By David Futrelle
Well, the post I was working on for tonight turned into a much bigger post than I expected; I’ll put it up some time later this weekend if I can wrestle it into shape by then. In the meantime, have this OPEN THREAD celebrating the new hero of the moment, Plaid Shirt Guy.
Plaid shirt guy (real name Tyler Linfesty) was randomly picked to be one of those directly behind Donald Trump at his rally in Billings, Montana last night. Not a fan of Trump, Linfesty was caught on camera responding to a number of Trump’s more outlandish assertions with obvious and rather comical disbelief — until Trump’s people ushered him off the stage and into the arms of the Secret Service, who ultimately tossed him from the rally and send him on his way.
Here’s one of Linfesty’s finest moments:
This guy rules pic.twitter.com/TgP1sHycVC
— Clem Fandango (@Squanch_Me) September 7, 2018
Here he is being given the hook:
In solidarity with Billings #plaidshirtguy who was escorted off the risers after wearing a @DemSocialists sticker for 20 minutes. pic.twitter.com/wNH08GzMU4
— Billings DSA (@Billings_DSA) September 7, 2018
Shortly after that, several other rallygoers standing behind Trump were also sent on their way:
When you realize halfway through a Trump rally that the people in the bleachers need to be peppier and blonder. pic.twitter.com/NytEn23a9g
— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) September 7, 2018
Linfesty’s reactions were a bit reminiscent of Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker’s legendary caught-on-camera response to some of Sean Spicer’s baffling pronouncements at one White House briefing. Here you can compare the two:
— sophie tylenol (@sophietylenol) September 7, 2018
The Daily Beast tracked Linfesty down after the event to ask him about his experience and his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America.
One more little video, this one turning Trump’s weird mispronunciation of the word “anonymous” into something rather glorious.
Anomynous. pic.twitter.com/sJ36OGPgOy
— Levi Fishman (@levifishman) September 7, 2018
We live in deeply weird times. Discuss.
Of course there’s going to be complaining about non-white folks in The Witcher. ‘Cus who pays attention to a multi-novel story arc about how racism, pogroms, and making people pariahs because they are different is destructive. Really it’s about how Fictional White People Are Awesone.
9.9
@Catalpa – Thanks! I put Pantomine on my to-read list.
While looking it up I also saw that Goodreads has lists/tags that can help me find specific things… so yeah, no need to bother people with this query (queer E for the straight A!)… but putting me on the right track was a big help. 😀
ETA: This face looks like it’s laughing. I meant to convey smiling, not mockery. Curse emojis! (shakes fist at sky)
Looking at an LGBT/youth fiction list also reminded me of something my high school tutoring student* was reading – Every Day by David Levithan. It has an interesting premise: the narrator is a mind inhabiting different bodies each day. A. is the genderless personality with their own memories, and they fall in love with a girl the same age – and have to convince her they’re the same person across different bodies. It’s an interesting premise even without the romance angle.
*His English teacher skews philosophical, it seems. There’s another existential, what’s-the-mind-body-connection sort of novel on his class reading list – Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis, in which Greek gods give some dogs human-like intelligence.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
The only thing that came immediately to mind for me was The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner. Not sure it’s quite what you’re looking for, but maybe it fits?
Glad you found useful tags at Goodreads. Good luck with the research.
OT:
Yippee! Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars, so they gave her boss the Nobel Prize for physics. Now she’s won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and she’s giving the $3,000,000 to help women, minorities and refugees get into physics.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/jocelyn-bell-burnell-female-scientist-donates-money-diversity-physics-breakthrough-prize-pulsars-a8526976.html
Who’d like some schadenfreude with their tea?
IIRC, Trump has tried to promote the idea that he really won the popular vote, except for that pesky Democratic voter fraud thing with illegal(s) voting all over the place. He probably also tried to conflate electoral collage victory and “election victory”.
Now, maybe he gave that up because there was too much pushback from critics, reminding everyone of the popular vote fiasco, so he decided to just be specifically proud of his ELECTORAL COLLAGE victory which was something he officially achieved, so critics won’t bother to keep harping on the popular vote.
Or maybe he’s lately found it inconvenient to highlight the inaccuracy of US elections. If the Democrats win the midterms bigly, he’ll maybe try the desperate gambit of openly declaring US democracy fake. Not because it might save his presidency, but because it’d give him one final burst of validation from supporters.
I mean, Kavanaugh is probably going to be confirmed still, because Republicans have dropped any pretense they might have to caring about the country, their constituents or anything else besides their own power. But it is kind of hilarious that Republicans have been selling the whole nice wholesome dad image to deflect from accusations that Kavanaugh is an authoritarian and now he’s being accused of perjury. I hope Democratic senate candidates use this. Make all Republicans explain why they tried to cover up criminality to ram through a judge who will assist the president in covering up his criminality. Tie every Republican in with Trump’s obstruction of justice. I really want to see this newfound Democratic spine on the campaign trail too.
Open thread so I’m going to share my big news. Apologies to those already know and who have heard me talk about nothing else for the last couple of months.
I got married last Saturday! Very happy. Husband is cute and nice and good at stuff.
Congratulations Viscaria!!!! Wishing you both every happiness 🙂
Congrats!
Does anyone else love these tacky blingee gif so ironically that you actually end up going full circle and loving them unironically? Or is it just me?
Plaid Suit Guy is clearly Handsome Son Jon. He’s had one to many chocolate milks.
I also unironically love them. And thanks, opposablethumbs, WWTH! I know it’s a bit crass to practically never post here anymore and then just drop in to share happy news. I’m just excited. ?
Some fun news: A Mysterious Package (based around my favorite podcasting murder hobos) I pre-ordered in May has finally begun to ship!
Some not fun news: I tried spray painting some stuff for my room, and I unfortunately underestimated the over spray. So I’ve just spent some time scrubbing my concrete balcony. The good news is that hot water and dish soap scrubbed with a green scrub pad took out quite a bit of it, and now I’ve got some Scrubbing Bubbles sitting on it for a bit.
Also, the spray paint didn’t go nearly as far as I had hoped it would (luckily it’s cheap), so I have a few plastic bins that are painted 3/4ths of the way, and a drawer set frame that’s about 9/10ths painted.
Ugh. Swedish election night. The Sweden Democrats seem to be on their way to second biggest party with about 20 % of the votes. This is a party that was a literal Nazi organization as late as the 1990:s. A former SS member was among the founders. Loads of them, even in the top, still have serious nazi sympathies. Their budget has a gaping hole of 30 billion (!) SKr. (3,3 billion USD). They talk law and order but no other party has as many members with serious criminal convictions, even among the top. They talk about improving welfare all the time but constantly votes against any such improvement in parliament. And 20 % of the voters happily support them. Ugh ugh and a million ughs.
How does that happen in such a famously progressive country?
I guess the short answer is we aren’t insulated against general (racist and fascist) trends blowing across Europe… But I also think it depends in part (and that these two things are connected) on the social democrats selling out and going more rightwing, a process that’s been going on for decades now. And the Sweden Democrats talk big about the welfare state and “the good old days”…
Dvärghundspossen – Maybe they want to build a “better people’s home”, with emphasis ambiguously on either “better home” or “better people”?
(Sorry if this joke either doesn’t make sense in Swedish, or has been already used to death.)
Are we just so inured to Trumpian outrages that we just laugh off plaid shirt guy? After being escorted away from view, he was IDed and questioned by police and Secret Service, then ejected. If it had simply been a case of moving him to a different part of the arena, it would have been a fairly unremarkable matter of image management. But no: he wasn’t allowed to stay, he was treated as a threat, and now his name is presumably on a list. For the crime of being insufficiently enthusiastic about Dear Leader!
@Moggie: in a word, “yes”. Welcome to the new age.
Congrats @Viscaria on the happy union
RE: mispronouncing things.
I notice several people I know who say ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’, at which point I make a witty ‘Atlantic’ pun.
OT: Today I’ve discovered, again, that facebook is disgusting, and will furthermore ask friends to sanitize memes by sending either screenshots or just the image itself.
From a supposedly progressive lgbt-rights community page: hundreds of people jump to the defence of an uber driver kicking gay women out of his car because obviously if there’s no evidence of obscene sexual activity, that means it DEFINITELY happened; thousands of people agree, calling the police on a black woman for using a coupon was totally not overreacting (or violent) if he thought it was fake; and yet hundreds more agree, it’s totally not appropriating native culture unless you say the magic words that every tru bigot™ says, in fact it’s the opposite, it’s “appreciation”.
Also is it just me or does it seem, from reading the comments, that the guardian is the most popular news for right-wingers to hate-read?
Maybe it’s not just facebook, maybe the internet as a whole is just a dumpster fire (with a few happy exceptions).
My favorite was Buzz Aldrin at a press conference. His facial contortions are legend.
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/sC2VPhp
@Viscaria
Aww. It’s so nice to hear great news! Congratulations and best wishes and may you and your new husband (like my grandparents) celebrate (at least) 75 years of marriage! (Boy, did they set the bar high. And even though they got married on April Fool’s Day, they seemed suited to each other and happy.)
@Dvärghundspossen
We’ve had much the same thing going on here across the Öresund in Denmark as well (with fewer direct nazi ties but the exact same politics including the talking up of social welfare especially wrt the elderly while consistently voting against such measures in parliament).
We’ve had the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) since the 90’s and now we have Nye Borgerlige (~New Conservatives) who are an off shoot for those who just don’t feel DF is quite right wing enough.
And a smaller (but fortunately irrelevant) offshoot from them who feel that even they aren’t quite right wing enough*.
* Or possibly just that they didn’t give the founder of this offshoot a quite important enough position in the party as he’s a thoroughly uncharismatic and non-self-aware guy who really fancies himself a leader. On his website, he describes himself as “Frihedens Soldat, De Svages Beskytter, Samfundets Vogter, Danernes Lys.” (The Soldier Of Freedom, The Protector Of The Weak, The Guardian Of Society, The Light Of The Danes)
Hello.
Congratulations to all who had achieve personal success !
Meanwhile, in England, some people are unhappy that the first occurence of a BBC new politic program had only women in it.
I think you can guess what kind of people.
Have a nice day.
@Rey: Yeah that sucks. I think few extreme right parties in Northern Europe has the direct nazi ties of the Sweden Democrats, but otherwise it’s similar trends all over…
@Lumpina: Yeah I don’t think that worked? But points for trying. 🙂
In the end, SD didn’t get quite as large a percentage of the votes as predicted. And because of how the votes were distributed overall, right now the political situation and who’s gonna govern is up in the air.
@Viscaria Congratulations!