In which you’ve got to be kidding me

On August 22, 2022August 22, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

My Congresswoman, an odious creature by the name of Jackie Walorski, died unexpectedly in a car accident several weeks ago. The way things work in Indiana is that if someone in office dies there has to be a special election to fill the seat no matter how little time is left in the term, but depending on the timing, the special election can be the same day as the general election, and there are no primaries– the parties just name their candidates by whatever means they choose. So the Democrats nominated the guy who already had the nomination for the general election, and the Republicans just named both a candidate for the special election (the winner will serve for about two months) and for the general. It is reasonable to assume that the same person will end up winning both, of course, but you never know.

A quick detour. You may recall a movie from the mid-nineties about a Notre Dame football walk-on named Rudy Ruettinger. Parts of it were actually filmed in my high school, and there are a handful of my classmates here and there filling out background/extra roles. Sean Astin starred as Rudy. This is the logo for the film:

The Republicans chose their candidate sometime in the last day or two. His name is Rudy Yakym. I have briefly perused his website and he appears to be a nutcase; there’s a bit on there about ending persecution of Christians, so we’re in genuine shithouse rat territory here and I’m super excited for the Republicans to be getting worse again.

Scroll slowly, here. Take a second, take all this in, and picture this guy’s campaign logo. Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute to think about it. In fact, have a song:

Okay. You ready?

This is Rudy Yakym’s campaign logo:

Literally all my dude did was turn off the bold.

Fuckin’ embarrassing.

Fuck Mel Hall, Chapter 4: Never Mind, Fuck Everybody

On September 25, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

There was another anti-Jackie Walorski flyer, paid for by the Indiana Democratic Party, in my mailbox when I got home this afternoon. Once again, the flyer makes no mention of who the flyer-ers think you should vote for, only that you should not vote for Jackie Walorski. Now, the last time this happened, I was kind of wondering just how much Hall’s people had had to do with it, since he was never mentioned. Well, his radio ads are all about “Washington Walorski,” so even in his own stuff for his campaign he can’t avoid using Republican frames. I’m not going to bother talking about the entire flyer. Let’s just talk about this part of it:

This is a photoshopped image. It was photoshopped by an asshole at the behest of another asshole.

The general theme of the ad is that Walorski voted for the tax bill without knowing what was in it, so she’s “voting blindly.” Get it? She’s covering her face? Or at least someone’s manly hands have been photoshopped over her face? It’s the exact same hand in a different image on the other side, so this isn’t even a good photoshop, and don’t think that I haven’t noticed that it appears to be a man’s hand they used– rumors about Walorski’s sexuality (she’s married, to a man) have been floating around for literally as long as she’s been in office.

And then there’s that fucking gesture again.

Let me be one hundred percent clear: that image is photoshopped. It is not real. Even if it is an actual image of her using that gesture and only the right arm is added on, it’s still a photoshopped image and therefore by definition the entire thing is suspect. Which means one of two things:

That somebody affiliated with the Indiana Democratic Party deliberately decided to use an image of Jackie Walorski making a white power gesture in an ad and then not call attention to it, basically just doing it as a dogwhistle to both white supremacists and antiracist leftists; or
That they were unaware of what they were doing. In September of 2018, just a couple of weeks (how the fucking hell has it only been a couple of weeks??) after Brett Kavanaugh’s asshole assistant caused a rather substantial brouhaha by making the same gesture behind him at his confirmation hearing.

One of these possibilities is disgustingly cynical at best and actively slanderous at worst. The other possibility is proof of utter fucking incompetence. And neither of them are fucking okay. I hate these people. I hate this fucking election, and I hate the fact that I’ve now had to spend two fucking posts defending Jackie Fucking Walorski, who is also an asshole, but who still doesn’t deserve this shit.

A pox on the lot of these fuckers.

Fuck Mel Hall, part 3 of an endless series

On September 18, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

You may recall parts one and two of a series that wasn’t originally called “Fuck Mel Hall,” but to hell with it, this is my blog and I get to rename stuff if I want to, plus: fuck Mel Hall. Mel, if you’re not aware, is one of two Republicans who is running for my district’s House seat, IN-02. The incumbent, Jackie Walorski, is a Republican who says she is a Republican. Mr. Hall, who received barely 40% of the vote in the primary, somehow is the Democratic nominee, but is not a Democrat. He has made it repeatedly clear that he has no interest whatsoever in advancing the goals of the Democratic party and has never identified himself as a member of the party in any advertisement– radio, TV or print– that I have ever seen.

I will not be voting for him. I think he’s a prick. I vote for Democrats; he isn’t one. If I’m going to be represented by a Republican I want to be represented by one who is honest about it.

Now, an interesting fact about Ms. Walorski: she only got about 3/4 of the vote in her primary, and the person she was running against literally had no campaign at all. Not a website, did no campaigning, nothing. But he was a dude, so 25% of the Republican primary voters voted for someone who they literally knew nothing at all about other than that he had a penis and their current representative didn’t. Mel Hall supposedly got 40% of the vote in the Democratic primary; the other two candidates running were significantly more progressive than he was and he has continued to run as a Republican anyway. I pay attention; there was no enthusiasm for this man anywhere during the primary and the lack of enthusiasm remains today. He will lose and lose badly.

Anyway, take a look at that flyer up there. My wife got one; I didn’t. That’s unusual– neither of us ever miss an election, so generally whenever we get any election-related flyers, we get two of them.

Take a close look and see if you can figure out what’s going on here.

Also: be aware that an election cycle or two ago, faced with no significant races in the Democratic primary, my wife cast a vote for the least objectionable candidate in the Republican primary. All you have to do in Indiana is ask for a ballot and they give you one.

This flyer, paid for by the Indiana Democratic party, appears to be trying to peel Republican voters away from Jackie Walorski, but never once mentions who they ought to vote for instead. The entire damn flyer is Republican-framed: Democrats tend to believe government is actually good for something, so the bullshit “Washington Walorski” nonsense isn’t really going to get any traction with us. I want my representatives to be experienced and good at their jobs, goddammit, and Walorski has been in office for six years, not thirty. I don’t even like her and I recognize a bullshit attack when I see it. Another tell? Every person in the ad is white. Democrats don’t send out ads like that. Republicans, who know good and fucking well that their base mostly doesn’t see people of color as human beings, do. And apparently we’re not above buying into their racist asshole framing if we think it’ll get, well, somebody some votes.

Fuck every single thing about this flyer, in case that isn’t clear. Fuck the cynicism embedded in it, fuck the racism, fuck the sexism, fuck the candidate that it doesn’t bother to mention, fuck the bullshit nickname, which comes from the same asshole impulses that led the Republicans to call Joe Donnelly “Mexico Joe” in some of their bullshit ads, fuck every single thing about it.

I need better fucking representation around here, across the goddamned board.

This one has some bad words in it

On September 5, 2013September 5, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music, Politics15 Comments

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(First things first: if you need context on the picture, go here. This post is gonna be sorta grab-baggy; it should make sense by the time I get to the end.)

Let’s start by griping about nonsense. Y’all know the song OPP, right? If you don’t we can’t be friends anymore. One of hiphop’s classic anthems; it came out when I was a sophomore in high school and therefore I will have it memorized until I die. The whole song is about infidelity, but because it doesn’t have any bad words in it and the writing is clever it got played at high school dances all the time. Combine that with the call-and-response and what you end up with is hundreds of teenagers hollering about penises and pussies in public with none of the adults noticing what’s going on. It’s wonderful. It contains this verse:

As for the ladies, OPP means something gifted
The first two letters are the same but the last is something different
It’s the longest, loveliest, lean– I call it the leanest
It’s another five letter word rhymin’ with cleanest and meanest
I won’t get into that, I’ll do it…ah…sorta properly
I say the last P…hmmm…stands for property

It doesn’t stand for property.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from school when I encountered a picture-perfect example of why I bloody fucking hate terrestrial radio: they played OPP, and they bleeped out cleanest and meanest.

They bleeped two words that rhyme with the actual name of a human body part that half of the human race has, in a song that is entirely about infidelity.

This makes sense on no levels at all, and makes me want to punch the shit out of everyone involved– like, “hit you until my hands break off at the wrists” level of pummeling. I goddamn hate bleeped songs. I feel like if you think as a corporate entity that you need to bleep part of a song you shouldn’t be playing it at all. Ideas are more dangerous than words, you stupid dumbasses. But this is a new level of stupid– even if I was willing to entertain the suggestion that the word “penis” needed to be sanitized from the airwaves, the suggestion that words that rhyme with penis should also be sanitized is so damn dumb that I’m literally in pain right now while I’m complaining about it.

Stop making me use italics, U93. I fucking hate you.

New item! I bring in the mail when I got home, and there was a flyer from our new wingnut Congresscritter in it. Jackie Walorski is enough of a discredit to humanity that I’m not even terribly interested in describing why; she won her last election largely on the backs of 1) redistricting; 2) the incumbent deciding to run (successfully) for the Senate; and 3) disgusting, pathetic accusations of carpetbagging against her opponent, who grew up here (I went to high school with him) and then moved from the area to go fight in Iraq and start a veteran’s charity in DC. It was literally true that he hadn’t lived in the area for several years, but his family still lived here and he spent the majority of his time gone on active duty and fighting in a foreign country. Even if I wasn’t against her politics– and believe me, I am– I’d think she was scum for that.

Which made it interesting to me that most of the flyer– the bit that wasn’t a slanted short questionnaire– was all about trumpeting her bill extending whistleblower protections to sexual assault victims in the military. Protecting rape victims isn’t generally something that Republicans are big on. Crowing about having done so isn’t either. Which leaves me to wonder if a) she’s trying to moderate herself a bit; b) she actually is more moderate than I’d thought; c) she’s just trying to look more moderate; or d) this is an interesting bit of microtargeting– since the flyer in question was addressed to my wife, and there wasn’t one in the mail for me. Generally when we get these sorts of things (and they come frequently enough) there’s either one of them for each of us or it’s just addressed to the household and not to either of us specifically. This one just had my wife’s name on it.

Hmmm.

Last but not least: I just got into an interesting discussion on Facebook about Mike Krahulik’s latest bit of dumbassery. (Be aware: if you don’t know who Mike Krahulik is, you probably ought not to read this part, as I don’t intend to provide a lot of context.) The person who started the thread was saying that he was done with Penny Arcade on account of not being able to support Mike’s actions any longer, and while I agree with him that the man has gotten incredibly tiresome in a lot of ways I’m not able to pull the trigger on that just yet. Which got me wondering about exactly what gets me to cut something I enjoyed out of my life on account of not agreeing with its behavior. I can think of four examples: Mel Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Dan Simmons, and Chik-Fil-A. In each of the four cases, I have previously really enjoyed their work (or their chicken; I hate Chik-Fil-A as a corporation but I will fight you if you denigrate their chicken. We can hate them for their politics but let’s not get stupid here) and am no longer willing to support them in any way because of their beliefs and/or behaviors. I kinda want to include Tom Cruise in here, too, but I was never really a fan of his so it’s not quite the same thing.

I guess the difference is hatred. Mel Gibson hates everybody. Card and Simmons and Chik-Fil-A are open in their hatred of gay people. I don’t think Mike Krahulik hates anybody. I just think he’s a sheltered geek with a short fuse, and spouting his mouth off about shit he knows nothing about frequently gets him in trouble– but I don’t think he hates anybody and I don’t think he’s trying to be an asshole most of the time. My Facebook friend made a good point that once you’re past a certain age you either need to get better about things or own your own bullshit, and he’s right about that– but at the same time I’ve fucked up in my own personal feminism in who knows how many different ways, so I’m not always inclined to jump down the throat of somebody who seems to be trying to get better about sexuality and gender issues. I’m just not sure how much more slack I’m willing to cut the guy if he’s not smart enough to figure out that “never talk about this shit extemporaneously, and have someone smarter than me read over my shoulder whenever I talk about it in print” is a sound policy.

Within minutes, a link to this article appears in my inbox. For those of you too lazy to click, it’s about how Not Intending To Do That appears to be a magical fucking power that not only insulates the Unintender from owning the negative results of their actions but causes others to defend them as well. It’s… right. It also includes the word “kyriarchy,” which means something bad, which is sad, because it’s a fun-sounding word and I’d like opportunities to use it in public.

Thinking about this more: the bit of me that wants to defend Mike is related to the bit of me that refuses to give up on certain kids (I can’t honestly say all of them) in my classes who are for one reason or another generally assholes but seem saveable to me. I think Mike’s saveable. I might be wrong, and he’s a grown-ass man with a long, long cultural reach and not a fourteen-year-old, but I think that’s another part of the difference here as to why I’m not willing to lock the door on PA just yet.