I run the weird little gay kids club at my school, right? Which is great. I love my weird little gay kids club. It’s my favorite part of my job. Only, and I don’t know if you know this, I live in Indiana, and Indiana’s … kinda more backwards than a lot of other places, and racing towards the past as fast as we possibly can? So it’s been decided that the advertising for our first meeting can’t say things like “gay.” Or “LGBTQ.”
Which would be a problem, if you weren’t me. Witness my Gem Club posters, or at least the top half of each of them, since the bottom half has things like QR codes to sign up for the club and my real name:
This next one is a little questionable because pop culture is so fractured and it sort of depends on these kids knowing who these people are. The bottom of the poster has Lil Nas X and Freddie Mercury on it; I know damn well they don’t know who Freddie Mercury is but I don’t care and also any of them who do know who Freddie Mercury is should damn well be in my club.
I rejected a number of possible image choices for this post, one of which was a photo of the shitgibbon from today where it is very, very clear that half of his face is drooping in a way that absolutely screams “I’ve had strokes recently, and might be having one now.” I never ended up posting about the weird collective hysteria of a couple of weekends ago where the Internet all at once decided he’d died, and conspiracy theories and other forms of nonsense absolutely abounded for a few days. I myself got drawn into a conversation about whether a bunch of closed roads around Walter Reed Army Medical Center meant anything (answer: no) although I managed to avoid most of the really nutty shit.
Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to make what ought to be a really obvious point clear: that it is perfectly okay to be happy when absolutely fucking terrible people die, especially if said really terrible people die in the exact method that they have long suggested that it is perfectly acceptable for other, non-them people to die. My wife and I had a nice little moment together when it was confirmed that Charlie Kirk was dead, and accidentally viewing the video of him being killed a few minutes later (I don’t recommend looking, if you haven’t seen it) made it really clear that he’d been alive for maybe a few seconds after being shot and no longer than that. He could have been in the hospital with the trauma team standing next to him and already prepped for surgery and that shot would have killed him.
I feel bad for his kids. That’s it. And the truth is, I don’t even feel that bad for his kids, because they’re 3 and 1 and they will be better off without his awful influence in their lives, as will the entire rest of the world. I felt bad for them when he was alive, too. He literally died in a way that he had said was just fucking fine for other people to die. He had just said something racist and obnoxious seconds before dying. And he thought empathy was a personality flaw. So, cool. Fuck you, Charlie, I hope you’re in Hell.
(I’m having to be careful, as I’ve discovered that Kirk and Ben Shapiro are more or less the same person in my head. Shapiro is the one whose wife has never had an orgasm. Kirk is the “your body, my choice” guy, and someone else made a choice about his body today. I don’t care.)
And now, let’s engage in wanton speculation. No doubt me writing this and putting it on the internet will lead to being proved wrong immediately on most counts, so you can all look forward to that.
This was clearly an assassination; that’s not the speculative part. This was a deliberate and targeted shooting and was obviously planned carefully in advance. The shooter fired once, from a distance indicating at least some skill with his weapon, killed his target, and escaped completely undetected. Apparently the rifle has been found, but I genuinely don’t think Kash Patel’s FBI has enough institutional competence left to catch this guy and I’m also not convinced they’re trying very hard.
I do not have any trouble believing (which is not quite the same as saying “I believe”) that someone set this guy up to 1) give a nice little excuse for even more right-wing violence and fascism and 2) as much as I hate to say it, continue to try and knock the Epstein Files out of the news. Trump? Maybe not. Stephen Miller? Absofuckinglutely.
Dude got shot in Utah, which is not well-known as a bastion of liberalism, at a college that had not only invited him to speak in the first place but got what looks like a nice-sized crowd to hear him. It’s difficult to imagine why someone would deliberately target Charlie Kirk absent a specifically political motive, but I also have no trouble believing that he was killed because he wasn’t batshit enough for the shooter. I’m not interested enough in the rabbit hole this will take me down to do much research, but apparently he wasn’t super popular with some of the further reaches of the fever swamp for some reason. Feel free to enlighten me if you like.
And finally, if it was a leftist of any stripe who shot him, Kirk is not going to be the only one, and I’ll bet it’ll be no more than a few weeks until there’s at least another attempt. If you decided to start killing right-wing figures and were as successful as this guy was, would you stop with one? I kinda doubt it. I can’t wait to see the fucking nickname the press drops on the shooter if it happens again.
I have spent my Wednesday evening trying to put Wuchang to bed for good, failing because of a bug in the final trophy, somehow refraining from throwing my Xbox through a wall, and then … well, laughing a whole fucking lot at something that’s gonna get me in trouble if I talk about it.
(Forgive the movie clip; if there’s an actual video of Malcolm’s comments, I can’t find it.)
This book represents an interesting milestone for me in a couple of ways. First, I am rarely offered nonfiction ARCs for review, something I’d like to encourage more of. Second, I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography of someone I was less familiar with prior to reading the book than I was with Charles C. Diggs. While I don’t think I could claim to have never heard of him– I have read too much about the Civil Rights movement to have never encountered his name before– I couldn’t tell you much other than that he was a Black congressman. I certainly wouldn’t have recognized a picture of him. I was a little worried that this might hurt my enjoyment of the book; as it turns out I have more than enough context around his life that that wasn’t a problem.
The interesting thing here is that, sitting here, I’m struggling with the urge to make this piece a review of Diggs rather than a review of the book. At the same time, though, you weren’t sent a copy of this for free, so I kind of feel like if I’m going to convince you to read it you probably need to know a little bit about the fellow you’ll be spending a few hundred pages with. To wit: Charles C. Diggs Jr. was the son of one of Detroit’s most influential Black businessmen. His father was the founder of the slightly-oddly-named House of Diggs, a funeral home that at one point handled just over half of the deaths among Detroit’s Black citizenry. Charles Sr. had a short-lived political career as a Michigan state Senator but mostly kept his business empire running; Charles Jr. started his political career in his father’s seat in the Michigan Senate but was elected to Congress in 1954 and never looked back. He would remain in office until 1980, when a financial scandal led to him being censured by Congress, forced to resign, and briefly imprisoned. He holds the distinction of being the victim of one of Newt Gingrich’s first acts of assholery, as the future Speaker of the House and fellow resignee-in-disgrace began agitating for Congress to expel Diggs almost as soon as he took office.
When Diggs entered office, he was one of only three Black congressmen, joining William Dawson of Illinois and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of New York. He proved himself to be skilled at coalition-building and incrementalist approaches to civil rights– one of his first legislative accomplishments was desegregating airlines, for example– and eventually became one of Congress’s foremost experts on and advocates for Africa as well. Soon after taking office he traveled to Mississippi to sit in on the trial of Emmitt Till’s murderers, which made national headlines, particularly as Mississippi at the time had absolutely no idea how to handle a Black Member of Congress.
But let’s talk about the book. House of Diggs is a very strong political biography and a worthy addition to my library about the Civil Rights movement and is somewhat less successful as a biography of a person. Which, honestly, kind of fits with its subject anyway, as Diggs was quite successful as a politician and much less successful as a person. His children are barely mentioned, but his four wives, three of whom had children with him, would have described him as a poor father anyway, and you won’t find out about any of the three divorces until nearly 80% of the way through the book. He had a gambling problem and was absolutely terrible with money, which is part of what led to his own downfall and at least tangentially led to his father’s business empire slowly disintegrating after the senior Diggs died by suicide in 1967. The finance issues that led to his resignation and jail time are a bit too complicated to go into detail about here, but I felt Orr did a really good job of explaining the details of what happened, both in a literal factual sense and in how Diggs’ own personality flaws led to his eventual indictment. It also seems to be true that the practices that took Diggs down were quite common in Congress at the time, and Orr doesn’t neglect the role of racism in his prosecution while never losing sight of the fact that, no, “everybody else was doing it” isn’t really a top-10 legal defense.
All told, I’m really glad I was sent this, as it’s from a university press and I likely wouldn’t have even encountered it otherwise. If political biography is your thing or you have an interest in the Civil Rights movement, I highly recommend taking a look.
Seven years ago, in 2018, this man’s debut novel jumped off a shelf at me at Barnes and Noble. It looked satisfyingly chunky and as a science fiction book that was obviously going to be Part One of a substantial series, it was something that was immediately Aligned with My Interests.
I opened it and flipped through it and looked at this author picture. And thought Jeez, that guy looks like a prick. I bet he’s a conservative.
And then I put the book down.
And, standing there in Barnes and Noble, I googled this man to see if I could find evidence of him being a prick. And, indeed, I couldn’t find any, and the closest I came was him claiming he “doesn’t talk about politics” on Twitter, which is something that only conservatives say.
And after a few minutes I started feeling bad about it! This is not how I usually work. My rule for politics in my reading has always been Don’t Want None Won’t Be None, and how it is supposed to work is you can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t go out of your way to make that information available to me, but as soon as you do I will judge you accordingly. And, to be completely clear, I’m perfectly fine with people applying that same line of reasoning to me. You can choose to not read a book– which, most of the time, costs you money— for literally any reason you want. Refuse to read a book with a blue cover. Spend a year reading only books with blue covers. I don’t care. There are way more books out there than anyone has time to read in an entire lifetime, with more coming out literally every day, so you use whatever filter you want. I don’t have anything to say about it.
Feeling guilty and kind of stupid, I bought his book. And brought it home, and read it, and really didn’t like it all that much. And it sat on the shelf for five or six years while four sequels came out, and sometime in the last couple of years I looked at it again and thought oh, what the hell, and for whatever reason the second time around I liked it a lot more, and the sequels quickly followed, along with the sixth book, on release day. The series wasn’t world-changing or anything, but it was solid and interesting, and it was also clear that barring some sort of car accident or something it was going to be finished soon.
So how do I feel about the fact that a 2018 interview has come to light recently where not only does he piss and moan about how every YA book nowadays is about a girl who “wants to be an assassin for some reason” and there aren’t any books for boys, and about his affection for Jordan Peterson?
I am, to be clear, almost certainly going to buy the last book of his series when it comes out, which should be this year or early next year. This isn’t JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman territory, where the books are forever consigned to the pit. He’s just a conservative Catholic, and frankly the fact that the interview lurked in the depths for years before exploding onto TikTok in the last couple of weeks for whatever reason means that he actually does seem to be following my DWNWBN rule. But I likely won’t bother with whatever he does next, and next time I’m gonna trust my gut when I take a look at an author and get a vibe. Because, again, there’s lots of books out there, and I don’t need a good reason not to buy one.
This is kind of awkwardly stapling two posts together (and there will be an addendum at the end featuring even more stapling) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how weirdly gendered reading seems to be getting. I have never believed that there was any such thing as “girls’ books” or “boys’ books”– I’ve told the story here a few times before about my aunt catching me with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when I was ten or so, a book I picked up and read because it was there and I was bored, and her being vocally horrified, and me being completely baffled about what the problem was. But just because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as gendered books doesn’t mean that society doesn’t think so, and it feels like in the last couple of years reading has taken this weird slide into being Something Men Don’t Do, which is entirely fucking unacceptable. This is particularly clear in retail establishments that sell books but aren’t bookstores– go look at the books in Target sometime, for example, and I’ve seen pictures of Wal-Mart’s book selection and it seems to be the same thing. Target clearly doesn’t think men read.
(Do more women read than men? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as “men don’t read.”)
I think this is probably mostly BookTok’s fault, which is dominated by women, and whatever, I’m not attached enough to my own gender to be bothered if something is addressed to “my book girlies” and happens to overlap with my interests.
But did I kinda want to fight when I saw this? A little:
Anyway, one way or another, I’m not going anywhere. If that makes me a book girlie, I’ve been called worse.
You may remember a couple of weeks ago when my family attempted to go to a specific local Italian restaurant and, in a comedy of errors, managed to end up at the wrong restaurant, eating a meal there because we are cowards, and resulting in me not getting carrot cake, which was the entire reason I wanted to eat at that place in the first place.
Well. My birthday was yesterday, but my birthday dinner was tonight:
I could only finish half of that gorgeous sonofabitch. I don’t even want to know what my blood sugar is right now. I’m getting my A1C checked later this week in advance of a regular doctor visit next week, and I may just show the doctor a picture of this cake when she jumps down my throat about how I’m so diabetic I’m legally already dead.
I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.
In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.
I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.
In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.
Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.
I have said this, or variations on this, before. But this is the type of message that bears repeating.
No human being is illegal.
I favor completely unrestricted immigration to the United States. I don’t care if you get here on a private jet or by walking across the border. I don’t care if you have “papers” or not. If you think a better life can be had by coming to America, I think you should be allowed to live here.
Immigrants are not taking anyone’s jobs. The way I know this is the kinds of jobs immigrants work are always hiring, and I don’t see anybody lining up to work them.
Immigrants are significantly less likely to be criminals than US citizens, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if we end up bringing a statistically insignificant handful of criminals along with all of the honest immigrants. We have plenty of home-grown assholes and criminals as is, and I’ll happily trade that Nazi trash creature Stephen Miller for a dozen Mexican murderers anyway. They can move into my fucking neighborhood. We’re still better off. This is the “poisoned M&M” question all over again. If the M&Ms represent human lives, I’ll eat the whole fucking bowl. I don’t give a shit.
ICE should be abolished immediately, and anyone who still works for that agency could be dropped into an active volcano with no actual loss to humanity.
Let anyone who wants to come here in, and give them a path to citizenship. If they break the law along the way treat them like anyone else who broke the law.
Immigration is an unconditional societal good. We are better off because of these people, and the people most opposed to immigration are reliably the worst among us.
I know who I stand with, and I will not apologize.
This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker:Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.
(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?
My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.
This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.
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