Saturday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, March 9, 2024
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76 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The headline of the day- Spain’s supermarket thieves covet olive oil as prices surge
Far-right Montana congressman says he’s quitting politics after ‘death threat’
But I never thought the leopards would eat my face.
You know what I notice about the media coverage of Biden’s sotu, the complete lack of follow up by these same organizations that spent a week reporting on all the perils and landmines and thresholds for competency that brethlessly awaited him, and how this was such a telling seminal moment for his presidency. And then he knocked it out of the park, kicked all his naysayers right in the balls, surpassed all expectations such that they even accused him of being on drugs. And the reporting on this now, these set of circumstances after the aftermath? Basically nothing. So, a week of “Uhh oh”, followed by, well, actually he was great so we can’t report on how great he was and keep that in the cycle past a day. And if he was terrible you know that would still be being talked about it right now. Uh yeah, nothing on that. That’s how horrible our media is. Just the worst.
Fun Fact: It is quite possible to get marijuana in Barcelona. It is however illegal to possess it anywhere but your home, or presumably, hotel. Weed is sold through private clubs, and one of the things they tell you as you leave with your cannabis, is to carry it in your underwear, because cops can search anywhere except your underwear.
At first I assumed this was Catalans having a little fun with tourists, and had it been I would not have resented it because it is legitimately, funny. Turns out it’s actually legit. So you buy your grams and your gummies, and stick ’em in your wherever. Not cheap, because there’s a 20 Euro membership fee on top of somewhat pricey goods, but the quality is excellent. Even by LA/Vegas standards.
To the surprise of absolutely no one:
@Michael Reynolds:
Brings new dimensions of meaning to the term “padded bra.”
US not hiding aliens or UFO technology from the public, Pentagon says
Well, I’m glad that’s settled.
I guess he wasn’t prepared for that question.
@OzarkHillbilly: Perhaps the only good thing coming from the old Trump administration is that I genuinely believe this would have been a day-1 question to staff upon taking office, and he has no ability to keep his mouth shut.
@Michael Reynolds:
Michael,
Almost 50 years ago in his The Dogs of War, Frederick Forsyth wrote ‘Spaniards will cheerfully admit, Spain is different’.
Forsyth was writing this as his main character was going through Spanish customs. Customs officials would take particular interest if Penthouse magazine, Communist propaganda, drugs or weapons would be being brought in, but not so much if it was excesses of money, liquor, or cigarettes.
@Bill Jempty:
Spain is radically different from when I was here at age 19. (I’ve been a couple times in the last five years, or so.) Back in the early 70’s there were donkey carts on unpaved or barely paved streets in parts of Madrid. Trains moved so slowly it was comical, and they’d stop in the middle of nowhere for half an hour to wait for a guy carrying a basket of fruit to board. There was no air conditioning, full stop. If there was deodorant, it was not widely used. All toilets were squat-style. It was a labor of Hercules to get a bottle of water in a cafe, and I don’t think ice had been invented. And of course there was the Guardia Civil in their ludicrous patent leather hats carrying submachine guns and bullying backpackers.
It was a dark, rather scary place. And now it’s very nearly France, and well ahead of say, Alabama.
@Michael Reynolds:
Funny story. A few years ago, my wife and I arrived in Madrid at 7am. Couldn’t check into our VRBO apartment until 2pm. Made our way from the airport to the neighborhood in which we were staying (Lavapies – which literally means Feet Washing). My wife and I go one of two ways on vacation. Either a super nice hotel in the center of the city, or an apartment in a grungy neighborhood. Lacapies is the latter – mostly Nigerian and Moroccan immigrants. After getting a nice breakfast in a small diner, we made our way towards our apartment, arriving around noon. We had two hours to kill so we parked ourselves at a small park with a large group of local Nigerians playing futbol – soccer. Sitting there minding our own business, carry-on suitcases next to us, we must have looked like the biggest marks. Me, who looks Greek, Spanish, or Arab, and my wife, who is as white as you can get. With luggage. After about 15 minutes, a young Nigerian, wearing a grey trench coat, sidles up to us, very casually, and under his breath, in English, asks, “Weed? Hash?”. I say, “Maybe”,
And like in a movie, he turns, faces us, and opens up his trenchcoat, Sewn into the insides of his trench coat, are pockets, five/six on each side, and each has joints, gummies, vape cartridges, rolling papers, and even a vape battery. He was a walking dispensary. I bought two joints, and he told me the underwear rule. It was good shit. Really good. Ended up seeing him againa few days later at the park, and buying two more joints for the Barcelona leg of my trip.
Good times.
Someone asked about SOTU ratings the other day. Interestingly, according to Nielsen, ratings for this year’s SOTU were 18% higher than last year.
@Michael Reynolds: That’s the Spain my wife grew up in. She can tell some tales about what it was like to be poor in the ’60s.
@EddieInCA: @OzarkHillbilly:
It’s so weird to me to be able to get (more or less legally) high in Spain. Back in the day long hair + a joint meant Guardia Civil could (more or less legally) gun you down. Sort of like Texas in that same era.
We are all-in on the posh hotel in the city center thing. I’m looking at Plaça Catalunya* as I type. We have dark memories, sense memories of living in run-down motels, sitting by an outdoor pay phone in case a job came through, idly stomping roaches and dodging moths.** When I do book tour it’s in my rider: 4 star or better. Nope, not getting close to slumming.
*But the brightly-colored porta-potties in the foreground are less than ideal.
**This amount of detail suggests trauma..
A recounting of the life of a trans-masc eagle:
https://blahaj.zone/notes/9qmumthsn0y802x3
@Tony W: There are a lot of reasons to doubt the UFO truthers, but maybe first and foremost is that hundreds of world leaders across 75+ years, not a single one ever wanted to give what would become the most famous speech in the history of the world, “I come here today to tell you that there is intelligent life in the universe and they have visited us.”
@OzarkHillbilly: The thing about alien technology is that it is probably incomprehensible. Imagine a time machine that carries you back a hundred years, and you encounter Thomas Edison with your cellphone. Can you explain how it works? If he takes it apart, can he reverse engineer it? I think that there is so much contemporary technology in a cellphone that without all of that industrial base the cellphone in Edison’s hands would be a paperweight. Likewise, a vessel capable of interstellar travel would be an insoluble puzzle to us. Give Priam a Abrams tank, and he has no way of fueling it, making the ammunition, nor the metallurgical knowledge to make one. Knowledge would be very hard to extract from a genuine alien artifact.
BTW, I require very rigid evidence to believe in aliens. No such evidence exists.
@OzarkHillbilly: Over at Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen notes that the report finds no indication of alien activity and wants to know what that really means.
I’ve long wondered about people who are drawn to obvious con men and other types of phonies. I call them “trumpers” (lowercase t), after Trump of course, but it also applies to those who put their faith in Jim and Tammy Faye, in Rush Limbaugh, heck even in New Age phonies like Marianne Williamson. Some people are drawn not just to phonies, but obvious and blatant phonies. And not all of these people are simpletons, not by a long stretch. What do they get from these con men?
More and more I believe for a significant number it is one single thing: certainty. I think there are people who are inwardly terrified by uncertainty of any sort, and are drawn to people who present as unerringly and strongly certain. A phony will always be able to present as more certain than any honest broker. They never have to concede that something might require study or thought or might be this way or that. Because their entire output is just Frankfurt-ian bullshit, they can pivot at any time, sometimes even in the same sentence. When the average person listens to them all they can hear is the BS and are repulsed, but for a not insignificant number of people that strong and certain BS perfectly fills the fearful hole in their psyche that is widened by any doubt or indecision.
It’s why I don’t try to engage or argue with trumpers. The logic or reality of any argument doesn’t matter. All arguments introduce doubt, and they cannot engage with that, and so are pushed more towards their source of certainty. The better the argument, the faster they run from it into the certain embrace of their con man.
It takes so goddamn long for resistance to build that I give up. And then, there it is.
Impatience has always been a failing of mine.
@MarkedMan:
Weak men and the inexplicable women who are with them.
I think men have lost their way, their definition of self. Many have proven frankly quite fragile in the face of what I acknowledge is genuine stress. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who refuse to adapt, they annoy me, they bring out the judgmental in me, and that’s not attractive. @Andy and yes, @Lounsbury, are right that the furry mammals who adapted hold the dinosaurs in contempt. (I paraphrase. Rather freely.) The contempt began to manifest a few years earlier than might have been politically advisable.
The dinosaurs, deep down know they’re finished. It’s why we get the nihilism. And the hunger for a Führer to lead them to some alternate world they don’t really even imagine, a place as unformed and unreal as the heaven they’ve given up on. Some of these people still haven’t gotten over the ascent of Hippies.
I think they see a future where people like them have no place.
@MarkedMan:
This is, of course, the appeal of religion. It offers certainty, and a support community of fellow believers. And it is the difficulty many people have with science. The core of science is falsifiability, the concept that we believe a thing is provisionally true only because, so far, no one has shown it wrong, and they might. I recall a story I read years ago from a guy who was visiting the astro-physics department at a university. They were the authors and supporters of some particular theory. He was expecting to find them a bit glum as new data had just called their pet theory into question. Instead he described them as just short of dancing in the hallway singing, “Oh boy, we got new data! Goody, goody, we got new data!” We often see critics treating science as though it were a competing faith. They cannot conceive any other understanding.
@Slugger:
Right away, not a chance. If Edison* and many, many others can have years to study it, and multiple exemplars, then eventually they’d succeed in creating electronic computers and microchips decades ahead of “schedule.”
On the other hand, if you took a 1950s car to, say, the Renaissance, people like Da Vinci could figure out most of what the various parts of the engine do. Things like spark plugs and the headlights would astonish them.
But suppose you took the latest Samsung phone to, oh, 1970. By then microchips and computers were already in existence. They’d understand the phone well enough, but would be unable to replicate it without 50 years worth of refinement in the manufacturing of electronics.
How does that compare between us as we are now and hypothetical interstellar travelers? We have no way of knowing, until actual interstellar travelers show up.
We can be smug and think there are no fundamental forces or energies we’ve yet to discover, the way electricity would be to people in the Renaissance. But we know that we don’t know what the major part of the universe is composed of. We name it dark energy and dark matter, because we have no clue what they are. Maybe more advanced species not only know, but can make use of them (we make use of all the other forces and energies).
So, it depends what “much more advanced technology” means.
*Edison would have a much better shot at understanding and replicating an intermediate technology, like a vacuum tube computer such as ENIAC.
@gVOR10: I always laugh when some fundamentalist starts talking about a cabal of scientists that collude to hide anything new. The reality is that every scientist dreams of being the one who proves something new. The thing is, they really, really resent posers who come in and just announce their “new” thing, and their proof is shoddy crap they wouldn’t let a high schooler get away with, built upon a misunderstanding of the subject matter.
As in most things with fundamentalists, every accusation is an admission. They think scientists behave this way because it is the way they behave.
@Kathy:
Excellent point and you use the perfect example. Every new advance in chip technology requires a new factory to be built. They don’t just retrofit the old ones because that equipment simply won’t work for the new technology. So it takes years to plan and build a plant and start production, and then it has to be profitable. The factory stays in existence but keeps on making the same technology and as it ages it slides down in value.
@gVOR10:
Bible inerrancy, a mandatory belief for Southern Baptists.
@Michael Reynolds:
If Florida can actually put abortion on the ballot for 2024, that will change the equation in the general election. Alot of center-right women, who would normally vote GOP, will vote in favor of abortion. How many of those will translate to Biden votes? Will be very interesting to find out. Could be surprising.
@MarkedMan:
I forgot to add Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Suppose you showed Da Vinci a modern cell phone. That would be magic as far as his knowledge goes.
Show the same phone to Tesla, and he knows enough to get a glimpse on how it works.
Show it to Steve Jobs in the 70s, and he’ll claim to have invented it 😉 Seriously, he’d have a good notion of how to get Wozniak to do a simpler version of it.
So in what part of this progression will we be when/if we find a much more advanced technology?
@Slugger:
I’ve thought about things like this before. Obviously, would need to take a good generator with plenty of fuel.
I would like to take a TV and PS5 back to someone like Ben Franklin or Mark Twain, shove a controller in his hand, and have them play a game with a huge open world like Elden Ring.
Mainly because the biggest issue with taking something like a cell phone back is that much of its functionality is hampered by not being able to connect to a network.
Something more akin to what you are talking about would be to take a very large TV, a few modern films on Blu-Ray to Edison and show him those.
I’d be curious exactly which part would fascinate them all the most. Part of me thinks it would be something we would not expect.
Hero Cops Union Strong.
Pittsburgh Fraternal Order of Police
@Kathy:
The Harry Potter movies are interesting in this regard. When they first came out a newspaper photo that showed movement and action was obviously magic. But I wonder if the next generation to watch those movies will even register them as magical.
I’ve tried to think of a way to define magic that doesn’t also encompass technology but I’ve been unsuccessful
Hero Cops
Uvalde parents outraged after independent report finds police officers didn’t violate policy
The true blame lies on the civilians and parents who disobeyed law enforcement and tried to save their kids themselves.
@MarkedMan:
The next generation probably won’t know what a newspaper is.
@OzarkHillbilly: Apparently, it’s not just the leopards that want to eat his face:
Ouchies! Still, the hits just keep on comin’ [cue the leopards]
On the plus side (to whatever degree this is a plus 🙁 ) with clowns to left and jokers to the right, it’s a good sign that you’re in the middle when they’re shooting at you from both sides. I wish him better fortune in his next career.
@Slugger:..I require very rigid evidence to believe in aliens.
Bring me one…
That’s all I ever ask.
@gVOR10:
I suspect that it may well mean what Slugger is talking about one click up.
@MarkedMan: None of them said the following with a television news crew and member of law enforcement present.
A small snippet of a long story I have to finish.
@gVOR10: “Tyler Cowen notes that the report finds no indication of alien activity and wants to know what that really means.”
The man is proof that hard-core libertarianism is even worse than lead for cognitive function.
@MarkedMan: I think that the next generation of youngsters may still have enough experience with the phenomenon of newspapers (some will still be available, they’ll still be in libraries, etc.) to realize that printed photos do not self-animate (unless that technology is coming down the pike in the next year or so) but will also get that “this is like if newspapers could have YouTube videos imbedded.”
@Paul L.: “[D]idn’t violate policy” is the “what’s wrong with this picture?” part, indeed! Yikes!
@MarkedMan:
“I come here today to tell you that there is intelligent life in the universe and they have visited us and they are disappointed in us. They said that we were backwards, boring and don’t even taste good. The worst part is that they weren’t even rude about it, they just stated it as if it were a fact.”
I can see an ambitious politician not wanting to give that speech. Everything else you say will be forever overshadowed by this, and you will never be able to get anything done because any time you are talking about universal health care or whatever, people will pester you with questions like “How can they say we’re boring? Did the aliens even read Twilight?”
FinishedTFY. Seriously, I think what they fear is a loss of status. The ability to put those they see as inferior back in their place. This is at the heart of their obsession with being an “alpha male”, which I find hilarious as all get out as well as a little bit sad.
Man, if you have to tell people you’re an alpha male, you ain’t.
@Kurtz:
Everyone wants to go back in time and kill Hitler, but what if you could just give 13 year old Hitler a tablet filled with porn? But only interracial porn. Just try to change his entire worldview.
Probably not very many would vote for Biden, but I wonder how many would vote for trump anyway?
“I am going to vote to protect my rights and at the same time I am also going to vote for the man who enabled the holy rollers to take my rights away.”
That level of cognitive dissonance hurts my brain.
@Michael Reynolds:
I might have mentioned that I’ve fallen backwards into an amazing rave family*. It’s quite the Get-A-Long gang. Racially diverse, gender diverse, sexuality, age, class, we are all over the friggen place. I’m old enough to recognize how beautiful and special it is. I’m going to cherish this for a long as it lasts.
One of the best parts of this group is just how secure the cis straight men are. They are just secure in themselves and their masculinity. There’s a lot of noise and bluster and bravado, but at the core there’s kindness and respect and support. One gay man pointed out to me that a couple of guys are huge muscular gym rats and they come out to raves wearing tight clothes and show off their muscles and dance with wild abandon. These are hard dudes. I think one was a gangbanger. lol, he was teasing me that the needles I use to inject estrogen are bigger than the needles he uses to juice. Called ‘em harpoons.
Not once have I felt unsafe around these guys. I’m like half a foot taller than most of them and they just treat me like I’m one of the girls. It’s amazing. I wish more men were like these guys.
*Think a sort of commune but we all listen to “EDM” and party together instead of befouling the woods.
@Stormy Dragon: Heh, thanx for that. Evangelical heads everywhere will explode.
@OzarkHillbilly: A bumper sticker I saw recently noted that watching Fox News to understand the world is like believing you’re an oceanographer because you watch Spongebob Squarepants. “Women voting for Republicans” could replace “watching Fox News” in that formulation very easily.
Oh, you aren’t going to like this at all. Not only is it Steve Bannon’s show, but he’s talking to Batya Ungar-Sargon, who while on the Left, is disfavored. She’s talking about her upcoming book. ‘Second Class‘, that looks at how the multi-cultural working class are moving to vote, if not Republican, but for Trump.
It is an stark contrast to the ‘White Rural Rage’ meme being sold right now.
As she says, “Polarization is a totally elite phenomenon”. “The American working class is deeply tolerant.”
I know, that startles, but if you wish to understand what is happening, it would be wise to consider her view collected as she researched her book.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve observed a view of politics very close to that of professional wrestling in many Trump supporters. They only see the headlines on FOX. They have no deep understanding of the issues and do not seek to have any. It’s entertainment for them. Trump gets this.
From this perspective, Trump’s comment about that guy who is running for governor of North Carlina -“MLK on steroids.” is a comment on the entertainment value of the man’s stage presence, nothing more, and was entirely valid.
@Beth:
One of the things that really shocked me was the discovery that some men, when they say, “I hate women”, actually mean they hate women. I always took it as a self-deprecating, rueful thing, until Gamer Gate. Then it was like, fuck, they actually hate women. Was, and still is inconceivable to me. I still believe the reason we get the big shoulders and the muscles is because our job is keeping that damned leopard at bay. I’ve had a few occasions to play that role, and it wasn’t fun, exactly, it was scary a bit, but I had fulfilled my duty.
More bad news for Boeing… Triple seven drops a wheel on takeoff, ruins some rental cars at SFO.
@dazedandconfused:
Does ‘roid-rage come with a side of antisemitism? I can see it shutting down some critical thought processes.
I think Trump might be onto something here.
@JKB: “Donald Trump is a new deal Democrat”? What????
ETA: Interesting conversation though. Still, she’s no more of a liberal Democrat than I am. A brand new revisionist history (and overestimation of the power of “the Democrats” [music: “dun dun dunnnnhhh.”])
@dazedandconfused: Seems like that would be bad news for United, rather than Boeing, as wheels are commonly replaced, and should be part of the maintenance checklist.
But, I would await for clarification from proper authorities — either The FAA or Kathy, whichever.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I don’t see why you would question the liberal bona fides of the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.
And, as regards to the claim that “the multi-cultural working class are moving to vote, if not Republican, but for Trump,” I would look towards ownership and editorial changes in Spanish language news services before anything else.
@Bill Jempty: I bought some stunning olive oil from France when I was in Geneva a couple of years ago. A quick online check suggests that it is about 20 euros per litre these days.
@Gustopher: I dunno. I usually attribute it to me being really judgmental.
@JKB: A sucker born every minute. The only question here is, who’s the sucker?
I wasn’t happy to hear that either.
@JKB: The difference is that you seem to be buying the assertion. Do you not have any critical thinking skills?
Meanwhile:
England 23 Ireland 22
England win by a drop-goal by Marcus Smith at the last minute.
Literally: the clock had gone red, but in Rugby, play continues until the ball goes dead.
What a game!
The final weekend sees England play France, and Ireland vs Scotland.
If England win, and Ireland lose, England take the Six Nations championship.
@Beth:
My experience with all-nighter raves in the UK (back in the late 90’s/early 00’s) was that by and large nobody gave a damn about “categories”(various).
Just want to get ecstatic (in whatever their preferred mode of doing so may be: just dancing and the sonics can get the job done, often enough) and have fun.
@Michael Reynolds:
“I hate x category” tends to be a symptom of personal insecurity, in my experience.
As does misogynistic inter-male “banter”.
I mean, lad, I tended to think, if you are so disdainful of women, why the fuck are you you blatantly desperate?
I also tended to run out of patience when some guys got tetchy about being turned down by female friends. Being 6ft, 14 stone (little of it fat back then) and with facial scars (unless hidden by facial hair) I tended to be persuasive.
If I was not, Big Tim was.
As Big Tim as, umm, big.
LOL
Like when friend Alexandra remarked to one bloke, on being asked:
“What’s your sign?”
“A no-entry sign, in your case.”
Also, Alex:
“Life’s too short, and so are you.”
Fun times.
@Gustopher:
Whoever it is I pity the fools. They’ve pissed off the wrong people this time. Car rental companies’ ruthlessness has been well documented.
@JKB:
A sincere thank you for pinning this. I’m curious to see the argument she is making. I have seen the name, but don’t recall whether I’ve read anything by her. I’m not making any kind of real judgment about any of her work.
—
Oh, boy. I read the blurb for her forthcoming book. I Googled her to get a feel for what she writes. And . . . Uh . . . I have questions.
First things first, According to the bio on Aeon.co, her PhD is in the 18th Century Novel and her dissertation is called “Coercive Pleasures: The Force and Form of the Novel 1719-1740”. Both the hyper-specific English PhD and the title of the dissertation certainly seem lefty.
The blurb for this upcoming book states “Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive.” Well, okay.
Of course, based on the description of her visit to the Bannon podcast, this seems a little anecdotal for her claims. Oh, I see the blurb also says it “combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinion on America’s emergent class divide.”
Well, specific sensational claims about the upcoming election in a book that presumably has some sort of lead time may require a bit more than “a look at the data” and some vague notion of expert opinion. But talking about a large class divide is the wheelhouse of a good socialist now isn’t it?
Both her first book, and the forthcoming one are published by Encounter Books, a conservative publisher. (Hmmm)
She went on something called The Unspeakable Podcast in support of her first book. The description of her episode describes her this way:
The title of her first book? Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. Okay, well, I know there are plenty of socialists who aren’t crazy about ‘identity politics’. I’m sure someone who is “something of a socialist” would find it easy to argue that woke politics crowds out the far more important class discussion. Still, I’m starting to wonder about describing her as “on the left”. These idiosyncratic qualifiers are . . . uh . . . interesting.
Oh, well let’s look at a tweet, or xeet, or whatever the fuck it’s called. (link to her feed)
Okay, hmm. Well, I mean I suppose a humanities PhD, a stint as opinion editor at The Forward, followed by a position at Newsweek as deputy opinion editor, and a Neurologist father who specializes in pain management doesn’t automatically make one elite. After all, she is just a deputy editor at Newsweek.
But it is a little weird for a self-described socialist who is “of the left” to use the term leftist that way. Oh, I see, she’s only talking about the “elite” leftists, which definitely doesn’t include her.
More tweets:
Oh, she’s in favor of unions! She may even be a closet Marxist. Whoa, whoa, now. Her evidence of Dems abandoning unions is their pushing of right to work la–oh, right, that was a GOP thing. So her claim about Dems moving away from unions is based on, oh, there it is, border policy because their base consists only of elites (still not her!) and they like likes cheap labor.
Well, vaguely pro union=left if not far Left. So. Sure.
Let’s see, what else? Oh, that’s right! Look at that. I see. She has to be a liberal, The Forward started out as a socialist publication near the turn of the 20th century. Oh, wait. She was called out for bothsiderism and platforming “clickbait conservatism” by another publication? Surely, it had to be by Nathan J. Robinson or someone at the Nation. Oh, it was CJR?
Bonus tweet:
Wait, so are they writing these links on napkins at Waffle House while they discuss current events with their community that consists of a wide spectrum of political thought from AnCaps, a few moderates and liberals, and at least one Marxist-Leninist? Or is it more likely they will send it on Facebook to some high school acquaintance they haven’t seen since their 20th class reunion in 1980?
Who knows?
But she definitely may have worn a Che shirt once when she was getting her PhD.
Or something…
@clarkontheweekend:
Actually, they – ‘The Mainstream Media’- has now moved on to evening things up by reporting on how, to the dismay of many in the Democratic coalition, Joe used the term ‘illegals’ instead of the preferred/correct ‘undocumented.’
I do believe that that many in ‘The Mainstream Media’ are intimidated by decades of relentless conservative critcism, so they try to even things up, and often engage in false equivalecies in their reporting.
Trump is convicted of rape and defamation? Yes but, Hunter Biden is alleged to have laundered money through his father. It goes on forever. There are no such expectations in the (now) Mainstream Conservative Media that anything has to be reported fairly or honestly. Much of their reporting is done in service to advance the radical conservative cause.
There is nothing quite like it in the so-called ‘Main Stream Media.”
I take my thank you back, JKB.
@JKB:
Meanwhile, in Britain, and in Europe, as in the US, the far left and far right continue, as so often in the past, to merrily come together to spit venom against the democratic mainstream.
Same ol’ same ol’, to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the politics of the 1930’s.
Bring it.
Beat that shit before, can do it again.
@Gustopher:
@dazedandconfused:
I’d go with United, especially since the same week they had a runway overrun and gear collapse.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Remember in the 90s the media called the internet “The Information Superhighway”? Quaint as it sounds now, the loss of the analogy is felt. Picture the trolls as the speed bumps, potholes, and especially the flaming wrecks along such a highway.
I find this a satisfactory answer to your question.
@Kathy: I’m in the “it’s not a highway, it’s a mall, and it’s not about information, it’s about commerce” camp and pretty much always have been. The analogy never resonated for me.
And here’s Rob Schneider with a story about his Mexicana wife getting re-pilled. Is it just a joke?
@dazedandconfused:
The irony is that Robinson hates MLK, whom he has called a “communist” and “ersatz preacher.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-robinson-martin-luther-king-inferior-communist_n_65a2ee1ee4b0351062f20e92
@MarkedMan: I think pretty much everyone likes con men. My evidence? Consider The Music Man. People love that show, love the character of “Professor” Henry Hill. People loved Steve Martin’s Leap of Faith, in which Steve played a (faking it) faith healer. Terry Pratchett’s character Moist von Lipwig was a con man, who ended up revitalizing the post office in my favorite Pratchett book Going Postal.
Remember the story of stone soup? That’s a con man at work. The con game can end up working for good.
What it all turns on is the con man staying around to try to make it all work, as opposed to catching a train out of town.
Everyone loves con men. They are very charming, after all.
@Stormy Dragon: I love that story. I would expected such stories from primates, but it’s a surprise when it involves birds.
Where’s de Stijl? I have an earworm. Figured he’d be checking in after the Iowa Dem primary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YEMO6ELaL0