I’m pretty much only posting because the thought of going three days without putting anything on the site gives me hives. I don’t really have a ton to talk about, or at least I don’t have a ton of stuff I want to talk about. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days wanting to punch the internet in the face because the internet is stupid and the people on the internet are stupid. I’ve been protecting my sanity by unfollowing a ton of both-sidesers lately regardless of whether I think they’re generally entertaining when they’re not being both-sidesers. I don’t have the patience for it any fucking longer, sorry.
On TV just now, Gordon Ramsay pronounced “guacamole” as “wocka-moll,” and now I want to punch him too because British or not that’s just not right.
Anyway. An example: The world’s gotten stupid enough that I came very close to wading into a parenting argument on Twitter earlier today. I won’t link to anything because I was too disgusted to make it through the video, but there’s a video floating around of a little kid cutting up in a restaurant. He’s, I dunno, five, and he’s telling everyone to go fuck themselves and calling his mother and grandmother bitches and apparently at a few points he’s actually yelling Crip slogans. There are motherfuckers who are sincerely suggesting that what this kid needs is more violence in his life because apparently Mom and Grandma don’t beat him enough. How fucked up do you have to be to watch a kid that obviously damaged by violence and suggest that beatings are the way to help him?
So, you’d think if somebody wrote an article called “It’s Time for Democrats to Take Responsibility For Their Assassination Porn,” there would be a real good chance that that article would be about 1) assassination porn, whatever the fuck that is and 2) Democrats. That would be a reasonable assumption! Even, perhaps, a common one!
Unfortunately it’s 2017 and everything is stupid as fuck and it’s been a long time since I’ve ripped a politics article to shreds so let’s do this shit.
Wednesday, our public servants were violently attacked. Except, this time it wasn’t a man or woman with brown skin who swears allegiance to Allah. Nor was it a man or woman who worships in the “deep state” of Pepe the Frog and Alex Jones conspiracies while swearing allegiance to right-wing conservatism.
Okay, first of all, this intro would be half-assed coming from a high school student. The phrase “swears allegiance” is used twice in two sentences and you don’t worship “in” a “deep state,” much less a conspiracy. It sounds like it makes sense until you actually pay attention to it. Maybe the next couple of sentences will be better.
Instead, the perpetrator shares the same political ideals as 50 percent of the country.
Which fifty percent? Because that “right wing conservatism” thing is close enough to half of us to not be worth grousing about, and if you think “the left” is half of the country…
Yesterday a liberal supporter who volunteered for the Bernie Sanders campaign attacked a political servant, capital police officers, and Hill staffers.
Again, grammar: attacked a political servant? Just one? And what part of “liberal” and “volunteered for Bernie Sanders” says 50 percent of the country to you? Fuck Bernie Sanders.
But I’m quibbling. Let’s get to the meat of the article:
a madman released several gunshots at the representatives
Okay I can’t actually let that pass. Released? He released several gunshots? You release doves.
As the events unfolded, Sen. Rand Paul commented that if it weren’t for the capital police, everyone would have been dead on the field.
Yeah, let’s talk about some things Rand Paul has said real quick. There’s this, for example:
Now, Paul’s apparently quoting this “judge nap” individual here. Do I care? Not a fucking bit; he’s RTed this guy’s words without condemnation or equivocation and so he gets to fucking own them. Remember, it’s the Democrats who need to “take responsibility for their assassination porn,” but this fucker literally calling for people to shoot at the government (and then crying when they do!) gets a pass.
For years, the Left has focused on the racism and demagoguery on the Right that they believe led to the election of Donald Trump.
This is absolutely true.
Certainly, Trump’s comments about how “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton, or that he could assassinate someone on the street and still get elected, didn’t help negate such stereotypes. Neither did depictions from radical conservatives of Barack Obama being burnt, lynched, or hung from a noose ease tensions between the Right and Left.
These things all happened! Now, this person talking about “Second Amendment people” was running for President while he said that, and he’s supposedly the President now. And those “radical conservatives” include close associates of that so-called President, including his own employees, as well as violent scumbags like Ted Nugent who he has invited to the White House. Meanwhile, there’s that asshole who physically assaulted a reporter– he’s in Congress now, too!
So, I’m sure the Democrats who are guilty of “assassination porn” will be of similar influence as the President of the United States, right?
When former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin released a “crosshairs” target map of 20 congressional districts under faces of Democratic lawmakers with the text “Don’t Retreat, Instead – Reload,” liberals immediately chastised the violent, disgusting act “critics saw as a winking approval of violence,” wrote Max Fisher of The Atlantic.
“Former governor of Alaska.”
Former governor of Alaska.
Former governor of Alaska.
…
Man, I coulda sworn Sarah Palin did something other than be governor of Alaska for half a term. OH WAIT RIGHT SHE WAS A VICE-PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE. So so far we have the actual fucking President and the VP nominee from the previous political cycle who are guilty of violent, eliminationist rhetoric. So, man, we must really be up for something once they get around to those Democrats who need to take responsibility for their assassination porn. Sarah Palin putting literal crosshairs on people’s faces wasn’t quite enough to qualify, apparently; whatever it is the Democrats have done is probably way worse.
Liberals’ anger at Palin was justified, considering that soon after Gabrielle Gifford, a Democrat, was shot in the head and 13 others were wounded, including six killed.
Yeah, let’s not forget that that happened. Democrats reacted exactly the same way they’re reacting to the most current attack– calling for some sort of sane fucking gun policy in this country, because we want people to stop getting shot. Guess what: that’s going to be our reaction to every single shooting, no matter who does it or who they’re shooting at! Maybe there should be fewer guns, and it should be harder to get them! This might happen less often if that were true!
Republicans blew it off, since they only care when it’s them getting shot at. Two dozen fucking children were murdered and they called the entire thing a conspiracy and mocked us for caring. I’m supposed to cry when it’s one Republican congressperson who survives the assault?
Of course, Palin isn’t responsible for that tragedy, but I agree with Andrew Sullivan that her “inflammatory rhetoric has poisoned the discourse and has long run the risk of empowering the deranged.” Like our actions, words have consequences.
You didn’t have a stroke; the first half and back half of this quote do, in fact, directly contradict each other.
If “inflammatory rhetoric” poisons the well of civility, then certainly liberals bear some responsibility for Wednesday’s hideous assault against Republicans.
MY BODY IS READY. Hit me with some of that Democratic assassination porn!
Since last November, liberals (including myself) have engaged in rhetoric and disdain against Trump and conservatives for myriad reasons. But some of the arguments and intense conversations, especially on social media, have been utterly gruesome. This rhetoric I’ve personally refused to partake in, like pondering the assassination of the president.
I am super fucking psyched for the long list of examples of Democratic elected officials who have pondered the assassination of the President and/or called for violence against the same. I’m ready. Let’s go. Example time, assholes!
Recently, comedian Kathy Griffin
Wait what
Political commentator and activist Reza Aslan
Hold the fuck on
To this day, liberals refuse to accept that Trump won the presidency, despite the interference of the Russians.
Oh you did not just bring up Kathy fucking Griffin and Reza Aslan— Aslan’s sin, by the way, is calling the President a “piece of shit,” not, like, any violent rhetoric of any fucking kind at all– and then change the fucking subject like you were done talking. Is this seriously where we’re going, here? We’re juxtaposing literal violent threats and violent fantasies from the highest echelons of the Republican party with a third-rate comedienne doing a routine no one understood or gave much of a shit about and a religious studies professor with a potty mouth? Are you fucking kidding me?
How the fuck do you type something this stupid and not just hurt all over while you’re doing it? I would expect my brain to slowly shut down autonomous processes until I died if I persisted in something this fucking dumb.
We’ve engaged in mindless conversations about how Clinton won the popular vote, Trump is a moron, and Republicans are heartless.
Oh, go fuck yourself. I’ve not been talking about it much around here, but it’s becoming increasingly fucking clear as time goes on that that was the least legitimate election in American history. This isn’t that post, but these are far from fucking “mindless conversations,” and I’m sick to fuck of people acting like vote suppression and Russian interference in our electoral processes are just things that happen that no one should worry about. I repeat: go fuck yourself.
None of these arguments over semantics resolve real peoples’ problems, such as economic disparity, affordable health care, lack of job opportunities in urban and rural areas, climate change, and an out-of-control prison system.
You know what else isn’t going to resolve those real people’s problems? The Republican party. They don’t give a single fucking wet shit about people. Look at this abomination of a health care bill– oh, wait, you can’t. They screamed for years about how Obamacare, which was debated for a year and a half, was “rammed through,” and literally no one outside of the Republican half of the Senate has seen the fucking bill.
So, right. Still waiting for that assassination porn. There’s gotta be one elected Democrat in here somewhere. Just one.
Sanders isn’t responsible.
Well, then.
He’s been responsibly engaging in conversations on practical progressive ideas,
Have I said “fuck Bernie Sanders” yet? No? Fuck Bernie Sanders. He’s not a Democrat and neither are his followers– in fact, they’re fucking proud of it. And gaslight as much as you like but there is a part of his base that crosses over quite neatly with Trump’s base, and that crossover element is pure fucking misogyny. Every white dude who thought he was a lefty but hated women anyway voted for Sanders. Every single one. And Sanders’ reaction to this rot in his midst has been to repeatedly deny that these people exist and try to gaslight those of us who have had to put up with them into believing we’re making that up. Yeah, I said it: that fucker who shot at those Congressmen was a Bernie Bro, and fuck him.
NOTE: this is another difference between us and them, by the way– any Clinton supporter/mainline Democrat who gets it into his or her head (who the fuck am I kidding; it’ll be “his”) to go shoot up anyone at all under any circumstances can also be similarly fucked. The Republicans defended the shit out of motherfuckers for pointing guns at federal agents when those motherfuckers were white conservatives. Does the word Malheur ring a bell to any of you? Do you remember these assholes?
I’m sure there’s a Democrat doing some assassination porn here somewhere…But yeah, back to Bernie for a sec, and in the interest of precision: I don’t hold him responsible for the misogyny of so many of his supporters. I hold him responsible for not openly condemning them until they were run the fuck out of his “revolution.” Which he never came close to doing.
But anyway. Bernie’s not a Democrat, and it’s the Democrats who are doing the assassination porns. I’m sure the last couple of paragraphs are going to get to the porny part. Surely.
Despite past rhetoric, Trump isn’t responsible for this recent attack either. In fact, he gets the severity of this tragedy: “Many lives would’ve been lost if not for the heroic actions of the two Capitol Police officers who took down the gunman, despite sustaining gunshot wounds during a very, very brutal assault,” said Trump in a statement from the Diplomatic Room at the White House. In my opinion this shows Trump is growing to understand his responsibility as president and commander in chief.
Wow.
We liberals have been too busy arguing with and hating on “the others.” We’ve done what we accused the Right of doing. And what has that gotten us?
Liberals, it’s time to have a serious talk about the dangers on the Left to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again.
Yesterday at work: a $2,000 return on an insanely slow day. I have like eight sales but the biggest one is for less than a hundred and fifty dollars so it doesn’t amount to shit.
Today at work: a $4,000 return, and I still haven’t dug myself out of yesterday’s hole, plus it’s Tuesday, so there’s two trucks in the morning and then lots and lots of phone calls to people whose stuff has arrived and then spending the rest of the day answering the phone and in a progressively worse and worse mood because you’re leaving detailed messages for these fuckwits and they’re calling without listening to their fucking voicemail and saying things like “Uh, yeah, I got a call from this number?” and then trailing off.
LISTEN. TO. YOUR. FUCKING. VOICEMAIL. YOU. FUCKING. CRETIN.
I’m gonna go off on somebody sooner or later, goddammit. If I answer the phone and say “Thanks for calling <furniture store>, this is Luther, may I help you?” then maybe the phone call might be about furniture? Did you even hear that, moron?
And then I got home and had an angry letter from the Illinois Department of Revenue wondering why I hadn’t filed my taxes in September. Because I haven’t set foot in Illinois since July, maybe? Or earned any income? And don’t taxes get filed in April, and what is this September shit? That could be why.
OH SHIT RIGHT also half the staff got written up because the store had too few prospects last month. That was fun too!
I was as disappointed as anyone when Disney decided to wipe out the Expanded Universe.
Wait, no, that’s not true. I was as disappointed as any normal person when Disney decided to wipe out the Expanded Universe. I did not go on to act like an insane asshole about it, though, and many people chose that route, so I clearly wasn’t as disappointed as anyone. I hung out with(*) Timothy Zahn this summer, the guy who wrote the Thrawn books, and he seemed like he was having a pretty normal weekend, so I figure I can probably find a way to move on if he can.
I have been further disappointed by the fact that I have hated every single New EU book that has come out so far. I’ve bought all but one of them– I haven’t grabbed Dark Disciple yet, for no good reason– because I am an eternal optimist and a creature of habit, but I literally haven’t finished one of them, because they have been terrible. Maybe I finished A New Dawn. I’m a huge fan of Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series, and I was enormously excited that he was writing a Star Wars book. It turns out that first-person Luke Skywalker books should be illegal, and Heir to the Jedi was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Half of one, anyway; I didn’t come close to finishing it.
Star Wars books had one more chance, and that one chance was Star Wars: Aftermath. I love Chuck Wendig, but I love Kevin Hearne too, and that didn’t work out so well.
And then the reviews started rolling in, and they were awful, and it almost kept me from ordering the book until I realized the incredible percentage of poor reviews that were clearly written by morons. So I bought the book and I read it.
Star Wars: Aftermath is not my favorite Star Wars book. Star Wars: Aftermath is not my favorite Chuck Wendig book, either. That honor goes to The Blue Blazes, which, c’mon, sequel already.
Here are some good reasons to not like Aftermath:
Chuck Wendig’s typical writing style– present tense, with choppy sentences and occasionally deliberately brutalized syntax– is hardly Star Wars house style. If you’re not ready for it– I was, obviously, because I’ve read his books before– it can be jarring.
The book is focused on minor and/or new characters. Han Solo and Chewbacca show up for an interlude section, and do not affect the main narrative in any way. I can see this being disappointing.
I don’t dislike Aftermath for either of those reasons. In fact, I don’t dislike Aftermath at all. It’s a pretty good book. But I wouldn’t want to punch you if you didn’t like the book and you cited one of those reasons.
Many of the one-star reviews, sadly, are from people who perhaps need more punching– or perhaps more appropriately a firm slap to the back of the head and a stern reminder to fix your broken life.
Here’s what I liked about Aftermath: the Star Wars universe– well, okay, galaxy— is really big, and a major political event like the fall of the Empire is going to have an effect on every corner of it. While a lot of people aren’t going to like that the book breaks away from the Big Four of Han, Luke, Leia and Chewie, I think it’s actually a strength. The book pokes its nose into lots of different corners– some we’ve heard of, some we haven’t, and some we’re getting our first glimpse of other than a brief shot or two in a trailer– and we see the effects of the Empire’s dissolution across the galaxy. The book is sprinkled with short, three- or four-page Interlude chapters, which pick a character and a planet and tell a really short story about them. None of them impact on the main narrative. It’s a great way to spread the breadth of the story without hugely overloading it with more people and situations to keep track of. The interludes are just that– interludes. You could skip all of them if you wanted to, but that would be a dumb decision.
If you didn’t like Aftermath because there are some gay characters in it, you need to reevaluate every single thing about your failed mess of a life. You are terrible. The good news is, you can stop. And you should.
I am told that there are five gay characters out of the dozens in the book. Here is how terribly gay they are: one mentions toward the end of the book that he is not into women. Technically, this doesn’t even mean he’s gay. He could be asexual for all we know, or perhaps just not into bounty hunters and finding an excuse. One character has a gay aunt, and he has intermittently lived with her and her partner for the last several years. They get a little domestic scene or two. There is supposedly a gay male couple as well; they have such a strong impact on the narrative with their gay gayness and their shoving gay down the throats of the nongay that I managed to miss them entirely. I only know they’re there because I’ve seen people complaining about them. I musta missed a pronoun somewhere, probably in one of the interludes.
If you don’t like this book because there are some gay characters sprinkled among the huge majority of straight characters, this is you:
And I don’t mean “the hero of the series,” by the way, I mean the second whiniest scene in film history, and I’m only using this one because the Tosche Station scene doesn’t have as much of a poutywhinyface as this one does.
Now stop it.
I’m not telling anyone they have to like, or even read, this book. It has weaknesses; chief among them is a problem that slays many would-be Star Wars writers: the deadly problem of the figure of speech. Wendig bounces back and forth between English figures of speech that reference animals and situations that, as far as we know, don’t exist in Star Wars (he may not actually say “raining cats and dogs,” but that’s the type of thing I’m talking about) or trying to use English figures of speech but Star Warsing them up in annoying ways (“raining nexus and rancors!”) that are not better.
Like I said earlier: it’s not my favorite Star Wars book, nor is it my favorite Chuck Wendig book. But it’s certainly a solid effort that’s well worth the read, which is something I haven’t been able to say about any of the other new continuity books (I’m sorry, Kevin! I love you, really!) and there are a couple of really cool hints about the new movies sprinkled here and there. Just do yourself a favor and try to strip away as many preconceptions as you can before you read the damn thing.
Including the bigotry. Definitely get rid of that. Because it’s dumb, and the back of your head has a slappin’ target affixed to it at the moment.
(*) Where “hung out with” means “had maybe a two-minute conversation and shook his hand, and he was sort of at my booth for a while but it was actually the booth next to mine,” but it’s my blog and I get to overstate my life if I want to.
Perhaps the clearest sign that I am utterly burned out as an educator is the fact that tomorrow is the last day of the first round of ISTEP testing and I haven’t even been able to muster up the energy to complain about it. Today was impressively rough; our principal is out of town, and literally the first words the AP said to me were “Get in here, we’ve got a problem.”
We’d just gotten a call from transportation that they were going to be two hours late picking up some of our kids– kids who had already been waiting at their bus stops for up to half an hour, and some of whom had apparently called the school to tell us that they didn’t have keys to their houses and couldn’t get back in.
This is a fuck-up of astronomical proportions before you get to the part where we’re out fifty or sixty kids on a testing day. At that point we start looking around to figure out who’s getting fired. It’s incompetence on a staggering scale, and the worst part is that it’s not terribly surprising, because transportation has been run by morons for literally the entire time I’ve worked in Indiana.
That aside, though: based on rumblings I’ve been hearing from downstate and the insane difficulty level of the “readiness” test they made our kids take twice leading up to the ISTEP, I was concerned that the thing was going to be impossible. There’s still plenty of time for them to make the multiple-choice portion a huge pain in the ass, but this test looked no different to me in terms of difficulty level than any other ISTEP I’ve administered. Which is to say: the math was too difficult for most of my kids, but it’s always too difficult for most of my kids, and this particular test was not more too difficult than it has always been.
So, Knighthawk Armory, an organization I’d never heard of prior to today, just posted some fucking amazing pictures to their Facebook page. I’ll show you two of them; click through for the others. They made a Hulk out of scrap metal:
(CORRECTION: They didn’t do it, they just reposted the pictures. Actual artists are Old Steel Art out of Thailand, whose page is mostly not in English but whose pictures are amazing anyway.)
Here’s the fifth comment on the post:
There are some dumb, dumb, dumb motherfuckers in this country, people. Christ.
You’ve read what I have to say about Rigor and High Standards, yes? If not, start here.
The State of Indiana, in their infinite wisdom, has had the ISTEP test redone for this year. And they have let us know that this one will involve High Standards! And Rigor! Lots of Rigor! You can sprinkle it on stuff, like cinnamon sugar.
We take three practice tests over the course of the year so that we can get some idea of who might pass the ISTEP, because there are no other ways to figure that out other than testing.
The results of the second test are (mostly) in, and I’ve been looking at them all week.
Currently perhaps a dozen students in my building are expected to pass the ISTEP. In the building.
That is not a typo or an exaggeration. Historically we’ve been passing, oh, 70% of our kids or so, give or take a couple standard deviations.
But, hey, what do you want us to do? Make excuses?
I’m pretty much only posting because the thought of going three days without putting anything on the site gives me hives. I don’t really have a ton to talk about, or at least I don’t have a ton of stuff I want to talk about. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days wanting to punch the internet in the face because the internet is stupid and the people on the internet are stupid. I’ve been protecting my sanity by unfollowing a ton of both-sidesers lately regardless of whether I think they’re generally entertaining when they’re not being both-sidesers. I don’t have the patience for it any fucking longer, sorry.
So, you’d think if somebody wrote an article called “
Yesterday at work: a $2,000 return on an insanely slow day. I have like eight sales but the biggest one is for less than a hundred and fifty dollars so it doesn’t amount to shit.
Lemme see, lemme see, how shall I start?
