We’ve got to be careful about the whole “weird” thing. I saw this story about a
man in Oklahoma who raises spiders and felt a moment of self concern.
His life’s mission is to save spiders for a greater purpose. Edmond resident Nick Krueger said spiders are important to the environment and science.
He sends the spiders he collects to researchers worldwide to help solve problems. Inside Krueger’s home, people would discover a whole new world.
“There’s always something new to learn,” said Krueger, inside his “spider room. “Most people hear that you do that, and they say, ‘What? Why?’”
He uses the words “weird and enthusiastic” to describe his hobby, but Krueger loves being unique.
“It’s fun to be weird,” Krueger said. “Being normal is boring.”
Some people might think I am weird, and I really don’t mind. Maybe I would if I were running for high office. I still think it’s a good tactic to label this current crop of Republicans as weird, though. I remember the Republicans way back, when their schtick was that they were staid, sober, strait-laced, boring conservatives who wanted no nonsense and just wanted to get the job done…the job of making money. They were bankers and shop-keepers. They didn’t like Communists. That was their whole image, and they rode that reputation into office, promising stability and restraint.
Now they’ve morphed into creeps who obsess over bathrooms and want to ban books and are upset about non-white people having civil rights. Their whole rep rests on being the boring guys wearing suits, and it’s fair to point out that no, they’re not that any more at all, they’re fanatical freaks who are trying to control other people’s lives.
And they’re not cool enough to raise spiders in their living room.
It’s worth pointing out that where, once upon a time, the Republican agenda was mainstream and entirely comfortable for the typical middle-class family, they have evolved into this weird alien anti-American freak show that is “at odds with the average American’s life”.
They have become the party of the wealthy elites, out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people. Thomas Paine wrote about what happened to the French nobility, and it’s exactly how to make them hurt.
The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.
We know this. Mel Brooks spelled it out.
You know that Trump hates being made to look like a fool. Keep it up.
I wouldn’t say you’re “weird,” PZ. You’re unusual in a good Cyndi Lauper type of way.
Trump and his ilk are WEIRD in a cultist and fascist type of way. Ignoring their awful beliefs for a moment, the fact that they wear pillows on their ears and make golden idols of the man is weird as fuck. Painfully weird.
“Weird” is what you say when you can’t come up with a more accurate word. The proper words, unfortunately, haven’t been very effective, sadly. Words like “corrupt” and “hypocritical” and “immoral” and “treasonous” and….
We only call conservatives “weird” because Liberals and the MSM are too afraid of calling them “fascists.”
More importantly for Paine himself, what happened to him at the hands of the Jacobins? Ironic in the OP context.
https://uchv.princeton.edu/events/thomas-paine-french-revolution-history-and-theory
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine
Nice Revolution that. Kinda shows what might happen if it is all burned to the ground to clean the slate.
Also partly because his freethinking in The Age of Reason:
The GOP/fundie xians also attack libraries and librarians.
Both are important parts of a literate civilized society.
They also often attack science, scientists, medicine, and health care.
The theory of evolution and Heliocentrism (that the sun is the center of our solar system) are perennial targets.
Their newest target is the Round Earth theory.
Their latest health care targets are vaccines, especially the vaccines for the Covid-19 virus.
This is a delusion that can and does kill them.
It’s estimated that the antivaxxers managed to kill off 330,000 of their numbers during the recent pandemic.
So, a hardcore Republican hates libraries, thinks the earth is 6,000 years old, the center of the solar system, and flat.
They also refuse vaccines, get sick a lot, and occasionally die from preventable diseases.
It’s weird and also creepy.
@4
Awwww… the poor Aristos and priests, and their willing lackeys.
How about using “abnormal” instead of “weird?”
How Bill Barr Killed Secret Probe on Whether Egypt Paid Trump Millions
Intriguing.
The timeline seems messed up. The investigation began in 2017, but the money withdrawal was discovered in 2019? They wanted to help his 2016 campaign by giving him money 5 days before he was sworn in – about two months after the election?
Some other guy
X = Foley, not Trump.
Eric Trump dismisses David Lammy’s comments on Donald as ‘dumb’
Apparently the Telegraph cannot bring themselves to publish the word ‘crap.’
The description of Donald Trump is spot on.
Calling them “weird” is fine, but you should add “…and not in a good way.”
Walter Solomon @ 1
Good weird is The B-52’s , Cyndi Lauper, Public Image Limited, Laurie Anderson. That Scottish stand up comedian. The people who do extreme body modifications to look like fantasy animals. That matematician who solved an old problem but refuses to accept the reward/prize .
.
Bad weird: Bobby Fisher, the chess world champion who flipped out and blamed everything on Jews. David Icke. Hard-core Republicans. The Unabomber. That South African billionaire.
Holy See ‘deplores’ offence to Christians in Opening Ceremony
I don’t which is weirder; that they are offended by a performance that had nothing to do with Christianity, or that it took them more than a week to come out with this statement.
I am almost but not quite weird. I’m Western, indistrialized, educated, and democratic, but I am not and never will be anything close to rich.
Good weird is like “eccentric:” Unusual passions, methods, and such. I’ve got no problems with that. It takes all kinds, and their novel approaches and perspectives can often produce surprising results.
Bad weird is more like “creepy,” as in their abnormality is harmful or at least threatening enough to worry about. Kind of the same vibe as its counterpart, “Normal people worry me.” I’ve met more than one MAGA jerk who insists they’re “normal,” often implying they deserve special privileges for it.
I’ve loved this attack – calling them ‘weird’ kicks ‘em where it really hurts. And I think plays well with swing voters. But the sudden unison and exclusive use of the word ‘weird’ is a bit much. Are the dems so unimaginative that they couldn’t mix it up a bit with other words like ‘odd’, ‘bizarre’, and ‘silly’?
@8 — Regarding the timeline, I think the idea is that el-Sisi was making good on his $10M bribe, one he had presumably pledged the previous November, in the last days before the election. At that time, Trump had bragged that he was writing a check to his campaign from “his own money”, which happened to be for that exact amount. So the idea is, the $10M cash withdrawal was a reimbursement for that.
In the case of people like Trump, grotty works too.
It’s a very different thing to call yourself weird than when someone else is doing it. Calling yourself weird says you’ve accepted your differences and you think they’re just fine. Someone else calling you weird is sometimes in context the same. But mostly it seems to be cultish conformists who are desperately trying to imply there’s something wrong with you, often to distract from how strange they are themselves.
I freely admit that I’m weird: I’m a childfree cat lady who plays Pokémon and collects Transformers. My husband is a cat dad, Transformers collector and we met at a convention. We’re weird. We own it. It’s not an insult.
However…
I’ve been rewatching the original Transformers series from the 1980s. Now that I’m older, I notice just how much Megatron cannot stand any disrespect. You insult him and he completely loses his mind. He can’t stand any sort of slight. Optimus Prime will outright roast him and Megatron can’t handle it. But it’s because Megatron is an authoritarian and authoritarians can’t stand being disrespected. It didn’t make sense when I was a kid but now it absolutely does.
I consider “normal” to be a four-letter word. But there’s good weird and bad weird. Trumplethinskin and his cultists are definitely the bad kind of weird.
I like the “weird” jibes, for lots of reasons, one of which I’ll mention below, but I fear the results of this trick. Why?
The effectiveness (currently) of the charge of “weird” has the conservatives (small c, not just party related) on the back foot in the US for now. There are a variety of reasons, not least of which PZ mentions in his quote from Mel Brooks. Conservatives, generally, have very little in the way of a sense of humour. They understand “laughing at” and are very comfortable with doing it, but not receiving it (as mentioned). That’s not really “humour”, it’s bullying with sneering laughter and always done as a group.
I’m going to try to illustrate a couple of ideas with some quotes of my own. The first couple from Martin Amis:
“A sense of humor is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one. Watch the humorless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humorless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick — and that’s about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally ‘challenged’, as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humorless have no idea what is going on and can’t make sense of anything at all.”
“What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.”
And a very favourite one of mine:
“By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
Conservatives lack a sense of humour, in the sense I’m using it. The last part from Amis “…such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” hits the nail on the head. A sense of humour is not just bewildering to the conservative mindset, it is dangerous. Their “seriousness” is a facade built on something deeper. Something the above quote about what conservatives fear hints at. The “seriousness” of the conservative always rests on a superior force, god, nation, military prowess or power. It is an appeal to superior violence, hence why “laughing at” is so popular with them. It’s the laughter of the coward, the bully, the kid looking over their shoulder to check the others laugh along too. And Brooks is right, they can’t stand it.
BUT!
One of the greatest satirists who ever lived, Peter Cook, when he was opening The Establishment (a nightclub) said that he wanted it to be like “…those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.
Satire/Humour is good, but it’s not enough. (And I know no one said it is!)
One of Thatcher’s Conservative allies, Lord Baker (Tory peer), said:
“I believe that if you can laugh at your rulers, you don’t cut off their heads…”
And
“Laughter is an escape for those kinds of pent up feelings. It helps make society calmer.”
Baker was right, but much more right in a manner he possibly didn’t intend: Sometimes, you have to stop laughing and start chopping off heads. Of late, especially in the UK, too many (notably Johnson) have exploited the form of “The Buffoon” to act in substance like “The Fascist”. The laughter gave licence to those conservatives willing to exploit it. Humour is essential, but has its limits.
So, “weird”, yes. Poke fun. Poke their pomposity and self-importance. Make them feel what they try so hard with their mockery and cruelty to cause others to feel. But remember it will come time to chop off their heads. And also remember that playground taunts that have been used against others (gay people are weird, people standing up for themselves are weird, foreigners or people with different cultural norms are weird…etc) only ever work for a time against the bullies that use them (if at all).
However, the reason I like the “weird” jibes a large amount is that they cut far deeper than the mere lack of humour. They are radical; they cut at the root of what it is to be a conservative: They challenge the belief that conservatives are not merely “normal”, but “normative”. A foundational, often unstated, core belief of the conservative is that they are the default from which others only deviate.
Another illustrative quote with too many putative sources to mention is:
“Conservatism is the intense fear that somewhere, somehow, someone who you think is your inferior, is being treated as your equal.”
To the conservative mindset, the charge of “weird” is, to them, an accusation of inferiority. The phrase “the narcissism of small differences” might well have been invented for the conservative. Although, distressingly, a large number of ideological folk of many political positions hate The Peoples’ Front of Judea…splitters! Mockery that cuts at this core belief of being normative is very significant. It’s as if your pet dog reared up on its hind legs whilst you were hosting a dinner party and corrected your interpretation of Kierkegaard by calling it “incorrect and out of line with well-established scholarship on the subject”.
It’s not just what the dog is saying, it’s that the dog is speaking at all. Your inferiors can’t judge you! And the dog is speaking to correct you? You will be mocked (see above), you will not be taken seriously (see above), but worse, the dog has proclaimed that you are, in some way, not the standard.
Conservatives mock because, yes, they fear mockery to some degree, but more deeply, they other because they fear being othered. They fear being non-normative. Not the default. Incapable of referring to the larger/higher power from which they claim to derive authority, status, power, probity, and seriousness. They fear being bullied as they bully. And bullying, cooperative mockery and violence, is what is done to the “weird”.
Louis
@20 Autobot Silverwynde wrote about enjoying the Transformers.
I reply: the Transformers movies are fun and you are so correct about the characterization of Megatron (tRUMPty dumpty) vs Optimus Prime. But, be careful, there are rtwingnuts that will see the word ‘trans’ in Transformers and they will attack you.
@21 Artor wrote: I consider “normal” to be a four-letter word
I reply: YES, we agree. Given the chaos in which we are immersed, years ago we abandoned use of the ‘N’ word (normal).
I suggest that (whenever we can safely) we laugh our asses off at some of the nasty ‘weird’ insanity these rtwingnuts spew.
My organization is keenly aware of the difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. We laugh with John Oliver, we laugh at the tRUMP cult and all their humorless foolaid drinking minions.
Watching couch molesting eyeliner wearing JD Vancehole I am are ROFLMAO. But, I take very seriously the billionaire clowns with flamethrowers that support him.
(I’m sure this is on the infinite thread) The elongated muskrat is pulling a huge fraud on people in swing states, he is telling people he will register them to vote, but, he is collecting all the personal private info of people and using it for his own unethical purposes. WTF
Noted Weirdos J.D. Vance & Donald Trump Want to Surveil Pregnant Patients, In Case They Get an Abortion
Yep, that’s pretty weird. And creepy.
‘Weird’ used to mean something more than merely ‘quirky’ or ‘unusual’; more like ‘unnatural’ or ‘supernatural’.
The ‘creepy’ aspect was built-in.
Georgia Republican condemns GOP for staying mum as Trump ‘throws sucker punches’ at Kemp
He’s waiting for the Republican Party, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump corporation, to come to its senses. He’s going to be waiting a very long time.
The Harris campaign cast an even brighter spotlight on the controversy with a statement titled, Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.
The first time I heard the no-ability joke was on the Wizard of Id cartoon strip…Definition of nobility: Why noblemen don’t do no work.
@ 20
I’ve proudly flown the “Weird” flag my entire life. I’m nearly 50 and along with the usual genre fiction (e.g. sci-fi, fantasy, and horror), I watch anime and other animated TV shows. I play tabletop role-playing games and miniature wargames (which is simply a more involved version of army men. I just got back into video games. I love novelty music and Weird Al is my muse.
As a teenager, these pastimes (along with my mental health issues) made me the target of bullies. No doubt there are those who’d today write me off as “immature” or various ableist slurs for the cognitively challenged. It’s also cost me the chance at romance a couple of times.
I don’t fucking care.
My “weird” interests and hobbies are my only source of happiness in this miserable world. For good or ill, they are what makes me “ME.” I will not be made ashamed of them.
@ 22
My father, a MAGA-devoted Uber-Catholic bully, is a case in point. He despises comedy. As kids he’d yell at my sister and I for watching a sitcom or stand-up comedy show because “life isn’t funny!” However, you wanna know what would send him into uproarious laughter?
The cheesy one-liners action movie characters would make after killing an opponent.
John Morales
It definitely has that connotation by the time Shakespeare wrote down the story of the three Wyrrd sisters and that dudes fate.
Wyrd is the Old English equivalent to Old Norse Urðr, which means fate, or what will be. It’s the nominative form of the verb ‘to be’ personified as one of the three Norns. It also shares a root with the English words odd and woe, and is often an element of names like Woden, Arrow-Odd, and Odacer.
Having the Gods mess around with your fate usually has unpleasant consequences for one’s lifespan.
As Louis wrote above, @22, the republican party, conservatives in general, believe that they are are the arbitrators of normality. Anything outside of their own understanding is weird. It was the adjective they used to attack the outcasts during high school. It’s not a surprise that they are becoming defensive when being labeled with it now. Other adjectives would probably not get as great a reaction, and it probably wasn’t thought of before because liberals are used to being called weird. It doesn’t have the same sting to a free-thinker.
If the republicans had embraced the label nothing would have come of it. A lot of people admit to a certain amount of weirdness and some are proud of it. But they just revealed a weak spot, an exposed section of breast in the gem-stone amour of Smaug.
As for the power of laughter against authority, I’m partial to the following Lord Dunsany tale:
https://books.google.ps/books?id=7O5eKnHGyQsC&pg=PA85&hl=ar&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
Speaking of weird
RFK Jr. says he dumped dead bear in Central Park a decade ago
Michigan Officials Open Probe Into Elon Musk’s Pro-Trump PAC
JD Vance claims to have Scots-Irish ancestors. Where is this country of Scots-Irishland? Could it be that Trump-enabler Vance is himself of mixed heritage?
@Reginald Selkirk #33
Maybe he got the brain worm from the dead bear.
Bringing out a joke her 11-year-old son told her last week, she (Rep. Ashley Hinson (R- IA)) said that the nation’s egg shortage has been caused by “all the hens identifying as roosters.”
The actors who played the Germans in Hogan’s Heroes were Jewish. Several of them lost family to the Holocaust. One narrowly survived Nazi attempts to assassinate them. One was hauled off stage for mocking Nazism in his act and ‘beaten senseless’ by the SS. The actor who played the French POW survived Buchenwald.
They took the parts on condition that the German characters be portrayed as buffoons at all times.
Oh, they were always sore about that last bit. They just hid it a lot better. But much of 1980s and 1990s Republican policy was aimed squarely at hurting (and disenfranchising) POC, particularly the “tough on crime” stuff and the cuts to social services. The tough on crime stuff is especially insidious, because it was used to essentially bring back antebellum slavery in many of the southern states.
Louis@22:
I’ve often wondered if their performative piousness and cleaving to religion is precisely because they feel cut off from that “larger/higher power”, which in turn is because they cut themselves off from it.
This isn’t to make a claim that there is a supernatural such higher power. The supernatural does not exist (and in fact is a logically incoherent concept, as I’ve demonstrated elsewhere; put succinctly, observation of the world yields a mix of signal and noise, the signal contains regularities exploitable to make predictions or cause things in the world — science and technology — and the noise is exactly that, just noise, with anything meaningful necessarily being in the signal part and the signal part’s regularities being expressible as the laws of nature, thus, not supernatural).
Rather, we are all embedded in higher things: the world-system, the ecology, even civilization. We are interdependent with those things. As flex and I have been discussing in another thread here at FTB, we are even entangled with those things down to our own alleged “individuality”: part of us resides outside our skulls and even our bodies, due to these interdependences. There is your higher power, and you feel it whenever you look up through tall trees and listen in the woods, or see a magnificent achievement of civilization like an impressively tall building or a successful space mission, or when you understand something new about the universe, or even when you are meshing harmoniously with some social group.
You feel a part of something then. You don’t if you sever those bonds mentally to maintain a pretense of being apart from, aloof from, those things. Especially when that includes “nature”.
Much has been made in the eco-circles about human (and especially Western) “biophobia”, a preference for ultra-clean super-hygienic surroundings, machines, food that at the very least doesn’t look like parts of plants or animals anymore if it isn’t wholly synthetic, and a literal unwillingness to get one’s hands dirty, as well as a deep suspicion of non-intellectual pleasures, especially sexual ones. This seemingly cerebral sort of attitude is much stronger, of course, in conservatives, and it is related to a bunch of other phenomena, including belief in some form of Cartesian dualism.
I maintain that it isn’t even just biophobia, it’s what you might call physiphobia, a fear or hate of nature itself and a refusal to acknowledge being part of it. The Cartesian dualism comes naturally, then. If Republicans have spent decades convincing middle- and even working-class Americans that they are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who will return to their rightful place in the economic sphere if they just work hard and follow the rules (spoiler warning: it’s a scam!), the conservative religious establishments, especially of the big monotheisms, have spent millennia convincing people that they are “temporarily embarrassed angels” who will return to their rightful place in the celestial sphere if they just work hard and follow the rules — religious rules, of course. Human supremacy, to the point of nature-apartheid. It’s why they hate evolution, which puts us and other animals on a continuum. It’s why they hate laughter, and sex, and really even good food, or anything else that is uncerebral enough that a dog might also enjoy it. It’s also the source of the west’s, especially, ecological destructiveness: nature is an occupied populace, like the Palestinians or the Native Americans, to be used or disposed of as humans see fit. Its needs don’t matter. It exists only to serve us.
I expect this is why conservatives are so hostile to the environmental movement, even in cases where it isn’t obviously incompatible with capitalism’s “business as usual”: the environmental movement is violating the apartheid and not maintaining the human-supremacy kayfabe. So is having enjoyable, pleasure-centric sex, or really doing much of anything that’s actually enjoyable, or feeling any emotion not connected with domination or consumption. The puritanical fear that someone, somewhere might be having fun is rooted in this physiphobia.
Physiphobia also explains TESCREAL. The tech sector ended up with its fair share of conservative human-supremacists, but a lot of them were raised and educated in a skeptical milieu that didn’t hold much truck with old-timey religion. So they reinvented Cartesian duality from scratch with the idea of porting the human mind like software to ever newer hardware platforms, to attain immortality, or uploading it into the cloud: temporarily embarrassed techno-angels. It won’t work … or rather, something of the sort will, but it won’t look much like what they envision (disembodied minds thinking great cerebral thoughts in the Matrix forever). We will have to take our bodies, and even whole ecosystems of surrounding environment too, with us wherever we go or what arrives there won’t be human, or even people, anymore. That applies in the physical world (no long term colonization without terraforming, or else integrating in some way into a foreign biosphere) and in cyberspace as well (where we go, whole virtual worlds will have to be terraformed that our minds can function and be whole in).
And that is why the spiritual, the numinous, ever evades conservatives: they have so cut themselves off from the only real source of that, and the fictitious versions in their heads are no substitute, anymore than a hall of mirrors is an effective substitute for a room full of genuine friends.
The above, notably, in combination with the bit about part of our minds being entangled with the outside world, means conservatives are cutting off parts of their own selves when they practice nature-apartheid. No wonder they seem impoverished in so many non-materialistic things! Even their greed may result from an effort to fill that void with more and more materialistic things, only to remain unsated because there is something they still crave that they are still not getting however rich they become.
The same apartheid-ism explains the conservative fascination with borders and fences, literal and metaphorical, and with purity and sanctity in all its forms. Open yourself up at all and icky nature leaks in, touches you, changes you. The apartheid breaks down. But a life form cannot survive surrounded by a fully-impermeable membrane … it is an unresolvable paradox, except by giving up the apartheid. Which they therefore must do on some level, while refusing to acknowledge that they have done so. So, doublethink and never examining anything too closely. The compartmentalization of the authoritarian mind ensues.
And of course once you have apartheided the “natural world”, however you have bounded that, it is all too easy to decide that some groups of human beings belong on the other side of the wall and not on your side, along with the other animals and plants and dirt and things like that. So bigotry and all the usual apartheids come easily. And it explains the choice of groups to marginalize. The disabled, of course, are a perennial reminder of being frail, physical, natural things, subject to damage and decay, and all the “temporarily embarrassed angels” rationalizations can’t fully overcome the fear. Any group seen as more “animalistic”, “baser”, less “dignified”, “lustier”, less cerebral, etc. also easily gets added to the marginalized heap: and note how often white supremacists compare other groups to animals and especially describe Black and Latinx persons as lusty and undignified. The policing of non-white hairstyling even stems from this, and the conservative hate for tattoos and most other body modification: all reminders that a) people have bodies and b) those people embrace their physicality in an “unseemly” way. Women get associated with sex and pleasure, as well as being emotional, so onto the marginalized pile for them as well, along with anyone who calls attention to their sexuality by being promiscuous or non-cisheteronormative. Notice how “model minorities” are the ones who act the most like they, too, regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed angels”, but are still sometimes feared as potential fifth columnists for the forces of nature, because in the end being different at all means being a suspect in conservative minds. After all, shouldn’t mathematically precise perfect pointlike angels all be indistinguishable and interchangeable? Difference implies complexity, and complexity implies messy, real, physical things rather than simple ideal Platonic forms. (And then one wonders if it’s Plato who started this whole mess, way back in the Bronze Age.)
BB:
Not even slightly. Well, nobody with any perspective or appreciation of history.
Big world, small Ancient Greece, small period.
Put it this way: the Egyptians had 30-odd centuries of culture and history before Plato came up.
(Eurocentrism is silly)
Minor quibble – Plato lived during what is commonly called the Iron Age, not the earlier Bronze Age.
(Also, pretty much the whole Bible was written during the Iron Age, although some parts of the Old Testament refer to events that supposedly happened during the Bronze Age, but which are probably legendary rather than historical.)
@Reginald Selkirk #33,
Well, what would YOU do with a dead bear, hmmmm?
It’s always criticism with you people.
Louis
P.S. Reginald knows this is a joke, I know this is a joke, but, well, this is the internet, someone won’t understand!
@Bekenstein Bound #39 & 40,
You’ve given me a thing to think about there. So I will! Thank you.
Louis
@ 38 chrislawson
If that’s true it didn’t work!
I’ve never known more lovable interpretations of nazis than Colonel Klink and Sargeant “I know nothing!” Schultz.
It’s worse than that, Jim!
Silentbob:
They weren’t Nazis.
They were Wehrmacht.
(Such ignorance!)
Definitely a lot of food for thought @39 and @40 there, BB. Certainly explains things I’ve noticed.
Usha Vance defends husband’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comment as a ‘quip’ in first solo interview
RFK Jr says Trump is ‘a sociopath’
Weird comes from “wyrd”.
Nancy Pelosi burst out laughing after being asked if Trump screwed up by picking JD Vance
Robert F. Kennedy in NY court as he fights ballot-access suit claiming he doesn’t live in the state
He stayed there three years and never paid rent? Sounds like a horrible house guest.
Calling Trump a traitor, a felon, a danger to democracy etc feeds his base’s fantasies of being rugged outlaw revolutionaries. Like the choad at the Heritage Foundation talking about how “their Second American Revolution will be bloodless ‘if the left allows it'” It lets them project as strong rugged individualists bravely fighting the enemy leftists.
Calling them creepy and weird, and laughing at them just short-circuits that whole thing entirely. We force them onto their back feet as they cope with having to deny they fuck couches, or explain their creepy and weird obsession with ‘childless cat ladies’ . So fuck all the tone police who ‘warn us’ about doing this.
They have agendas that do not correspond to ours, so we should not seriously consider their ‘advice’.
Reginald Selkirk@52:
So now there are two prominent Democratic women laughing at Trump. How epic will be the resulting meltdown — and will China even want him?
Not at all, and no.