“It’s a little too quiet” - US Politics February 2021

Every few months I get unhealthily pissed off that some horny dork wanted to rate hot girls at his college and ended up warping the brains of hundreds of thousands of Americans, nearly destroying our country as a result.

I think my mother helped elucidate that point for me. She's never been all that political, but Trump pushed her over the edge and she started sharing pro-Biden and anti-Trump memes.

She started complaining that one old friend in particular was giving her trouble over these posts, but then began complaining that this same friend was posting outright insane conspiracy nonsense, much like our typical QAnon. This friend was someone who went to the same church as us when I was in high school, and she was a mundane, normal, friendly person who never really talked politics or anything of weight.

as far as we knew, she was still like that a few years ago, but now in just a short period of time, she's basically MTG-lite and harassing my mother on social media with QAnon bullshit.

Man, Kevin Lynn, I've had glancing experiences with his outfit. They operate I think four different anti-immigration advocacy groups, all dressed up like progressive causes (one is actually called Progressives for Immigration Reform). They're pretty creepy. That whole article, basically "yogurt yoga mom turned fascist stormtrooper," feels like just what you'd expect and mind-boggling at the same time.

FB died the moment everybody learned how to share links.

xxpost hell, one of my best friends is in a standing text message chat with his wife, his wife's sisters, and their husbands, and they usually just use it to talk about goings on in their lives, share pictures of their children, discuss the regular drama with their mother, share memes, etc....

and then one day they started sharing nutbar news articles from like Epoch Times and proclaiming SCOTUS was going was going to overturn the election, and my friend told them to take him off the thread if they were going to share shit like that.

of course, one of these couples featured his wife's younger sister and her husband, who used to watch their kids, but had guns in the house that weren't locked up in a safe, and my friend and his wife were furious when they found out. so when given the ultimatum to either get a safe or not watch their kids anymore, the husband told my friend's wife to "mind her fucking business".

it really sucks seeing friends I went to high school with that I have a lot of good memories of turn into fucking lunatics

The people I went to high school with were mostly small town racist assholes anyway, so that’s been no surprise. What’s been more heartbreaking has been watching some of my best friends from college turn from kind, smart and thoughtful people to hate filled garbage monsters.

what really irritates me about these people is they all have the same attitude of "you're all sheep, repeating whatever CNN tells you, while I am a free thinker who seeks out the truth and doesn't succumb to propaganda". first of all, the only time I ever watch CNN is at the gym or at the airport, and I haven't been able to go to either of those places for a year because of you dumb fuckers. secondly, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU pushes the EXACT SAME misinformation at the EXACT SAME time, you have no original thought of your own. zero. fuck you.

Fairly glad to not be burdened with the acquaintance of more than 2 or so friends from high school at this point. We weren’t meant to remember these people!

^^^

Way back when I first joined Facebook I reconnected with a few high school people, but around the time of the Ferguson protests I was reminded of why that was a terrible idea and I’ve been mostly off it since.

Luckily all of my close friends that I kept in contact with turned out pretty alright, even if I have to side-eye a couple of them now and again. but I’m constantly shocked at how many of the vaguely hippie or “alternative” weed-smoking cool dudes and girls aged into full-on maniacs. I mean I shouldn’t be (people from a medium size Mississippi town entering their 40s), but damn.

I’m sure in their heads they “grew up” but it’s like nah fella the things you believe would make children who still think Santa is real roll their eyes.

Would it be likely that that doing your own research thing was a lure to bring people in. Looks like it's like a completing a simple maze gets you a reward Pavlovian thing only the research is heavily guided so it's going to lead you to a close proximity of conclusions.
But you will have this reward that you got there by yourself.
Is that like a classic con game. I leave you to draw your own conclusions but I'll just hide the strings that brought you to them. But there's another element to the end results not only had the con man bilked his mark but awoken something else that lay at least somewhat dormant. & that's now something that other people have to deal with.
But these marks now think they are enlightened by the process they've been through and not hoodwinked. So they're wondering why everybody else is in the dark.

I was thinking the other day on listening to a show talking about cryptids like the Sasquatch that there must be a major Venn overlap between people who believe in their existence and those who follow Qanon. & have the same feeling about outsiders, non believers and other infidels who don't swallow the lore wholesale.

Pretty lucky with my FB friends from high school, because most of us are decent people and in the event that a Trumpy GOP type kicks off, someone will inevitably point out that they remember the person’s various delinquencies as a teen or the way they never applied themselves in school. Another reason is that one of the most popular guys became a reportage photographer in Arizona, documenting chuds along the way, and challenges the large adult sons among us. One guy started trying to bang on about the crimes of Antifa on actual Holocaust Memorial Day and got told off by Jewish classmates.

There's a cliché about how you get more conservative as you grow older. Goes something like radical teen, Mor adulthood, conservative crank older.
May be something about the naivete of idealism washing off as you get more experienced or something along those lines. May have to do with continual exposure to greed and other negative impetuses driving other people.
Thankfully not everybody experiences things the same way or we'd really be in trouble. Not that we're notm

Conservative crank oldster got autocorrected.

I guess it was one thing when ‘aging into conservatism’ meant you go went from canvassing for McCarthy in ‘68 to voting Reagan. But now it’s like Bill Clinton voters who became convinced that Obama was planning to turn empty wal marts in Texas into re-education camps for evangelicals.

(tho tbf really thinking that cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs is about as absurd as a pedo dungeon in the basement of a DC pizzeria)

We oughta try that, what’s the rent on those empty wal-marts xp

the only surprises from growing up have all been to the left - ranging from marginal "weirdo whose only dream was to join the SEALs now praises Dubya, Obama and Biden" cases to fellow traveling socialists

(lotta #resistance brainworms, it was like being subscribed to Jeff Tiedrich's newsletter some days)

One benefit of the economy going into free fall could be more space to incarcerated GOP politicians. Keeps them away from infecting the general prison population with further btainworms.
Just stick them in cages in vacated commercial premises. I think it's a policy they like for other people so surely must be suitable.

Kennedy thought MA owed him a Senate seat

It's kind of interesting to reflect that those words could have be written at pretty much any time in the last 70 years.

Every few months I get unhealthily pissed off that some horny dork wanted to rate hot girls at his college and ended up warping the brains of hundreds of thousands of Americans, nearly destroying our country as a result.

If you'd like to ramp it up to more frequently than that, other countries are also available, as is the entire institution of journalism.

meanwhile

Cruz was asked by conservative radio host Michael Berry to respond to Ocasio-Cortez, who recently declined to work with Cruz on financial services legislation, pointing to his role in egging on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, noting, "You almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago."

Cruz compared Ocasio-Cortez to French revolutionary leader Robespierre.

"She wants to set up the guillotine and go after everyone she disagrees with," said Cruz.

Cruz did not mention that at least one of the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol has been charged with making death threats against Ocasio-Cortez.

In the same interview, while attacking the Democrats for Donald Trump's impeachment, he compared them to the mobster at the center of the "Godfather" movies.

"Where the end of all three movies, Michael Corleone, he settles his debts and he eliminates all his enemies. That's really where the Democrats are right now. The reason they're doing impeachment, they're trying to destroy Donald J. Trump, because they hate him."

If there was an MA somewhere in misinterpreting popular culture, Cruz would already be the course leader

Cruz thinks, hey, if I throw lots of gasoline on the blaze it’ll go out

well if you use an accelerator it will speed up and be over faster innit

accelerant

If there was an MA somewhere in misinterpreting popular culture, Cruz would already be the course leader

This guy?

Sen Ted Cruz: "Have you noticed in how many movies how often rabid environmentalists are the bad guys? Whether it's Thanos or go to 'Watchmen.' The view of the Left is people are a disease" pic.twitter.com/fthdBWVSWv

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) February 1, 2021

yes, was thinking also of his interpretation of Green Eggs & Ham

Ted limbering up those DARVO muscles

thanos did nothing wrong

When is the Ted Cruz vaccine gonna be prepped for distribution, is what I wanna know.

he really is just a trash person, it's incredible

i think to myself - how can i angle for this particular job, how can i be a better father, what tweaks can i make to my organisational habits to make me a better colleague - and people like ted cruz just walk up, spew trash EVERYWHERE, make no sense, shit on everyone and are rewarded with power and money

i mean not that i'm so great, but that's my point - a lot of people try REALLY HARD for usually quite middling results and this guy is just a human fuckface and waltzes through life attended by riches and approbation

So long as there are mechanisms in place to rain endless power and wealth upon the irredeemably awful, people like Ted Cruz will continue to be irredeemably awful.

(I mean, he'd be irredeemably awful either which way, but in that other world he'd only be burdening his family and neighbors.)

So this is a wild read.

https://www.axios.com/trump-oval-office-meeting-sidney-powell-a8e1e466-2e42-42d0-9cf1-26eb267f8723.html

AOC's live thing didn't shed any more light on Cruz specifically, did it? Cruz (to name one) is an absolutely unscrupulous shit, but I don't think he's any more guilty of putting her life at risk than the rest of the GOP, which is I think what she was getting at when she dunked on his tweet. I assume Cruz, Hawley et al. will get hammered at the Trump trial as much as Asshole himself.

Was just coming to link the Axios story. That shit is not even funny-insane; it's scary-insane.

That story is absolutely bonkers, but lol, it's pretty clear who the source is there.

Who would that be.

Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. None of them could agree on what non-ovular shape the office actually was.

xpost My guess would be Eric Herschmann, who is present at every exchange and comes off tough-guy heroic. He gets a lot of the best lines.

For example:

Finally Herschmann had enough. "Why the fuck do you keep standing up and screaming at me?" he shot back at Flynn. "If you want to come over here, come over here. If not, sit your ass down." Flynn sat back down.

I did a quintuple take @ this Sidney Powell quote: 'I would caution the readers to view mainstream media reports of any such conversations with a high degree of discernment and a healthy dose of skepticism.'

Again, that's an actual quote by Sidney Powell. Yes, the one with a brainpan full of banana pudding who couldn't discern or healthy dose of skepticism her way out of paper sack.

While part of me never wants to think about our read about that nest of vipers ever again, there's another part of me that is looking forward to having more names for all those previously anonymous sources whose names were withheld so as to speak candidly. When the T-man has no power to retaliate with, I suspect there will be a flood of tell-all memoirs.

I have a healthy dose of skepticism because it’s Axios.