Facts STILL Don't Care About Your Feelings

 

My god—Google Search for “what is a tariff” sudden spikes the DAY AFTER ELECTION DAY. 🤦🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/erds7pCqdG

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) November 9, 2024

I bet there are a lot of small-business people who feel like following Trump makes them more like big-business people. His policies are really going to fuck them up. And the effects of his "promises" are already coming to fruition. Their businesses don't have reserve capital enough to float them through additional costs that they can't calculate yet. I am not sure why so many people didn't check out what they were in for, but I'm still dealing with the thing I completely underrated--

There are a lot of people who simply don't know shit. Like:

Not That I Care About Joe Rogan

 

Joe Rogan has deleted his birther tweet. pic.twitter.com/sEClihi5H9

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 25, 2020

I really have been keeping out of the Joe Rogan thing because I don't fucking care about podcasts, but this is what I see: When I saw the same thing from Breitbart, I wrote "Show Me The Plane Ticket" because this was literally the dumbest thing set before me for my rational mind to reject. A person whose backstory was meticulously washed(allegedly) to not make him seem like he was born anywhere but the United States, is caught admitting to being Kenyan for the sole purpose of selling books, because whatever? No. That's not proof of anything. That's dumb. The people promoting it are racist and dumb. Barack Obama is an American-born son of an African man and a White American woman. He's Black all day because that's how society treats him and American forever.

Critical thinking isn't dead, but it isn't exactly being loved, cherished and obeyed by people who could really stand to take up the practice. Anti-vaccination and anti-mask views are bad science championed by "outsiders" because their contrarian behinds got thrown out for making the same arguments that keep getting debunked. They aren't rebels and underground scientists. They are fuck-ups. They've just discovered they can get paid for saying fucked-up things so they do.  Edgy! Far out! 

Later, Hater

Let's take a moment to consider the man that he was:

Rush Limbaugh was given the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union last night. Here's a bit on who he is.

Viewer discretion is advised. pic.twitter.com/rWYbfnDThl

— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 5, 2020

Before anyone chides me for celebrating the man's death, let's get this stright, I'm deploring the work that he did. The man that his mourners are calling a pioneer of conservative talk radio was a divisive bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe, an man who literally screamed that a fellow human being was a slut for hours because she believed that birth control should be treated as any other necessary health care.

It may be true that he blazed a path for others, as Father Coughlin or Joe Pyne could have been said to have blazed one for himself--but I would argue that was never a good thing. He lowered the discourse and called it entertainment in the way an abuser knocks someone around and then says they were kidding. He fought against "political correctness"--a made-up term that means when people try to apply some standards of decency to people who have stepped out of bounds, by being hyper-political and seldom correct. 

Anyway, he normalized the kind of rhetoric that made Trump sound so reasonable--it could be said that generations of conservatives had received a Limbaughtomy and their frontal cortexes never worked quite right again. 

I'm not grave-dancing--he hasn't been buried yet. But in a small and nasty way, the tone of my blog probably honors him better than the megadittoes of people who should be asked which inflammatory statements they think furthered conservative thought and ideals, and that's more than he deserves.

There's Outrage, and Then There's The Defense of the Indefensible...

I don't agree with Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh on very much, so I really don't follow them and don't blog about "OMG, this terrible thing some pundit said!" because really? What would be the point? They have a right to express their opinions, and while I can say they are dumb opinions or how I don't agree, it makes very little difference--except for this recent confluence of exquisitely grotesque pro-abuse and pro-rape comments that made me seriously wonder what the fuck they were about.

Just to start with Hannity--

Hannity explained that he was hit by his father as a child, and he turned out just fine.

"I got hit with a strap. Bam, bam, bam. And I have never been to a shrink. I will tell you that I deserved it," he said.

"I think he went far," Hannity then said about Peterson. "But I don’t want to see this guy get a felony, I don’t want to see this guy lose his job. He deserves parenting classes."

Hannity then took off his belt to demonstrate the technique.

There are a lot of people who were paddled or whipped as kids, firmly, not to excess, and who lived and did well for themselves. But boasting that one has never been to a shrink is not that same as saying one hasn't experienced after-effects of one's abuse, and there could be an argument made that the discipline Hannity received taught him to be a punch-down, kiss-up authoritarian personality who goes out of his way to excuse power and malign the underdog. Just saying. But there's a real disconnect when someone tries to excuse the switch-beating of a four year old child that leaves cuts in his legs and scrotum. That just isn't acceptable. If Hannity can't see that this is a question not about the ability of parents to discipline, but the extent to which they carry that discipline out, then I really wonder. Can't parents carry out loving discipline that isn't harmful, and instill values by living them? Is that so preposterous? (For the record I may have been spanked, by hand, once in my life, by my parents. Never an implement.)