If you read just one moronic Twitter thread today that, despite (or perhaps because of) its trenchant idiocy and utter uselessness, illustrates how lopsided are the stupid little e-parlor games we play with one another these days, make it this Twitter thread. I swear to Christ, I wish that thread had a neck, so I could snap it like it was a chicken. I despise these people and their loaded dice.
I almost wish I still had the patience for "fisking" or "FJM-ing" or whatever you want to call it, because out of a thread of twenty-six tweets, at least a dozen or so richly deserve to be picked apart by starving vultures on a desert highway. But it's easier and more to the point to simply point out that the reason the whole thing is a steaming heap of bullshit is that it's built on false premises, premises that always and ever only apply to one side in this eternal, infernal, completely pointless "debate" that is never really a debate.
Because, you see, a debate is where the interlocutors agree to discuss things using the same ground rules, the same tone, level of intellectual honesty, etc. This endless, fruitless internet squabble has no such constraints. In this game, "conservatives" (who are really reactionaries, and there is a difference) float lies and smarm and support their cult totem doing exactly the same on a daily basis. There are some actual liberals and centrists who respond appropriately, debunking the lies over and over again, and taking no shit from these moral cretins.
But then you have Vichy moderates and putative liberals like the one in the Twitter thread where the basic premise is completely dishonest, starting with the second tweet in the thread, weird tone and all:
But it's fucking stupid to imply that "they" are all equally terrible. Some of them really are terrible, you know. Tennessee congressturd Scott DesJarlais identifies as a pro-lifer and cynically uses the misguided sentiments of that voting bloc, even though as a doctor he fucked and impregnated his own patients, and coerced one of them -- as well as his own wife -- into getting abortions.
More to the point, Fuckface Von Clownstick, hero-god to the angry, ignored workin' man who's durned tahrd of people thinkin' he's a sucker, has a well-documented track record reaching back nearly fifty years of consistently abhorrent behavior. He's a thief, a liar, a cheat, a con artist, a bigot, aggressively ignorant, has lied on average nearly ten times per day since he's been in office, has characterized the (for now) free press and his political opponents as enemies of the state. He's an unrepentant demagogue who has literally stuck up for murderous nazis. Part of his business model consists of ripping off contractors, deliberately underpaying them, knowing that they can't afford to challenge him in court.
So yeah, tell me again how the real 'murkins, in their holy wisdom, insist that they all suck, so their default option of "whatever pisses faggot libruls off" is some noble choice that the majority of Americans are somehow obliged to talk them out of. Fuck that shit. I don't want to convince them or talk them out of anything. They can have him, and everything he's going to do to them. Good and hard.
Because, you see, we've all been through this bullshit spin cycle before. Salt-o'-the-earth real 'murkins throw off the yoke of their elitist oppressors by voting for -- well, an elitist, sure, but one who's a complete asshole, like Clownstick, just like they voted for Fredo Arbusto in the previous decade. Arbusto was a rich guy from an elitist political dynasty, but he said "nucular" like they all do.
Then when the elitist fake-prole funnels all the cash to his elitist buddies and lawn-darts the economy, and starts a couple of wars we can't get out of, the yokels push in a Dummycrat to fix all the fuck-ups, at which point the combination of Fox News and acetone fumes kick in, and they decide once more that they need someone who doesn't "condescend" to them. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I mean, if only someone could come along and bottle this innate wisdom, they'd make a killing. 'Scuse me, killin'. [spits giant brown glob into plastic cup, tongues wad of gnaw in cheek] Nothing more tiresome than the most gullible suckers on the planet insisting over and over again that their idiotic decisions are somehow worthy of respect. Maybe get your facts straight, and read a fucking book once in a while, and people might respect you more.
Much of the thread consists of McConnaughy talking about her father, who had no college degree, worked hard and made his way up the ladder anyway, and then unfortunately lost his job, and couldn't get back on the horse because of his age and lack of college. It's a common story in this nation, sad but true.
The American myth is that hard work will result in success. That is mostly ass-backward -- unless you're fortunate enough to inherit wealth or get some lucky break along the way, any success you have will only come from hard work. But that is a much different thing; there are millions of people who work very hard all their lives, just to eke their way through life. Keep that in mind at all times, but especially when some snake-oil peddler comes along with the latest iteration of the prosperity gospel.
I can relate to the anecdote about McConnaughy's dad, because it mirrors much of my own experience. I worked blue-collar jobs, landed with a small business that I helped build, worked for ten years in every department, starting in production and shipping, and working my way into the office, where I handled sales and customer accounts, A/P and A/R, payroll, and more, for a worldwide customer base. It was common for me to call a customer in Denmark or Norway first thing in the morning, and end my day with a call to one of the Australian shops we dealt with.
This company made a high-end aftermarket product for motorcycles, mostly Harleys and custom bikes. The pieces were made of sand-cast or billet aluminum, and were polished or powder-coated black. I started off in the metal-polishing room, spending hours a day leaning five-pound blocks of aluminum into a wheel spinning several thousand rpm, powered by a 15hp motor. I eventually compressed my L3 and L5 discs. I used to be about an inch taller than I am now, so I can literally say that I busted my ass at this job.
As I say, I worked my way up the ladder, eventually running the office, but after a severe sales slump in 2004, we were all laid off. Ten years of my life, down the drain. Took me nine months to find another job, worked my way up for a few years there, and then the so-called Great Recession hit, and I was out on my ass again.
So at age forty, laid off twice in four years, I decided I wasn't going to take that shit anymore, and I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees while working a full-time job. I don't want to hear this self-serving sob-story bullshit about how the big bad world fucked the workin' man over so bad, his only choice was to become the proverbial chicken who cain't be talked outta votin' fer Colonel Sanders. I went through it too, and I never once considered that maybe the best way to handle that adversity was to vote for a cheap con man, someone who's never worked an honest day or made an honest dollar, putting on some kind of act.
This is the thing I detest the most about the stereotypical white working class voter: their entire argument is predicated on the notion that undeserving parasites are leeching off the gubmint. But every goddamned one of them has something going on too. They're either living on disability or welfare, or their kids are. Someone in their family is hooked on scrip drugs, or weed, or meth. They have a daughter or niece who has several kids by several different men, none of whom pay for the fucking kids. They're hypocrites, I fucking promise you. Not every single one of them, but more than you'd think. They talk a good game about personal responsibility, but more often than not, talk is all it is.
But the rubes and their real 'murkin delusions are not the problem here. The problem is putatively moderate or liberal people like Corrine McConnaughy, who slap together these ridiculous paeans to the usual list of grievances that get vomited up whenever some dipshit journo ventures out of the city, and transcribed without question or even skepticism.
These things cannot be repeated enough:
I have said this before, but it cannot be repeated enough, and it is the truest thing you will read all week: if Hillary Clinton had won, you would have seen the exact same pieces written by the exact same idiots, talking to the exact same cranky, incoherent Clownstick voters. You think the Post would have gone to Park Slope and had a few Clinton voters elucidate their decision-making process? No fuckin' way. They would skedaddled straight out to Jerkwater, Arkansas and filled vast virtual column-inches with the addled, pustulent jabber of these meatbags, with nary a challenge to their ignorance and outright lies.
These are the same people who were utterly convinced that Obama was a sekrit Moooslim born in Kenya, and that his wife used to be a man. They snickered and traded emails with photoshopped gorilla photos of both Obamas. Now I have to explain myself to these dipshits? Fuck you.
To add the final insult to injury, the Twitter thread ends thusly:
For fuck's sake, even if it were somehow possible to compress one man's lifetime saga of greed, corruption, misogyny, racism, incompetence, and generally being a complete fucking asshole, even if you could squeeze all that into two sentences, they won't listen. They don't care.
The guy tweeted yesterday promising to help out a Chinese tech company that is under sanction for national security violations involving Iran and North Korea, because his next project in Indonesia is getting a $500M loan from the Chinese government. You know what these idiots' response would be? Lock her up! Lock her up!
Why would anyone waste time trying to craft a logical, intellectually honest argument for people who have no use for such things? It's a cult. Okay? It's a fucking cult. The sooner these enablers realize this, the better off we'll all be.
In less than a year and a half, this administration has easily been the most corrupt in my lifetime, just based on what we know so far. He and his minions almost certainly sold the electoral process out to the Russians. He is openly profiteering from the office -- he sells fucking coffee mugs with the presidential seal on them, which is illegal. Nobody cares, and nobody does or says anything about it, and it doesn't even make the news, because nothing matters anymore, and that is in large part because everyone knows that these fools will accept anything and everything from their cult leader, even things they would never accept from any other politician. How the hell is anyone supposed to reason with such a mindset, seriously?
These real 'murkins would have shit bricks if Obama had done anything remotely like that. Clownstick has done any number of things that, if Obama or Clinton had done them, would have incited calls for drawing and quartering. He has done any number of things that would have gotten you fired from Target or Starbucks. He has no business being anywhere near the levers of real power, and it takes concerted effort, and no small amount of pure spite, to not admit that.
This is all common knowledge, even among his supporters, and it is objectively far worse than any of the myriad other "terrible" people who infest the world of politics. They don't care, and anyone pulling this "tell me what I should tell them" bullshit oughta be ashamed of themselves, because they're either hopelessly cynical or willfully stupid.
These things are important, because if we are to have any hope of hanging on to ourselves, we must still be able to remind ourselves and each other that none of this is normal, that all of it used to be completely unacceptable. If we can't even do that anymore, if we must continuously and repeatedly genuflect and grovel to people who really want nothing more than the obsequious gestures, pretend that their lies are valid arguments, then there's no point to any of this. It means that the United States, as we knew it, is dead, and it just hasn't sunk in yet.
But just for the sake of playing along, here's two sentences to take home with you, Ms. McConnaughy: I'm not going to waste anyone's time trying to convince them. They can choke on it.
I almost wish I still had the patience for "fisking" or "FJM-ing" or whatever you want to call it, because out of a thread of twenty-six tweets, at least a dozen or so richly deserve to be picked apart by starving vultures on a desert highway. But it's easier and more to the point to simply point out that the reason the whole thing is a steaming heap of bullshit is that it's built on false premises, premises that always and ever only apply to one side in this eternal, infernal, completely pointless "debate" that is never really a debate.
Because, you see, a debate is where the interlocutors agree to discuss things using the same ground rules, the same tone, level of intellectual honesty, etc. This endless, fruitless internet squabble has no such constraints. In this game, "conservatives" (who are really reactionaries, and there is a difference) float lies and smarm and support their cult totem doing exactly the same on a daily basis. There are some actual liberals and centrists who respond appropriately, debunking the lies over and over again, and taking no shit from these moral cretins.
But then you have Vichy moderates and putative liberals like the one in the Twitter thread where the basic premise is completely dishonest, starting with the second tweet in the thread, weird tone and all:
Um, so, regular people from the middle of the country are probably right when they pick any political figure and call them a terrible person. Any of them. Either party. Strategic elites violate good person norms.Um, so, it's not exactly a revolutionary thought to point out that just like behind every great fortune there's a great crime, there's probably some degrees of oleaginous compromise, backstabbing, and lying behind most successful political careers.
But it's fucking stupid to imply that "they" are all equally terrible. Some of them really are terrible, you know. Tennessee congressturd Scott DesJarlais identifies as a pro-lifer and cynically uses the misguided sentiments of that voting bloc, even though as a doctor he fucked and impregnated his own patients, and coerced one of them -- as well as his own wife -- into getting abortions.
More to the point, Fuckface Von Clownstick, hero-god to the angry, ignored workin' man who's durned tahrd of people thinkin' he's a sucker, has a well-documented track record reaching back nearly fifty years of consistently abhorrent behavior. He's a thief, a liar, a cheat, a con artist, a bigot, aggressively ignorant, has lied on average nearly ten times per day since he's been in office, has characterized the (for now) free press and his political opponents as enemies of the state. He's an unrepentant demagogue who has literally stuck up for murderous nazis. Part of his business model consists of ripping off contractors, deliberately underpaying them, knowing that they can't afford to challenge him in court.
So yeah, tell me again how the real 'murkins, in their holy wisdom, insist that they all suck, so their default option of "whatever pisses faggot libruls off" is some noble choice that the majority of Americans are somehow obliged to talk them out of. Fuck that shit. I don't want to convince them or talk them out of anything. They can have him, and everything he's going to do to them. Good and hard.
Because, you see, we've all been through this bullshit spin cycle before. Salt-o'-the-earth real 'murkins throw off the yoke of their elitist oppressors by voting for -- well, an elitist, sure, but one who's a complete asshole, like Clownstick, just like they voted for Fredo Arbusto in the previous decade. Arbusto was a rich guy from an elitist political dynasty, but he said "nucular" like they all do.
Then when the elitist fake-prole funnels all the cash to his elitist buddies and lawn-darts the economy, and starts a couple of wars we can't get out of, the yokels push in a Dummycrat to fix all the fuck-ups, at which point the combination of Fox News and acetone fumes kick in, and they decide once more that they need someone who doesn't "condescend" to them. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I mean, if only someone could come along and bottle this innate wisdom, they'd make a killing. 'Scuse me, killin'. [spits giant brown glob into plastic cup, tongues wad of gnaw in cheek] Nothing more tiresome than the most gullible suckers on the planet insisting over and over again that their idiotic decisions are somehow worthy of respect. Maybe get your facts straight, and read a fucking book once in a while, and people might respect you more.
Much of the thread consists of McConnaughy talking about her father, who had no college degree, worked hard and made his way up the ladder anyway, and then unfortunately lost his job, and couldn't get back on the horse because of his age and lack of college. It's a common story in this nation, sad but true.
The American myth is that hard work will result in success. That is mostly ass-backward -- unless you're fortunate enough to inherit wealth or get some lucky break along the way, any success you have will only come from hard work. But that is a much different thing; there are millions of people who work very hard all their lives, just to eke their way through life. Keep that in mind at all times, but especially when some snake-oil peddler comes along with the latest iteration of the prosperity gospel.
I can relate to the anecdote about McConnaughy's dad, because it mirrors much of my own experience. I worked blue-collar jobs, landed with a small business that I helped build, worked for ten years in every department, starting in production and shipping, and working my way into the office, where I handled sales and customer accounts, A/P and A/R, payroll, and more, for a worldwide customer base. It was common for me to call a customer in Denmark or Norway first thing in the morning, and end my day with a call to one of the Australian shops we dealt with.
This company made a high-end aftermarket product for motorcycles, mostly Harleys and custom bikes. The pieces were made of sand-cast or billet aluminum, and were polished or powder-coated black. I started off in the metal-polishing room, spending hours a day leaning five-pound blocks of aluminum into a wheel spinning several thousand rpm, powered by a 15hp motor. I eventually compressed my L3 and L5 discs. I used to be about an inch taller than I am now, so I can literally say that I busted my ass at this job.
As I say, I worked my way up the ladder, eventually running the office, but after a severe sales slump in 2004, we were all laid off. Ten years of my life, down the drain. Took me nine months to find another job, worked my way up for a few years there, and then the so-called Great Recession hit, and I was out on my ass again.
So at age forty, laid off twice in four years, I decided I wasn't going to take that shit anymore, and I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees while working a full-time job. I don't want to hear this self-serving sob-story bullshit about how the big bad world fucked the workin' man over so bad, his only choice was to become the proverbial chicken who cain't be talked outta votin' fer Colonel Sanders. I went through it too, and I never once considered that maybe the best way to handle that adversity was to vote for a cheap con man, someone who's never worked an honest day or made an honest dollar, putting on some kind of act.
This is the thing I detest the most about the stereotypical white working class voter: their entire argument is predicated on the notion that undeserving parasites are leeching off the gubmint. But every goddamned one of them has something going on too. They're either living on disability or welfare, or their kids are. Someone in their family is hooked on scrip drugs, or weed, or meth. They have a daughter or niece who has several kids by several different men, none of whom pay for the fucking kids. They're hypocrites, I fucking promise you. Not every single one of them, but more than you'd think. They talk a good game about personal responsibility, but more often than not, talk is all it is.
But the rubes and their real 'murkin delusions are not the problem here. The problem is putatively moderate or liberal people like Corrine McConnaughy, who slap together these ridiculous paeans to the usual list of grievances that get vomited up whenever some dipshit journo ventures out of the city, and transcribed without question or even skepticism.
These things cannot be repeated enough:
- When a Democrat president is elected, no conservative journalist goes out to talk to the people that voted for them, to take back some pointers for their audience. That will never happen. Obama was elected in a true landslide in 2008, with a congressional supermajority. Within six weeks of his inauguration, McConnell gave his guys their marching orders, Fox had their talking points, and all you saw was cosplay dipshits in the park yammering about getting the gubmint outta they Mediscare. There is no conservative counterpart at all to this routine liberal self-flagellation.
- More votes were cast in 2016 for Hillary Clinton. Period. So every one of these stupid pieces is literally telling the majority why they must listen to the minority. Not only is this dumb and illogical, it is completely undemocratic. Were it not for ridonkulous gerrymandering, the Republicans would have no chance at all in the House of Representatives; they routinely lose the aggregate vote by more than a million votes every electoral cycle.
- Here is Obama's job approval rating throughout both terms. There are instances where his rating dipped below 40%, but they were few and far between. Most of the time his rating stayed between 45-55%. By way of contrast, Fuckface Von Clownstick's rating has rarely cracked 40%, mostly just in the past few weeks, with relatively fewer fuck-ups and a tough-guy pose to rogue states like North Korea and Iraq. But most Americans do not like this asshole, and this has been very consistent, yet journos keep talking to the minority cult who want to spend the rest of their lives sucking his tiny cheeto, and they're abetted by "explainer" types like the Twitter threader, who plaintively insist that (again) the majority, who generally use empirical facts and reasoning, must reach out and convince the angry minority, who typically use emotion and conjecture and whatever half-recalled bullshit they overheard from Jeanine Pirro or Sean Hannity.
- It's never the other way around, even when Democrats win. I'll bet you money that even if there is a true blue tsunami in the midterms, and these assholes get blown out of the water, there will still be these stupid pieces about how "we" have to reach out to "them" for some sort of middle ground. And I'll say the same thing when that happens: Nope. Never. I tried the reaching-out thing last time, all I got was nonsense about ISIS bringing Ebola across the border and Jade Helm rounding up gun owners in the FEMA camps underneath the Walmart stores, and on and on. I'm tired of trying to reason with people who communicate with sandwich boards on an urban sidewalk. I'm tired of listening to assholes yammer about the completely imaginary war on Christmas, and then using that as a rationale to vote for and support the most toxic, destructive political figure this nation has seen in decades. I have nothing more to say to them. I simply want to end their ability to perpetuate their destructive nonsense.
I have said this before, but it cannot be repeated enough, and it is the truest thing you will read all week: if Hillary Clinton had won, you would have seen the exact same pieces written by the exact same idiots, talking to the exact same cranky, incoherent Clownstick voters. You think the Post would have gone to Park Slope and had a few Clinton voters elucidate their decision-making process? No fuckin' way. They would skedaddled straight out to Jerkwater, Arkansas and filled vast virtual column-inches with the addled, pustulent jabber of these meatbags, with nary a challenge to their ignorance and outright lies.
These are the same people who were utterly convinced that Obama was a sekrit Moooslim born in Kenya, and that his wife used to be a man. They snickered and traded emails with photoshopped gorilla photos of both Obamas. Now I have to explain myself to these dipshits? Fuck you.
To add the final insult to injury, the Twitter thread ends thusly:
I think this is the hardest part of the Trump story—what’s so differently bad about him? Tell me in 2 sentences I can take home with me.Seriously. Because heaven forfend anyone be asked to pay attention to anything for more than three seconds. I mean, there's probably a Bachelorette spinoff airing somewheres, right? Who has time to read, or explain thoroughly? Give me a bumper sticker, these are bumper sticker people!
For fuck's sake, even if it were somehow possible to compress one man's lifetime saga of greed, corruption, misogyny, racism, incompetence, and generally being a complete fucking asshole, even if you could squeeze all that into two sentences, they won't listen. They don't care.
The guy tweeted yesterday promising to help out a Chinese tech company that is under sanction for national security violations involving Iran and North Korea, because his next project in Indonesia is getting a $500M loan from the Chinese government. You know what these idiots' response would be? Lock her up! Lock her up!
Why would anyone waste time trying to craft a logical, intellectually honest argument for people who have no use for such things? It's a cult. Okay? It's a fucking cult. The sooner these enablers realize this, the better off we'll all be.
In less than a year and a half, this administration has easily been the most corrupt in my lifetime, just based on what we know so far. He and his minions almost certainly sold the electoral process out to the Russians. He is openly profiteering from the office -- he sells fucking coffee mugs with the presidential seal on them, which is illegal. Nobody cares, and nobody does or says anything about it, and it doesn't even make the news, because nothing matters anymore, and that is in large part because everyone knows that these fools will accept anything and everything from their cult leader, even things they would never accept from any other politician. How the hell is anyone supposed to reason with such a mindset, seriously?
These real 'murkins would have shit bricks if Obama had done anything remotely like that. Clownstick has done any number of things that, if Obama or Clinton had done them, would have incited calls for drawing and quartering. He has done any number of things that would have gotten you fired from Target or Starbucks. He has no business being anywhere near the levers of real power, and it takes concerted effort, and no small amount of pure spite, to not admit that.
This is all common knowledge, even among his supporters, and it is objectively far worse than any of the myriad other "terrible" people who infest the world of politics. They don't care, and anyone pulling this "tell me what I should tell them" bullshit oughta be ashamed of themselves, because they're either hopelessly cynical or willfully stupid.
These things are important, because if we are to have any hope of hanging on to ourselves, we must still be able to remind ourselves and each other that none of this is normal, that all of it used to be completely unacceptable. If we can't even do that anymore, if we must continuously and repeatedly genuflect and grovel to people who really want nothing more than the obsequious gestures, pretend that their lies are valid arguments, then there's no point to any of this. It means that the United States, as we knew it, is dead, and it just hasn't sunk in yet.
But just for the sake of playing along, here's two sentences to take home with you, Ms. McConnaughy: I'm not going to waste anyone's time trying to convince them. They can choke on it.