Category: politics

Grosse messe

Folklore is the expertise of the dispossessed.

From a phrenological standpoint, one can see the IQ of the Rittenhouse judge is on the lower side.

The dewormer has turned on many anti-vaxxers. They continue to willfully throw off their mortal coils, in the name of freedom, Jesus, and Joe Rogan.

Funny how left/prog journalists can’t shake their obsession with Buttigieg.

SNCC paid a heavy price for its sexism and racialist separatism.

If Gosar’s anime had been hentai, he would have become the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024.

Many of the “new Trump Republicans” are boring. Can’t the GOP bring back the Delaware kitchen witch?

It’s funny how gullible “newsrooms” fixate on Steele rather than the FSB/Wikileaks hack of the DNC server.

The blackballing of Hope Solo is extreme sexism. The most decorated keeper (male or female) in US soccer history has to get in. Otherwise, the the US Soccer HoF is a joke.

When they came for Big Bird, I did nothing, because I have no beak.

When they come for Rudolph, they will have to contend with me.

There are several people who have cult followings for no explicable reason:

Trump

Bernie

Tulsi Gabbard

AOC

Elon Musk

Andrew Yang

Tim Tebow

From Money Honey to QAnon Dummy: the Rise and Fall of Maria Bartiromo.

Merry meet!

Tumbleweed

Hyperbole around continuity in history is bad history. Anyone who thinks nothing has changed since 1619 is an unreliable narrator of history. The problem is today’s continuity historians have a neurotic attachment to “bad stuff.” A citational compulsion is also a compulsion to repeat.

Like feudalism, life in the old Soviet bloc is an historical curiosity now.

Labor journalists once were working class. Today’s labor journalists come from a haute bourgeois background, with credentials from the Ivies or some posh J-school, collect 300K per annum for their “content,” and another 100K from monetized substacks. They share nothing with the proles.

While America continues to suffer from GOP carnage, boutique pundits clutch pearls about Democrats, who have sent $1.7 Trillion USD and $1.2 Trillion USD to the American people, and have to go back 50 years to find fault.

This is the clown show of US media.

The “labor movement” died for several reasons, none controlled by Democrats: deindustrialization, labor (let’s be honest, “labor” is a euphemism for “white working class”) defection to GOP after 1965 for racist reasons, Reagan’s destruction of the ATC, & right-to-work statutes.

The two most dangerous places in the US are elementary schools and christian churches.

Before Big Bird, there was…

Thoughts on a grey day

At this point, Dave Chappelle can only make neanderthals laugh.

It’s rare, but nice, to see a well-fed bodega cat.

Religious freedom/liberty has been instrumentalized by illiberal and anti-liberal groups to deny equality before the law to other groups. The abuse, and misuse, of this principle for craven, political ends erodes its credibility.

Media and other over-exposed pundits say Democrats are failing. Let’s look at reality. People say the Senate is 50-50 with the VP as tiebreaker. In reality, among the 50 “Democrats” are three non-Democrats: Sinema, Manchin, and Sanders. So in fact “Democrats” are not in control of the fate of Biden’s legislative priorities. Ignoring this reality, media and punditocracy blame the Democrats while remaining silent on the fact that 50 Republicans vote “no” on everything; because they are beholden to a lazy narrative about Democrats.

One can speak of physical violence and symbolic violence (which can take the form of speech). They are not identical, but there is evidence that language, images, etc. are not neutral with respect to power. Acknowledging this fact doesn’t mean the end of “free speech.” First Amendment Absolutists fail to realize that freedom of speech means one is subject to the free speech of others, which can be critical of what one says. They don’t like the criticism and to ward it off they call it “censorship.” I don’t support banning words, films, and the pseudo-politics of today’s outrage culture. I support counter-speech as a resource that can/should be more equally distributed.

Never enough

Indiana’s governor is recruiting un-vaxxed Chicago cops. So Indiana will be known as the measles and mumps state henceforth.

When you see Reps. Boebert, Gaetz, Gohmert, and friends doing strange things on the floor of the House of Representatives, remember this: their performances will be in the public record for all time. Government documents will be entertaining reading for future students of Congress.

Gotta have at least one Deadhead in a list of the top 75 of any activity.

Once again, former President Carter is urging Americans to buy less, which calls to mind his “malaise” speech. Carter’s neo-Puritan anti-materialism was mocked by luxury class journalists and politicians, as well as by the corporate suppliers of the consumerist addiction. If Carter had read Daniel Bell’s book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, he would have learned the consumerist genie had already been permanently unbottled [sic]. Instead he read Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (according to academic legend).

It seems like every hour another political pundit finds another way to extend the half-life of the “Dems in Disarray” pre-packaged narrative. Which makes me think these pundits really think it is too bad there are fifty, diverse state constituencies that need to be represented by Democrats. I’m surprised none of them spell out the obvious conclusion of their constant lamentations: Democrats should become a centralized vanguard party to streamline decisions. Worked for V. I. Lenin and Mitch McConnell.

I finally found the proper theme song for today’s “progressives.”

The phantom progressives

It must be galling to the progressive community in NYC that Buffalo elected a socialist mayor, while NYC is on the way to electing an ex-cop. Buffalo is, however, the exception to the rule. The current “left” is politically inept. For example, Bernie and his bros spent more time bashing Warren and Buttigieg (who never threatened to win the nomination) than Biden (who never trailed). Only too late did chapo-class journalists realize the danger, and hence the “Dementia Joe” threads (Bragman) and Tara Reade Hoax (Halper & Grim) came into existence.

In the case of the NYC Democratic-mayoral primary, the progs blew up Stringer and Morales, failed to read the room (Defund was a no-go during an incipient “crime wave”), and, in desperation, latched onto an absolute lightweight (Maya Wiley), which has cost AOC a good deal of credibility. Meanwhile, the ex-cop (Adams) coasted to the lead in the 1st choice ranking.

Despite being an ex-cop (and how embarrassing is that for the left?), Adams put together the multicultural/multi-class coalition that progs talk about but never actually achieve, since they were basically appealing to monied types in Park Slope, the UWS, gentrified Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, and the Hamptons.

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The MyPillock Guy is taking heat for revising the date on which Trump will be “reinstated.” To be fair, it’s almost 2000 years and there’s been no Second Coming yet. Trump’s return will surely take much longer.

Won’t you be my maior domus?

I don’t find any of the Democratic candidates running to be the next mayor of NYC to be inspiring. In order to write about them, I’ll begin with numbers. I know it is not fashionable to trust polling, but if one takes the majority of polls during the Democratic presidential primary as an example, Biden always led in every poll and Sanders never topped 30%. I recall few pundits ever acknowledged Sanders’ ceiling, and the ceiling for progressives as a whole in such a national campaign. In this case, the polls accurately forecasted a Biden victory in the primary election booth.

But NYC is a different pond. Perhaps a “progressive” candidate like Maya Wiley, freshly endorsed by political influencer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is now the “frontrunner.” Based on today’s report on a current NY1/Ipsos poll of likely Democratic voters, the mountain Wiley has to climb is significant. To be sure, this poll was conducted prior to the AOC endorsement, but how much “juice” does AOC really have (she didn’t move the needle for Sanders. This will be a test of her political influence: it is risky to spend political capital on a high profile, losing campaign, again)?

The top three candidates in order of preference are Eric Adams (22%), Andrew Yang (16%), and Kathryn Garcia (15%). Wiley doesn’t break into double digits (9%) and is behind Scott Stringer (10%). So let’s say the AOC push jumps her above Stringer. Will this endorsement really lift her above Garcia into 3rd place? Again, if one abides by polls, hasn’t Wiley already hit her ceiling? And despite the online media echo chamber re Stringer and Yang, are they really “done” as viable top 3 candidates? (The poll suggests yes for Stringer, but no for Yang). What AOC’s endorsement may have achieved for Wiley is to lift her level of familiarity with likely voters (52% in this poll, behind Yang 85%, Stringer 77%, and Adams 73%). But increased familiarity will bring more scrutiny, which may not help a candidate lacking the experience in government of her likely immediate opponents (Adams and Garcia).

If the Biden presidential primary victory is a harbinger of the mood of Democratic Party constituencies, then experience and a return to regular order in politics and social life are valued more highly by Democratic electorates than a call for big changes. At the national level, candidates like Warren and Sanders failed to “read the room”: Big Structural Change and “revolution” fared poorly in the midst of the daily chaos and deadly incompetence of the former guy’s presidency and the economic and social upheaval of a pandemic. Has Wiley read the room accurately in a race in which a former police officer (Adams) now leads the pack, a race in which likely voters identify crime/violence (46%) and affordable housing (45%) as the top 2 “main problems facing New York today”?