Nathan Robinson explains why the pundits and far-right apologists are not funny — they’re horrifying.
The breaking point for him was how these horrible people, like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias and Ben Shapiro, are now making excuses for a genocidal regime that is shooting and starving children in a campaign of extermination. I imagine that in the 1930s people would laugh at the Nazi monsters who were comically buffoonish, but they ended up tearing a continent apart, engaging the world in a destructive war, and marching millions of innocents to their death. Wake up, that’s what the right wing is gearing up to do right now.
It could be worse.
Support for the Palestinian genocide by Israel isn’t all that high in the USA.
It’s only 32% and going down.
This is ominous.
A majority of Israeli Jews at 62% support removing Palestinians from Gaza.
To where?
No one wants them and they have nowhere to go.
I hope they don’t support evacuating them from Gaza to gas chambers followed by mass graves for the ashes.
But, I wouldn’t bet on it.
That was a bummer. Starving Palestinian kids juxtaposed with thin-skinned, genocide deniers is not how wanted to start my day. Just yesterday, we were talking about people avoiding the news because it was just too hard to take. This is a case in point. I wish I hadn’t clicked the button on this video.
The news is terrible whether one clicks or not. The issue won’t go away by not clicking.
Reminds me of an old gag from Looney Tunes–“I can’t stand to see an animal suffer”, followed by closing the blinds.
Not all news is terrible.
I asked the Bubblebot:
BB: Yes. Several news platforms are explicitly designed to promote only positive or uplifting stories. Examples include:
✅ Good News Network — Established in 1997, it curates daily stories focused on inspiration, innovation, and human kindness.
✅ Good Good Good — Offers a digital feed and a monthly print “Goodnewspaper” dedicated to hopeful stories and practical ways to make a difference.
✅ The Better India — Focuses on solutions-based journalism, highlighting stories of resilience, sustainability, and social impact across India.
✅ Upworthy — Shares viral content with a positive slant, emphasizing empathy, joy, and social good.
These platforms intentionally filter out negative or sensationalist content, aiming to counterbalance mainstream media’s negativity bias.
Kamala Harris has the stink of the Biden admin on her as regards Israel. I didn’t know Brian Tyler Cohen was a genocide-supporter. If so, between that and the secret money he and other liberal commentators have been receiving from Chorus may be enough for me to stop listening to him completely.
John, you HTML jujutsu is most impressive. How do you make those green checks?
Walter Solomon @6
It’s just a char. Copy and paste to your hearts content…
✅✅✅
✅
For Spanish learners, https://holaquepasa.com/ has positive items in easy and intermediate-level Spanish.
[John, you HTML jujutsu is most impressive. How do you make those green checks?]
Not mine, though I could have done it with some work.
I merely copypasted the output of the bot, no more.
I did ask it again, and it conceded the plaintext (type):
(An interesting mixture of markup and markdown and unicode)
[BTW, those mdashes are a notable marker for current AI chatbot outputs — not a common thing, is that]
John Morales @4
If I want to totally disengage Youtube has fed me videos of cat in the street POVs where a cat has a collar cam while trotting about the neighborhood. It’s mostly good fun with parkour and sniffing places other cats just vacated (that’s the rule). But there are stressful confrontations and annoying neighborhood kittens getting in your face. Get off my lawn kitten!
I too love the green checkmarks!
[I have seen such, Hemidactylus. Eclecticism is mine. And yeah. The yowls!]
[musical interlude?]
Out of that whole group in the above image Maher as a professional comedian may have been pretty funny in his early stand up. And he took some flak for comments just after 9-11 about the terrorists that weren’t quite the same as the Dixie Chicks later on about Dubya. But the pushback was from similar places. Religilous was a mixed bag. I liked the part with George Coyne.
Maher lost ALL that positivity for me. He is now a total self professed “smartest guy in the room” snotty POS. Check out his preferred tone of voice. His stances on vaccines and COVID completely discredit him. It’s weaponized ignorance propelled solely by tone of voice. And his anti-Zoomer and anti-woke crap date him. That dipshit Jerry Coyne promotes him regularly should serve as ample caveat.
Re: comedians in the 1930s. Charlie Chaplin got himself banned from the US for making fun of Hitler.
chris, I checked with the Bubblebot.
BB: To illustrate the claim that Charlie Chaplin was effectively banned from the U.S. after mocking Hitler, the most apposite scene is from The Great Dictator (1940), where Chaplin satirizes Hitler directly and unapologetically. Three videos capture this with precision:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpU2Vtzwh80 is one of those0
The negarive news is good where its a call to action.
Problem is so much bad is happening where there seems to be no feasible, useful action to take.
Here in OZ we have had the Nazis on the march. At least the news has allowed those of us in a position to act to get in front of them, and film the details of their pathetic behaviour.
On one end is absolute liberty – freedom in its raw and primal sense, where there are no rules except the law of the jungle.
Yeah, and under “the law of the jungle,” no one — except maybe the strongest and most brutal of each tribe — has any real freedom to do anything other than day-to-day survival and reproduction. Anything beyond the hunter-gatherer level requires some form of social organization, obedience to some set of rules, and sacrifice of some “freedoms” in order to obtain much greater REAL freedoms that civil society provides.
Oops, my comment @18 was meant for another blog entirely. Sorry, you can remove it if you wish, it’s way past my bedtime…
@ 15 chrislawson
Sorry but that’s nonsense. He lost popularity because the Great Dictator veered into open preaching, and people wanted a comedy.
His troubles with the USA came years later post-war (1947) when he was one of the “blacklisted” – suspected of being a communist.
But his making fun of Hitler (1940) was beloved in the US, not condemned.
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#The_Great_Dictator