I’m going to be doing the usual drive-pilgrimage that will leave me exhausted, sleepless, and disoriented – but thankful.
Were Mohammad Bin Salman to attend a thanksgiving holiday, do you think he’d bring a turkey cutter?
9221 System 7
What, “too soon”?
First off, I do not approve of journalists being hacked to pieces, as a general rule. But I’m particularly disgusted by how the journalists are making a big deal about what a monster MBS is, now that he’s killed on of their own. What, didn’t they figure that out when Saudi Arabia started obliterating Yemen, or when he kidnapped a passel of other rich Saudi competitors and shook them down for money and pledges of good behavior? Journalists have traded in their souls for ‘access’ – they will bend over backwards to avoid flat-out ignoring people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or calling out MBS as a power-mad authoritarian. I’m sure it’s hard, these days, since the power-mad authoritarians have placed themselves athwart the dialogue, globally.
Some of us are worrying about “How do we handle our Trump-fan uncle who will be at thanksgiving?” – but, remember, it can always get worse.
The white house appears to accept MBS’ story that it’s entirely normal to bring a bone saw to a “mere kidnapping.” I have to try that one, some time.
Meanwhile, The War on Thanksgiving is in full swing. Christian dipsticks are trying to piss all over an ultranationalist holiday that celebrates genocide, to promote their necro-holiday instead. As Lewis Black says, “it’s not a war on Christmas, it’s a War on Hanukka.”
Can we settle on ‘christian cultural power-grab’?
Y.kno it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I even heard anyone dis Thanksgiving. It was always a family get-together holiday for us. No religion involved. No patriotism. Just a day for Family. Then I discovered the Loony Leftos, and omg!! My family is smaller now, and Mom and Dad are gone. It’s not as big a deal as it was. It’s just me and Bubba this yr. I’m working that day and our Turkey is a pound of breast from the deli. Anyhow, Happy Thankgiving Marcus and thank you for the blog posts, I enjoy them.
Motivated self-interest is quite motivating. Especially when it’s less about “getting ahead” than “continuing to get anywhere”. I kind of wonder how this compares to media coverage of the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz. When I hear libertarians and conservatives complain about how their tax dollars are spent I generally roll my eyes but I don’t think it’s nitpicking to have an issue with funding war crimes and their (incompetent) cover-ups.
I guess it’s never too late to grow a spine and find you have a real issue with this sort of barbarism but I really hope when the inevitable next one happens they remember to stay this disturbed.
I’m always a bit confused by American thanksgiving. Up here in Canada we celebrate thanksgiving in October at harvest time and there aren’t any competing holidays, except for a bit of early Halloween decorating. We don’t celebrate the genocide of our indigenous people with mock crap about pilgrims and freedom of religion (although our history with our indigenous people isn’t much nicer) and we have our celebration on a Sunday/Monday and then go back to work the next day instead of spending the next day going crazy shopping, loading up our credit cards and behaving like spoiled children.
No matter….enjoy your feast, avoid the trump fans and count your blessings (I hope they are many.)
Blah. Sorry if the above comment sounded disjointed and random. I was mostly thinking the real role of a free press is to push on issues like this. These are easy. No one who honestly thinks about these sorts of things thinks they should be brushed under the table, and the media can play a key role in helping people understand the banal everyday horror of these sorts of things. In horror stories they’re almost throw-away memes but in real life they’re terrifying.
Still, it’s annoying how much time the right spent demonizing Obama for bowing to King Abdullah, while Trump basically gets down and grovels to MBS, while asking if there’s anything else he can do to be more complicit in the genocide, and not even getting anything in return (the lies about money and jobs don’t count).
Now that he’s declared that the Saudis can openly kill anyone they want to, anywhere in the world, without repercussions of any kind, is he still planning to turn over Fethullah Gulen to Turkey? That bribe’s moot now, but Trump would try to do it anyway, just to show he can.
I suppose another way to look at it is that the Saudis’ version of extrajudicial murder is a bit more surgical (npi) than our own drone strikes on US citizens abroad, which tend to create a lot of collateral death and destruction. That’s one thing I’ll never forgive Obama for normalizing.
I’ve never much understood this American Thanksgiving thing. We’ll put the genocide and the nationalism to one side, because those are basically just wallpaper for the US these days. No, it’s the getting together with your family bit that I find somewhat fatuous. If you despise your family then what’s the point of getting together once a year? If you like them, why are you not seeing them more often? Or is there literally no other opportunity for seeing family? In which case, what the hell is there to be thankful for?
I think a lot of people in the civilised world can’t quite believe what it’s like living and particularly working in the USA. Specifically, they find it hard to believe certain things about employment there – ideas like your boss being able to fire you instantly for no reason, without recourse, and like not getting parental leave, or sick leave, or indeed any leave apart from a couple of weeks per year. And yet USAians take these things for granted, like they’re normal or good or something.
I theorise that one reason Yanks fetishise holidays – ALL holidays, not just Thanksgiving – in a way Europeans don’t is that they have so very very few of them.
While I do not actually believe this, one could say that Jamal Khashoggi’s death was just an application of the death penalty which Saudi Arabia and the USA still have. He was a Saudi citizen executed on Saudi soil (Saudi consulate) very likely on the orders of the Crown Prince. (I doubt that even the Crown Prince has the power to order an execution without a trial but he might.) There was no violation of US sovereignty.
I always thought that MbS’s most brilliant move for publicity was kidnapping the Prime Minister of Lebanon. I have the feeling that MbS is not going to be Crown Prince much longer.
I don’t get the reference?
@lumipuna: Every year xtians in the US complain bitterly about people saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry christmas” and claim it is a war on christmas. And yet, before we have even gotten through thanksgiving (which is, as Marcus points out, a nationalist holiday that celebrates the genocide of the first nations here) we already have christmas trees going up and christmas muzac and christmas this and christmas that. Saying that we have a “war” on christmas is complete and utter bs. That won’t stop Faux news though. They’ll be screaming as loud as ever.
Thanks. I knew about “Happy holidays” but didn’t know it was supposed to include Thanksgiving, or that some people see Thanksgiving as stealing attention from Christmas.
@lumipuna, #11: Oh, I don’t think that’s the case, I think that in the rush to promote xmas, people are totally forgetting about thanksgiving, and it does not get its day in the sun but is overwhelmed by the xmas stuff. It’s a joke, IOW. Marcus is expressing mock horror at “The War on Thanksgiving” which is just as not true as “The War on Christmas” although there are actually folks who think the latter is like, really truly realsie real.
OK, I’m not sure what we’re even discussing any more. Never mind.