it seems like nothing matters.
There is a new HBomberguy Video on Cultural Marxism
How/why did Debbie Harry turn out to be a pain in the ass?
Enquiring minds and all that…
@StephenLawt
It’s a bit blink-and-you-miss-it, but HBomberGuy correctly identifies one often-overlooked component of the nationalists’ fantasy world: Everyone in it is beautiful. They really do seem to think that if they can just get their way, there will be no ugly or even plain people, especially women. It reminds me of the MRA assertion that in “the past,” when women “knew their place,” they were better looking. They don’t seem to realize that women in old paintings are lovely because the painters painted them that way, and women in old photographs are lovely because unlovely women were not frequently photographed.
If you judged the population of the current year from photos in celebrity magazines, you would get the idea that this is a gorgeous time to be alive.
@Sinkable John – I would be happy to volunteer some proofreading, if not creating content. Let me know a way to reach you when you’re ready to get started.
(Some background on me: I’ve got decent writing/editing skills, but also because of ADHD and/or bad habits I’m not terribly organized with time. I hope that isn’t too much a drawback, because your project sounds like an interesting thing to help with.)
Crip Dyke:
It is a line from Heart of Glass:
‘Once had love, and it was a gas.
Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass’.
… we are living in a time of widespread famine, but somehow rich other than in food.
@Stephen
IDK why that Miley Cyrus bit is sticking in my craw. Like, yeah, the lady who is a multimillionaire is more prosperous than the woman married with 4 surviving kids and a long skirt. I just can’t get over how that is even a question that pops up to these fellows.
@Sinkable John
I would also be interested in your project. I do freelance research/writing, and I’m starting to get a handle on HTML/CSS and JavaScript. It’s frustrating not being able to do anything about what’s happening…basically everywhere in the world right now.
@Victorious Parasol
Yay for good news, and I hope you get more of those come spring.
@Jack
Am glad you like it.
It started with a doodle I called Ed. Then it sorta went downhill from there, and I started drawing varied Eds based on everyone around me and myself, and Edified famous portraits. By the time I was 14 I had a poster-size Ed Guevara modeled after the uberfamous pic, for example. I think the only one of those giant portraits that could have survived to this day is Louise MichEd, because I gifted it to a friend. The others were lost in a hilarious accident involving a candle and a fork.
Ed is literally the only thing I can draw besides more abstract doodles. Gonna try and see if I can find one of the original Eds though.
@Conan The Librarian & epitome of incomprehensibility
To be fair it’s not really about them poor white cishet men who didn’t know that fascism isn’t actually gonna make them any happier, because frankly, fuck ’em. It’s more of another example of how utterly devoid of humanity that ideology is. The main focus IS the bigotry, just seen through the angle of what they had to strip themselves of to get where they are now.
If it was, I wouldn’t have even formulated the idea to begin with, because I’m just terrible at this whole time and organization thing ._.
So don’t worry about that :p
Today I’m gonna scour the terrible, terrible corners of the internet and write a few examples. Just… mind that as I said, I can’t structure.
Re Clinton Foundation: what Conan the Librarian said.
Part of the problem is that people think sexism (and racism) is something done by consciously evil people wearing a T shirt saying, “I am a willful bigot.” What usually happens is that people find rationalizations for their prejudice and never notice. -I vaguely remember a study where people had to decide on college admissions. When the black kids had better coursework, then exam results were more important, and when they had better exam results, coursework was more important. “Racist? Me? How dare you! I just happen to believe that coursework/exam results are the important thing.”
So people grade on one hell of a curve. The Clinton Foundation may possibly have allowed pay to play sometimes, but used the money to save lives? Terrible! The Trump Foundation quite definitely ran on pay to play frequently, and used the money to pay Trump’s legal obligations? No big deal. Clinton got paid $250,000 to give a talk to Goldmann Sachs? Waaaaay too close to Wall St. Trump gets paid $1,200,000 to do the same? Well he’s a successful man, what do you expect? Waddaya mean sexist? You can’t prove that Clinton is innocent, so I have to vote for the man – I mean Trump.
This sort of double standard doesn’t mean people are evil (although the results can be evil). Sadly it means they’re human. I’m sure I do it too sometimes, although I’ve no idea when. That’s what “subconscious” means.
Re: Clinton Foundation
During the election campaign someone gave a good illustration of how this whole ‘pay to play’ thing got distorted.
They gave the example of a Saudi Prince who pledged $20 million through the Foundation. That money was to be used in some education project in KSA.
About a decade later Clinton was on some junket as part of her job as SoS. There was a reception, and amongst the dozens of people there, that prince was one of the attendees. As a diplomat, and presumably just as a normal human, she exchanged a few pleasantries with the prince.
The story was then spun as Clinton using the Foundation as a way of taking money for access.
Of course “Clinton meets Saudi prince after he pays $20m to Foundation” was literally true. But it hardly encapsulates the reality of what happened. Don’t need to explain to folks here the difference between things happening one after the other versus cause and effect.
I just found out about the Gay Agenda and it’s a thing of beauty. I wish I could afford one of those.
@ vicky p
I’m so chuffed for you.
Funnily enough I was just thinking of you today. Farage is in the news again. He seems to be sulking that he’s dropped out of the news. He claimed it’s because government officials have been banned from talking about him.
There was a government minister on the next (unconnected) news story. At the end the newsreader asked if Farage’s claim was true. The minister replied that it wasn’t and the only reason no-one was talking about Farage is that the government is only concerned about important stuff.
“Clinton meets Saudi prince” to me sounds like “secretary of state does her fucking job.”
If she used her job to get donations to her charity, that’s shady, but surely someone somewhere could have demonstrated that she took money and actually did something untoward?
So I managed to make them cut the bigoted shit, and then they apologized and reconsidered why they were saying it. Small victory, I guess. A bunch of progressives became aware of a bigoted bias they had without ever realizing it was kinda bigoted.
Namely, it was about a friend we have in common. She often wears her late father’s old suits. Bit of a laugh about how many people, upon meeting her, think she’s a man. I remarked that it says a lot more about us that we think that, than it says about her, and that’s when the disagreement started, right on this sentence.
I guess what made me angry was that they so strongly disagreed and clung to their rationalizations. I’m glad we fixed that.
… but err, sorry to people who were waiting for my example stuff on this little project. I’d forgotten about this lunch (which took almost the whole day, ’cause we don’t fuck around with lunch) and didn’t get the time to do anything. Now I’m drunk and it’s getting late, so you’ll have to wait until at least tomorrow, sorry.
@ryeash
I’m sorry, I didn’t see your comment. I guess you posted while I was writing mine and I forgot to refresh and check before posting. Well, I don’t think coding would be useful to this, but research and writing are exactly what’s needed.
Does anyone who’s interested in this think they’d do a good job at coordinating the others’ work ? I know I’m kinda starting this shit, so the responsibility should be mine, but I really suck at that. True, I don’t exactly like it when people tell me what to do, but the one thing I dislike even more is to be the one doing it.
@ Alan
I’m pretty chuffed to little NAAFI breaks about it myself, though I’d like to get to the point where I don’t have that thing in my brain any more. The measurements themselves sound pretty little, given that they’re expressed in millimeters, and then you see how much space it takes up in your brain. Which makes you realize just how small the human brain is, and you start wondering how you can live in such a small space.
ETA: And now I’m being evil and thinking that Farage would probably be quite peeved to see that his brain isn’t as big as he thinks it is.