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.
Today was probably the most demoralizing and exhausting day of the school year so far, to the point where I utterly unloaded on my boss after school, which is not typical of me at all. I’m usually the one talking other people off of ledges even on shitty days, and today the only advice I had was jump, fucker.
I don’t know how to educate people who know nothing and are utterly unbothered by the fact that they know nothing. I just don’t. There may not be a way to do it. You may as well just put some of these fuckers in jail right now, because that’s where people who fail every single class in middle school generally end up anyway, and finding out that one of the six or seven shitheads I wrote up today (!!) already has a PO was the shit cherry on top of the smegma sundae that today served me.
Another thing I said to my boss: “If our district was trying to set up the middle schools for failure, how would it look any different from what they just did to us?”
And then I got home and other than a break for dinner have spent three and a half hours working on study guides for the finals, which I will exhaust myself even more over the next four school days trying to get my kids to understand. I will fail, and they will make no difference, and 3/4 of my kids will fail the final anyway, because I could literally write the answers on the board and a third of them would still fail, and if thought is required those numbers go up. Significantly.
I really wonder what it would be like to work at a good school. I never have. I don’t even know where to find them.
I don’t have a lot to say, and I’m not going to use that as a launch into a ten thousand word post. I said plenty last night. America has demonstrated rather conclusively that she will choose any man, no matter how mediocre, over any woman, no matter how talented, and she has now demonstrated that twice. I am deeply disappointed, but I cannot claim to be surprised. I didn’t think this was going to happen, but unlike 2016, I didn’t think it was impossible.
I am writing through a fog of brain pills; I finally went to bed around 1:30, got up at 7, went back to bed at nine and slept past noon. I am pretty sure I am going to work tomorrow, and the day after that.
We can always hope he dies before January, I suppose. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are still going to run the country either way, and RFK is about to singlehandedly ruin everything they don’t ruin, but maybe his heart will finally give out. JD Vance will be President before 2028; the only question is how long it takes.
6:33 PM: I am sitting on my couch, iPad in my lap, phone to my right, MSNBC streaming on the television in front of me. The polls in Indiana closed half an hour ago and the state has not been called yet, which I’m choosing to believe is a good thing despite the fact that Trump is up 60-40 with 3% of the vote in. I can’t promise regular updates or that I’ll not abandon this in a fit of depression in a couple hours but We. Are. Live.
6:40 PM: I know I said this yesterday but I actually do think we’ll have an idea of who the winner is in a few hours. Will it be literally called? Probably not, but I think the writing will be large and glowing on the wall. I’m sure I’m wrong.
6:41 PM: This Philadelphia DA really should have just said “Fuck around.” If you’re gonna repeat “eff around and find out” four or five times just say fuck.
6:45: One of my cats spies a random other cat through our front window and starts making absolutely psychotic noises at it, causing the whole house to temporarily freak out and descend upon the room he’s in.
6:50: I take a few minutes to track down useful local race coverage. It occurs to me that the school board races are probably the first things I’ll know about definitively tonight. Mike Braun and Todd Rokita are both up but there’s only about 10% of the vote in and I’m not worrying about it right now. No matter how things go nationally the local races in Indiana are probably not going to be good news.
6:54: Reports of multiple bomb threats in Democratic areas in Georgia, which … sadly fails to surprise me.
7:00: A whole lot of states are about to close, and meanwhile … this, from Rush County, IN. I don’t actually know where these results are from; they were just posted to BlueSky.
My wife has had a theory that Kennedy was going to do unexpectedly well in Indiana that she has been talking about for a while; we’ll see.
7:06: It does look like that data was flipped, and everybody’s called Indiana. They called Banks for Senate too, fuck. Oh well.
7:17: They’re chattering about Georgia and I’m reloading the local races over and over. I really want to see School Board results, dammit!
7:22: Mental note that I’m not allowed to look at the New York Times website tonight, first, because fuck the fucking New York Times, and second, because their tech people are on strike and I don’t cross picket lines.
I’m gonna have to figure out a way to charge my phone from the couch. Hmm. Surely the boy has a charger around here somewhere. He lives on the couch.
7:27: I mentioned this in other places earlier, but I dressed in blue from head to toe today without even realizing I was doing it. I just changed into comfy pants and those are blue too. Meanwhile, I can’t find a charger cord long enough for my phone, and my son’s charger is Lightning, not USB-C, so I’m screwed there. Somebody bring me a ten foot USB-C cable.
7:29: The Vermont Senate race is called for Bernie Sanders, who I didn’t realize was running again. Does he know how Goddamned old he is?
7:30: A few more states’ polls close and West Virginia gets called immediately for Trump. What a Goddamn surprise. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin’s Senate seat goes to a Republican. Sigh.
7:36: Still waiting impatiently for my county to report literally anything.
7:38: I threw $20 at Slingbox for a month of CNN and MSNBC, by the way. I’ll cancel it in a couple of days because once the election’s over I don’t need it any longer and the second month will be twice as expensive.
7:42: Some dude is on a college campus in Arizona talking to students waiting in line, and apparently some male student told him that he voted for Trump because Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he didn’t know what she stood for, and I think it’s fine if that kid is never allowed to vote again.
7:43: Apparently that dude is at Arizona State and his name is… Gottie? I dunno, Rachel didn’t spell it.
7:44: Sigh. AP has called the IN governor’s race for Mike Braun, which not only means that we have him in office but his Christianist, psychopathic running mate, who makes him look like Mitt Romney by comparison.
7:52: I swear to Christ that if Kamala should have done Joe Rogan makes its way into The Discourse I’m gonna commit some crimes. I don’t even know which ones. Some of the crimier ones.
7:58: The way I can tell all the MSNBC people are my age is that they just interviewed De La Soul and all of the anchors are losing their minds over it.
8:00: Seeing online that Mark Robinson has lost the Gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Florida just got called immediately which kind of catches me off guard. It probably shouldn’t, though. So far no real surprises anywhere.
Illinois being “too early to call” is kind of alarming, though. Then again, so was Indiana.
8:03: This is unreasonable but right here at this exact second is the first moment of real dread tonight. Rick Scott is projected in Florida, too.
8:06: I want a Big Board.
8:10: GOD DAMN IT ST. JOE COUNTY DO YOU NEED ME TO COME HELP COUNT THE POLLS HAVE BEEN CLOSED FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS REPORT SOME VOTES
8:20: Not a lot going on and one of the cats is trying really hard to move into my lap, which is already occupied.
8:21: Rachel Maddow says thirty-two different places have received bomb threats in Georgia today. Christ.
8:28: Fuuuuuck I do not want Mike Braun to be my governor. Again, it’s not surprising at all, nothing that has happened tonight has been a surprise yet, but I’d like some good news other than the North Carolina governor’s race.
8:30: Florida’s abortion amendment is running at 57% but Rick Scott has already been called as winning the Senate race and Trump has been called for the state. Make it make fucking sense.
8:44: Kind of in a holding pattern until 9:00 hits and a bunch more states’ polls close. We’re in the doldrums part of the evening right now and I don’t think things are going to be getting better for an hour or so. That’s if we’re lucky.
A tranche of votes hit in St. Joe County, and with a quarter of the vote in the guy I really don’t want on the school board is in second place, which puts him on the school board. No idea where the votes are from, though; there’s no way I’m getting precinct-level data on school board votes.
8:47: I just saw an actual TV ad for … a podcast? Seriously? We’re doing that now?
8:49: Oh, there were bomb threats called into Navajo areas in Arizona too? Really? Weird how these keep happening to Democratic areas.
8:59: How horrible will the next minute of my life be? Stay tuned!
9:00: Nobody’s talking about the House at all. Anything changing there? Anyone wanna mention that?
9:01: Pretty fucking horrible, as Texas got called fucking immediately. We can still hope for Cruz to go down, I suppose, but Texas continues to disappoint.
9:06: Wait, NBC hasn’t called Illinois or New York yet? Come on.
9:14: Big Board dude is going on about how suburban and rural counties are moving more to Trump, which is true, but a difference of 200 votes isn’t really going to make much of a difference if the cities move by the same percentage and have twenty times as many people.
9:20: OH MY GOD STOP SAYING SLIPPAGE. PLEASE. IT HURTS.
9:21: Quit talking about Georgia and give me some numbers from Iowa.
9:24: Hey, good news! Sarah McBride wins a House seat in Delaware, making her the first transgender woman elected to the House. That’s a big deal. And apparently Fani Willis just got re-elected, too.
9:25: The FBI says the Russians are calling in hoax bomb threats all over the place, in case that single minute of good news made you feel any better.
9:26: I don’t know who any of these people who aren’t Rachel Maddow are, but the old white guy just chimed in to say that we “never had bomb threats at polling places before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate.” That is utter bullshit, as any primarily-Black precinct in the fucking South could tell you. Christ, what ahistorical nonsense.
9:33: I think right here is where I abandon the idea that we’re going to know anything tonight. I was hoping for a scenario where we’d be overperforming the polls— the shy Harris voter thing— but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
9:37: Continuing tonight’s theme of Not Surprising but Still Depressing, Marjorie Taylor Greene is projected to win reelection. Which makes me wonder if Colorado’s polls have closed yet. I think they have; I’m gonna go check on Boebert.
9:39: She’s up ten points with 2/3 of the vote in, so she’s probably reelected too.
9:42: I know I’ve talked some shit about this costume for the new Superman movie, but I am hugely in love with this picture even if the S-shield is wrong and I can see the stupid high collar.
9:49: I would like Rachel Maddow to explain what the fuck is the difference between “too early to call” and “too close to call.” Do they just change the language when a certain percentage of the votes come in? Is it possible to flip back to “too early”?
9:52: Two hundred years since he first ran for president, I still do not understand how this guy is getting even a single vote.
10:09: Fifteen minutes of talking my brother off the ledge via text message. Having eerie flashbacks to having a similar conversation with my mother in 2016. Colorado called for Harris.
10:18: Seeing a report on BlueSky that the Dems are now projected to take the House? Assuming it’s nonsense for now; it’s way too early, but Goddammit the way I have no information at my fingertips about it is driving me insane.
10:19: Steve Karnacki, whose name I am almost certainly misspelling, continues his infuriating habit of talking about candidates outperforming or underperforming 2020’s vote totals without referencing the absolute number of votes being discussed. 50% of the vote in Philadelphia is in and Harris stands to net at least another 200,000 votes when the rest of it comes in, which erases slight Trump gains in dozens of podunk rural counties.
10:22: God damn it, MSNBC calls Iowa for Trump. And fucking Cruz in Texas. Fuck. Fuck. The fabled Seltzer poll appears to have missed the mark.
10:32: Speaking of “shit I saw on BlueSky,” somebody’s called Georgia for Trump? That’s bad. That’s the first genuinely no-shit really bad sign of the night.
10:39: I’m starting to get deeper into the weeds in looking at county-by-county results in individual states. I’m getting depressed and scared and starting to contemplate taking brain meds. The bomb threats across Georgia are starting to look like they flipped the state.
10:43: Also assuming that the “we’ve taken the House” report was bullshit at this point.
10:58: Okay, new plan is never pay attention to BlueSky again; I don’t like what I’m seeing in Georgia, but people are literally still voting and if anyone has called it I haven’t heard about it other than that one post.
11:00: God, I hate this. But I’m pretty sure I felt the exact same way at this time in 2020. Polls in California have closed and it’s called immediately for Harris. Trump takes Idaho. Still no surprises.
11:02: HOW IS NORTH CAROLINA TOO EARLY TO CALL, RACHEL MADDOW. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST AND ALL THAT IS HOLY TAKE THIRTY SECONDS AND EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK THAT MEANS.
11:03: Dare I look at Montana and see what’s going on with Tester’s race, or is it going to just depress me more?
11:05: Okay, only about six percent of the vote is in. Nothing to see here yet.
11:16: NBC calls the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno, which means that we have lost the Senate. Even if we pick up the seat in … what is it, Nebraska? and hold Montana, the Senate’s gone.
11:21: AP has called North Carolina for Trump. And I know that this is more or less exactly where we were at this point four years ago, but I think I’m done now. I’m sweaty and tired and I need brain medication. We haven’t seen a single state flip yet but the only one I feel good about is Pennsylvania and there are going to be flips somewhere.
I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.
That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.
Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:
I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.
First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.
And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.
Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.
(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)
Like most teachers, I absolutely fucking hate the question “When am I gonna use this?” The answer is never. Never. You, personally, as someone whose sole concern is defending your ability to remain as ignorant as much of the world as possible, are never going to use what we’re doing, because you’re never going to useanything. You live in a country that hates education and educated people, and you’re going to be forty and still using apostrophes like they’re an early defense system for the letter S, mixing up basic homonyms you should have been getting right in second grade, and telling people that you did terribly in school but it doesn’t matter because “you did all right” while hoping your shitty car gets you home to your trailer park and wondering where you’re gonna score your next dime bag from since your weed guy got arrested last week. You barely use the alphabet. You’re not gonna use algebra.
*Ahem.*
I may be a little unreasonable in my hatred of that question, actually.
I have to start teaching transformations this week, and I fucking hate teaching transformations. I have come to terms with teaching equations of lines and slope despite the disinclination of 8th graders to learn them because they genuinely are fundamental to a lot of more advanced stuff, and the correct response to an 8th grader who says they don’t wanna learn that stuff is that you don’t give a shit and you’re not about to let their futures be determined by what they wanted to do when they were thirteen and idiots. Siddown, shuddup and pay attention, you whiny little fucker.
They’re never gonna use transformations. They’re just not. I can’t even figure out what this shit leads toward in an abstract sort of way, and it depends on spatial reasoning to really be able to figure it out, and I don’t know how to teach that, and I have never once in years of teaching math been able to explain satisfactorily how to write a rule for a dilation or a reflection or especially, Jesus, fuck these things rotations, and my kids stare at me with flummoxed and slightly betrayed looks on their faces because they’re used to me making sense at least in theory and Christ do I hate this unit more than anything else in the curriculum. Ever.
I may just make a deal with my kids that I’m not gonna teach this, and they’re just gonna miss the one question that is guaranteed to involve transformations on the ILearn, and everything will be fine anyway, and the trick is don’t tell anybody that we’re watching movies and practicing fucking addition and subtraction and fractions for the next few weeks because God fuck me dead if any of these kids can add -17 and 23 without a calculator and they don’t even know how to put 1/2 + 2/9 into a calculator, much less what it means or how to figure it out. Can we just do that instead and skip this entire fucking unit? Because it really and truly and genuinely does not matter if they don’t learn this in eighth grade.
They fucking bombed their test today. We’ve been talking about this material since November and I gave them a practice test yesterday that was identical to the test they took today except that I swapped around some numbers, I showed them how to do every question on the practice test in class yesterday, I allowed them completely open notes, and over half of them still failed.
I am so pissed off right now it’s giving me an upset stomach, and I am no longer interested in attempting to educate people who do not want to be educated. Fuck ’em. If 75% of my students are failing at the end of the quarter I don’t give a shit any longer. They should be able to drop the fuck out if they want to. Let them become their fucking parents’ problems again.
It’s confirmed. Devon Green, a 23-year-old former student of mine, passed away in his sleep two days ago. That’s all anyone knows at the moment. His family is struggling to pay for the funeral; there’s a GoFundMe. If anybody happens to have a few spare nickels with nothing to use them on, donations would be greatly appreciated.
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