Right-wing pundit Phil Labonte, 47, recently ran across the Tinder profile of Kat Abughazaleh, a Media Matters researcher who monitors Tucker Carlson and evidently decided to try to embarrass her by tweeting it out to his hundred thousand followers.
It turns out that his Twitter followers are as horny as he is, and they replied to his tweet with a flurry of crudely sexual comments suggesting that Labonte ignore her politics and “smash” her, as if this were somehow a possibility.
“Beat that shit up so bad it becomes a libertarian,” suggested one.
“Gotta be some tight puss,’ tweeted another.
“A mouth’s a mouth,” tweeted a third.
Others responded with “you can fix her” or the one word “would.”
Abughazaleh–who goes by Kat Abu on Twitter–made a collage of several dozen of the worst replies and posted it on Twitter as a sort of lesson about online harassment.
The only person who should really be feeling embarrassed about any of this is Labonte, a heavy metal musician and regular guest on Tim Pool’s Timcast, who revealed to the world that he’s apparently been trawling Tinder looking for women young enough to be his daughter.
“Even before you get the key to your apartment you’re desperately searching Tindr for girls half your age within 100kms?” tweeted one critic. “Sounds like a you problem, and probably a skill issue.”
“So you’re bragging about being a dude in his mid-40s who uses tinder to creep on 20 year old girls,” wrote another,
“This is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen someone post about themselves,” wrote still another.
“You sure you’re anti-communist?” asked yet another commenter, referring to a line in Labonte’s Twitter bio. “’Cause you just publicly owned yourself, loser.”
That’s gotta sting.
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@Milotha. Possibly to hide their eyes because certain vile human beings eyes, commonly abusers and serial killers, have eyes that only seem to ever convey two things. Soulless piss holes in snow, and burning pits into Hell. And nothing else. I doubt they have that level of self awareness, but it’s possible, especially if they are told it often enough.
@ surplus
I like your story idea.
War of the Worlds is of course an allegory on colonialism and animal rights. By the standards of the day, the Martians had done nothing wrong.
Carl Sagan made the argument that even if humans are tasty, aliens could just synthesise the flavours. But I think that ignores how even today people will pay a premium for organic or free range food.
We couldn’t really complain if aliens did decide to harvest us. What objection could we legitimately make? It might even be we accepted it morally. Whilst trying to avoid being eaten ourselves. That’s pretty much how we see the natural order of things. The powerful exploiting the weak is part of our cultural conditioning; especially when it comes to eating people.
I’ve mentioned before how Hannibal Lector can be a hero because he’s not really doing anything ethically unacceptable. He’s just breaking social convention. And people often find that admirable and aspirational. Hannibal is a fictional character of course; but just look at how that TV series has glamourised Jeffrey Dahmer. I think society accepts cannibals to an extent because otherwise it creates cognitive dissonance.
It’s a really interesting topic with all sorts of ethical conundrums.
@Cyborgette:
Disturbing.
Fig. 5 shows curves that seem to approach asymptotes. The implications are that, “when all is said and done”, from 20% to 30% of the population will have various symptoms of Long Covid, and 30% will have been hospitalized at least once. Some smaller percentage will have died. 20% will have lasting lung impairment, and nearly as many will have lasting fatigue. (Excess burden trending toward an asymptote near 200 out of 1000 on many of those.)
This might be a mixed blessing rather than an unmitigated curse. The drop in the size of the workforce might be in the vicinity of that caused by the Black Death, without nearly as high an actual mortality rate. That will cause major upheavals — the current inflation and supply-chain woes are just the opening bars of a pretty dire sonata — but once the dust has settled, the “reserve army of labor” will not be there to allow the capitalist class so much leeway to be terrible. Bargaining power will continue to shift toward labor (there’s already been a big wave of strikes and new unionizations; that too is just the beginning). It should be noted that the increased bargaining power of the laboring classes after the Black Death is thought to have played a role in the subsequent Renaissance, as well as motivating increased efforts to automate labor, leading to the Industrial Revolution afterward. Maybe by 2060 we’ll all have household robots and white collar jobs with a 3 day workweek and full benefits?
Those of us who survive, of course.
The large increase in the disabled population might also make fighting ableism the next big frontier in rights-advancement after the current one, the ongoing battle for trans and nonbinary rights. 20% will be a big damn voting bloc that no politician or party could afford to ignore. And the GOP is once again trying to gut social security; if the political winds swing the way these data suggest they will, the GOP might be busy right now signing the dotted line of their suicide note, and we’ll soon be well rid of them. Oh, I’m sure they’ll go to extremes of legal gymnastics trying to suppress the disabled vote, down to keeping polling places far apart and ripping out their wheelchair ramps, but doing that will not even postpone the inevitable. The GOP base is, in substantial part, old infirm boomers. There’s no way to target Long Covid victims for voter suppression without blowing their own feet off.
Of all those killed by the coronavirus in the end, the Republican Party will be the one I feel no urge to mourn.
@Surplus: You definitely need to write more! There are a lot of small online magazines that pay very little (or nothing) but people would enjoy your work. Heck, there’s people who’ve been nominated for Hugos for collected tweets.
People need good writing to get them through the day, especially nowadays. It would be a positive thing for you to get out into the world.
I laugh every time I hear some MAGAt complain that they can’t get to their polling place because they have long Covid. That’s what happens when you vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party, ya numnuts.
(I am perfectly capable of getting to my polling place, it’s across the street from the grocery store that I most often go to. But voting by mail is even less trouble, and I get an email when it’s received and counted. And since I never know what days I’m going to feel like going out — today was NOT one), it makes sure I get my say.
@surplus You should definitely try writing professionally.
40 years is too long for the general population, but if the narrator lives in a bubble it would be plausible.
The racial IQ thing is also used as a fig leaf for systemic social outcomes. <i>Black Americans are less likely to own their own homes, well that’s nothing to do with systemic injustice. What can you expect since they’re dumber?</i>
The one thing I know of that seems to reliably reduce prejudice is getting to know people from the outgroup as people. As you say, there’s no reasoning people out of it.
@Surplus
I’m afraid that’s an optimistic take. Remember, the flu pandemic of 1918 also left a massive number of people disabled – and the response to that was eugenics, in particular the Nazis’ genocide of the disabled. Republicans and a good subset of Democrats would absolutely love an excuse to let people like me die off. No death camps needed in the US, they’d just take away our insurance coverage and let nature do the rest. And as for boomers being in the same boat, sadly no – it’s pretty easy to distinguish between the elderly and the young-but-disabled.
“Beat that shit up so bad it becomes a libertarian,” suggested one.
Not sure what that says about either libertarians or these morons’ “understanding” of what makes someone a libertarian. Is that person suggesting that anyone who’s beaten badly enough to be unable to ever stand up for him/herself again, thereby becomes a libertarian?
I’ve heard some libertarians acting like bullies’ apologists, or not seeming to care about any form of bullying. They also tend to oppose what they call “collectivism,” which might, at least to some of them, include people ganging up on bullies and keeping them in line.
Seriously, where is this new layer of deranged bullshit coming from?
@Surplus That was great, especially the twist at the end.
@cyborgette I could wish that 9 of their 41 references weren’t obvious self-citation for all three of them.
@Cyborgette:
It did? Where is this documented?
In the short term, in some places, perhaps. In the longer term the result was, apparently, the flourishing of the modern welfare state.
That would require explicit age-discrimination. That seems unlikely, mainly because it would require taking the mask off. Existing voter-suppression tactics are given a veneer of legitimacy by pretending it’s about “voting fraud” or similarly. They can’t really target disability itself without affecting a chunk of their own base, on the one hand, and there’d be very little public support for something like raising the minimum voting age, on the other. Not only that; any voter suppression that’s orthogonal to disability will still leave the disabled as a substantial voting bloc that will not be in favor of any attacks on Social Security and similar programs. The only disabled subset who won’t care or might favor such would be the rich disabled, who won’t be numerous enough to carry a vote alone.
@ Raging Bee:
I think they were trying to say “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”, but didn’t phrase it as well.
@The Phantom Cheese:
I think they were trying to say “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”, but didn’t phrase it as well.
Ah—but conversely, a liberal can be a conservative who’s been denied health care or gentrified out of their home.
@ FMO
Must confess, at the Bar, we enjoyed some schadenfreude over this example of “A liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted.”
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/its-completely-wrong-falsely-accused-tory-mp-attacks-legal-aid-cuts
@Raging Bee – I thiiiink that person was just using “beat” as an expression for sex, although it’s telling that the word they picked has violent connotations.
@Surplus – Adding to the people saying you could turn the piece on the other page into a short story! I find it impressive when writers can develop a whole plot in just a few paragraphs.
@ Surplus
I too would like to read more of your fiction.
And your ablism analysis is good too.
Phantom Cheese: If you’re right, “didn’t phrase it as well” is a very charitable understatement.
@Raging Bee
Men who were bullies in middle/high school, and resent that the same shit doesn’t work (most of the time) in the adult world. These sorts are also IMO well represented among Trumpists and neo-Nazis. They long for a return to their teenage glory days, when they could make people do what they wanted just by threatening violence and humiliation.
I long for a world where the same shit doesn’t work in the teenage world. Or in grade school. Or at all.
@various:
Thanks for the compliments. I do, in fact, have some writing projects back-burnered …
@RagingBee:
I’ve heard some libertarians acting like bullies’ apologists, or not seeming to care about any form of bullying. They also tend to oppose what they call “collectivism,” which might, at least to some of them, include people ganging up on bullies and keeping them in line.
@Cyborgette:
Men who were bullies in middle/high school, and resent that the same shit doesn’t work (most of the time) in the adult world. These sorts are also IMO well represented among Trumpists and neo-Nazis. They long for a return to their teenage glory days, when they could make people do what they wanted just by threatening violence and humiliation.
I used to identify as libertarian (lower-case l), somehow having the idea that libertarians ought logically to be courtesy fiends—after all, the more that decent behavior is carried in the social contract and the I-Thou attitude (as well as a keen sense of threat assessment: is this behavior/presentation dangerous, or just something I’m unaccustomed to?) the less work government has to do. I somehow thought libertarianism meant the right to tend your own weed patch in your own backyard, under the gaze of your own statue of Pan, with your own husband and your own wife, and your own shotgun to defend all the above. (I assure you it wasn’t informed by Ayn “Your rationality and free will isn’t real unless you like James Bond, fast-paced major-key ragtime music, leaky angular architecture, sleeping with me if I so demand, and smoking; I, the Grand Poohbah of Rational Free Will, have spoken!” Rand.)
This assumption did not long survive contact with actual Libertarians.
Apropos nothing…
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/louisathelast/spa-day/
Well, if we’re now posting cartoons …
@Alan: I am picturing the capys further invading the drug kingpins’ neighborhood further and taking over the spa.
Although it could also be mere reportage from Japan.
@FMOx:
I know people who live like that. They’re all hippie peaceniks in California. Extremely not glibertarian.
(I have a black thumb, so can’t grow my own weed and have to buy it. And I only have a husband. No statue of Pan, but I do have a Playmobil Athena.)
Full Metal Ox:
I don’t share most of Ms. Raynd’s tastes (and none of her views afaict), but I will admit to enjoying fast-paced major-key ragtime music.
ETA: And also the much-less-often-heard slow-paced ragtime that uses a minor key for the verse and major for the chorus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZ0pBT0W5Q
@Surplus
Republicans have already been talking about raising the voting age after their failures in the 2022 federal elections.
Re disability after the flu of 1918, search engines are your friend:
https://time.com/5915616/long-flu-1918-pandemic/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2826837/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00414-x
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/spanish-flu-pandemic-and-mental-health-historical-perspective
Just for starters. The fact is it is common for deadly infections to cause chronic illness and disability in survivors, and the 1918 flu was not an exception.
Something’s broken at that first link. I can’t scroll down! I’m stuck looking at the headline and the first paragraph and that’s it. :/