Some Sunday Tabs
- Via The Verge: No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke.
- From Margaret Sullivan: An ugly case of ‘false balance’ in the New York Times.
- Via WRAL: Kennedy sues NC elections officials to get name off ballots. The entire Kennedy candidacy has been nothing but farce.
- Via HuffPo: JD Vance Blasts Teachers Union Head For Not Having ‘A Single Child’ In Resurfaced Clip.
- Via the AP: A Georgia Democrat seeks to unseat an indicted Trump elector who says he only did what he was told.
“I would characterize my involvement as being a good soldier who did what he was told to do and was following the advice of attorneys who do this for a living,” said Still.
Who is going to tell him what the excuse makes people think of?
While Mr. Crooks’s motive remains opaque, his online searches reveal someone who was looking for an opportunity to pull off a spectacular attack that would garner widespread attention, by either inflicting mass casualties or killing someone famous. Thus far, that profile more closely resembles that of a mass shooter than a politically motivated assassin.
- More JD. One of the things that strikes me, which is at the very beginning of the clip, is that he derides people for being agnostic or atheist and that “their only value system is to achieve in a very conventional way”–which is an odd thing for a former venture capitalist to critique (and, obviously, that’s only a side observation). I will note that it is standard fare in conservative religious circles to assert that people who don’t believe as they do are a) filling the void with something else (which varies) and b) that they are secretly miserable because the non-religious thing they filled the void with isn’t working.
It can now be safely said that JD Vance is one sick puppy.
I’m reminded of Penn Gillette’s remark to the effect that not believing in God does indeed leave him free to commit all the murder and rape he wants, “WHICH IS ZERO BECAUSE I’M NOT A F***ING PSYCHOPATH”.
Any Christian who asserts that belief in religion is the only way people can be moral is telling on themselves.
Good time to be old. 🙁
@Stormy Dragon: My line has been that you can’t trust people who need the threat of eternal torment to get them to behave decently.
Re Vance, I forget who to credit, but I saw a good observation this morning. He’s apparently very frustrated with his life and lashing out at large groups of people who have done nothing to him. He’s obviously very unhappy. Maybe he should get a cat.
Open letter to JD Vance:
I am a natural born American male who has never fathered any children. I got a vasectomy years ago to so that all my sex would be strictly recreational.
I like cats too!
You are such a righteous Republican why don’t you come after me?
GB
JD has zero rizz, as the kids say these days.
What people forget is that prior to 2022, JD Bowman, I mean, JD Hamel, I mean JD Vance, was a bought and paid for faux intellectual that told Peter Thiel things he wanted to hear. Like, eugenics and slavery were great ideas that needed to make a comeback, or that Catholic Integralism is the most perfect form of government. His entire life has been a morass of contradictory and conflicting statements, all in search of daddy. Trump is simply the latest of a long line of daddies that JD has spent his entire life searching for.
Margaret Sullivan (a much savvier journalism critic than I) seems to indicate in her “ugly case” post that, contra Mr. Joyner, the full picture of Trump isn’t baked in with the general electorate. Or at least if major media like the NYT stopped with the false equivalency, minds could still be changed.
Her post reminds me that perhaps the reason Trump’s high floor & low ceiling poll numbers seem immutable is that coverage of Trump without the double standards for “fairness” hasn’t really been tried yet in the mainstream media that have the greatest influence.
Marx referred to a similar phenomenon when he found proletarians seduced by the capitalist system into thinking they were happy to be victims of “false consciousness”. Claiming all those happy shining faces actually conceal untold depths of misery is a very convenient device for overcoming giant evidentiary gaps in an ideology.
I can’t decide if Vance wants to close all the Catholic schools, or to require the members of the religious orders which staff them to have children out of wedlock.