Month: July 2024

The new “normal”

It’s been kind of amusing to see the Democrats leaning recently into the idea that there’s something basically strange about the Republicans… Minnesota governor Tim Walz seems to have kicked it off in a TV interview and the Harris campaign quickly picked up on it:

“Old and quite weird” indeed. The Republicans aren’t particularly happy at being picked on like this:

Is there a Democrat equivalent of this dickhead?

And, to be sure, it’s really not the most refined political argument, but then again the Republicans don’t have much in their armoury either that’s better. “Ron DeSanctimonious” was about as sophisticated as Trump got, and someone probably had to come up with it for him. And, as someone says in that Politico piece, people understand Trump being weird better than they understand “an existential threat to democracy”. The latter is, of course, still correct, but “weird” certainly does hit harder in a way.

And let’s face it, THIS shit IS weird. There isn’t any other way to fairly describe whatever the fuck this is if it’s not meant to be some sort of parody of the cult’s iconography. Cos on the face of it, it’s so deranged it looks like it has to be parodic, and indeed I thought it had to be when I first looked at it when someone posted it on Bluesky. But then I saw Tim Pool’s name at the top of the post. Yes, Grim Fool posted this monstrosity (obviously didn’t create it, though, cos that would’ve required him to have talent). I couldn’t believe that either and thought someone must have photoshopped it… no, they didn’t, I went to Tim’s Twitter and, well, that’s exactly what I found there. And Tim is incapable of irony, so he posted this thing with a straight face. Fuck me dead. These people have no sense of their own absurdity.

I mean, look at this silly old chud here. There was a bunch of people like him at the recent Republican convention at which Drumpf appeared with a frankly unnecessarily large bandage covering his putative war wound from that shooting, whereupon it became like a badge for other people there. This is not normal. Weird is the word. I don’t see John Fetterman’s admirers having strokes as a sign of support for him, for example. And see this fuckwit too:

Well, at least her father probably wasn’t a leader in the fucking Ku Klux Klan, which is rather more than can be said for Rod Dreher’s dad. Also, I wonder if she ever published private pictures from a teenage girl’s private Instagram in a major magazine while accusing said girl unjustly of sexually harrassing other girls at her school, cos Rod DEFINITELY did that. That’s clearly weird behaviour on his part. People with normal moral compasses know better than that.

Obviously the left has been kind of tut-tutty about the “weird” thing, too, like the clown I saw harrumphing on Mastodon the other day about how everyone laughing at the couch-fucking thing distracts us from realising that J. Divans (saw him called that on Twitter today and thought it was FUCKING MARVELLOUS) is in fact a monstrous human being… Jesus FUCK, you idiot, NO ONE who’s paying attention thinks Vance isn’t a piece of shit, we know exactly what he thinks. Piss off with your indignation, let the rest of us laugh at the cunt like he deserves. Make him look stupid. Make him look weird.

But the choice of the term “weird” has also drawn some criticism on the grounds of ableism or something like that, which I understand a little better. By the same token, I also understand the arguments I’ve seen some make that the Left deploying “weird” like this gets in the way of the Right defining themselves as “normality”, and about the distinction between “good weird” and “bad weird”… but the latter does kind of assume people’s willingness to actually make it, and I did see someone (wish I could recall who) say something about how what we should really be calling them isn’t so much weird as creepy…

…and, frankly, Malsh Walsh here makes a good argument for that. Let’s face it: the idea that he expresses here (a girl raped by her father should have to give birth so the father’s crime will be discovered) is not only weird and illogical, it’s FUCKING MONSTROUS. Not only is Walsh full of shit, he’s being actively evil here. And I can see why some are saying we should be emphasising their badness more than their oddness, and frankly that’s a line of thought I’m increasingly coming round to myself…

…and the authors of this astounding bit of work have latched onto that aspect of the whole thing; this is profoundly disquieting, nailing the essential unpleasantness of these people, and it’s one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen. The casting is just brilliant, and the SWEAT… oh gods, the SWEAT. I think the increasing amount of sweat is a good way to finally round this post off.

Indeed

In fairness, I certainly am giving much thought to Tom’s penis, primarily about how much smaller it is than mine. Thanks, dude, I haven’t felt this adequate about my substandard genitalia in YEARS.

Heart shaped hedges, Japanese gardens

Submitted as evidence that not everything I play here is fuzzy obnoxiousness, weird post-punk, and so forth. A fair bit of it is, to be sure, but sometimes a man’s just got to submit to the pleasures of perfectly mainstream pop/rock.

    1. Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Accidents Will Happen
    2. Japan, Quiet Life
    3. Split Enz, One Step Ahead
    4. Ultravox, The Thin Wall
    5. Roxy Music, More Than This
    6. The Church, Almost With You
    7. Depeche Mode, Leave in Silence
    8. Simple Minds, Glittering Prize
    9. ABC, All of My Heart
    10. Duran Duran, My Own Way (Carnival remix)
    11. John Foxx, Endlessly
    12. Lou Reed, I Love You Suzanne
    13. INXS, Johnson’s Aeroplane
    14. New Order, Thieves Likes Us

RIP Martin Philipps

Can’t honestly call myself a fan of The Chills as such, I don’t really know much of their music and I probably should explore it further than the ’90s best of I bought years ago but also haven’t listened to in years, but the news of Martin Philipps’ passing (which, for some reason, I’m finding a bit less unexpected than other commentators; they’re not saying what the cause of death was but I did know he had years of health issues including hep C and liver problems) prompts me to post this. Godhead stuff, really, lives up to its title perfectly. Sometimes it only takes one song to justify a whole career, and I think this is one of those cases.

Or maybe don’t do that

I’ve seen this online:

And, well, I understand the sentiment, or at least what I think the sentiment was supposed to be, but if you just take this at face value… people did vote in Germany in 1933, and they didn’t quite vote enough for Hitler that he got the outright majority he wanted, but they voted enough to keep the Nazis in a position where they could combine with other parties to get the two-thirds supermajority Hitler needed to pass the Enabling Act which made him a dictator. So maybe people shouldn’t vote like it’s 1933? Unless, of course, they’re going to vote like it’s 1933 but this time they’re going to get it right?

GO JAMES

Bolt’s ultimatum: I’ll quit if James Murdoch wins succession battle

Sky News Australia after dark star Andrew Bolt will quit the company should Rupert Murdoch and his eldest son Lachlan lose control of the family media empire to the more politically moderate James Murdoch.
The brothers have clashed over the company’s editorial slant in the past, particularly over the conservative Fox News channel in America, as well as James Murdoch’s criticism of the climate coverage in News Corp’s Australian newspapers.
“James could sack me if he did take over, but he wouldn’t need to. I wouldn’t be the only one who wouldn’t work for him,” Bolt said during his Sky News show on Thursday evening, responding to a report published by The New York Times this week, detailing a legal battle for control of the Murdoch family’s assets.
“It’s a values’ thing. A freedom thing. I don’t know if he gets that.”

I don’t know if Convicted Racist Andrew Bolt, a man in no position to snipe at other people about “values”, gets how few people will actually care if he does this. As for James Murdoch, I don’t really know anything about him, though his Wiki page suggests… not great things (I mean, he’s one of THOSE Murdochs; is there anyone in that family who’s free of that taint?). But the current Murdoch family dispute apparently relates to the old bugger trying to change the details of the family trust that controls the Murdoch family’s media holdings by shutting the other kids out of it and leaving everything to Lachlan. The likelhood of this succeeding is apparently minimal, however, which I presume is why C.R.A.B. is making this big “look at me daddy” display of loyalty to the old cunt, he wants to make sure Rupert knows he’s always have one of his chief propagandists backing him up… so I’m sure James is at least a bit trash but I still kind of hope he does prevail in this battle, if only cos I want to see Bolt stick to his promise. And James will do fine without him, too, cos there are unfortunately a lot more where he came from…

Ad-Vance JD where?

I haven’t had much to say about JD Vance, Drumpf’s running mate in the election, and I’m kind of glad about that, cos his story has got marvellously sillier as it’s gone on. I suppose we can begin with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, whose somewhat mixed reception (especially among the Appalachian folks whose way of life—among which Vance himself grew up—it apparently takes a dim view of) already meant he was a complicated figure, popular enough to win Senate election two years but not really liked per se. This, at any rate, is what I’ve been able to gather. In spite of that, there was some speculation before the Republican convention that Trump would pick him as his running mate, which wound up being the case, and…

…oh. THAT’s unfortunate. And because Nick Fuentes is a fucking Nazi piece of shit, he’s not a fan of Vance’s wife either:

An opinion I’m sure a large segment of the party shares but they’ve had more sense so far than to admit it. Of course, the strangest thing about the Vance-as-VP thing is that, well, he’s quite frankly said these things about his putative future boss in the past:

And he meant “America’s Hitler” as a bad thing, not a good one. I wonder at what point he switched from “never Trump” to “whatever Trump”? I know people’s political opinions change, but it’s quite a swing from calling a guy Hitler to happily being that guy’s Himmler… and it just makes him look like a stranger and stranger choice for Trump’s second. But I said the story gets sillier, and it does…

No, REALLY. The story that Vance supposedly refers to in his book about having fucked a couch is, alas, about as real as the stories from years ago about Ted Cruz having been the Zodiac Killer… but it’s out there in the same way and it’s making him look like a fool in the same way too; I see Bluesky running with the gag in the way Twitter would’ve done once (maybe it is, I’m just not there much to see it) and it’s been kind of gold:

Incidentally, this is what I meant when I said the other day about the limited shelf-life of the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme. Shepard Fairey’s art is not only iconic, it’s durable and eminently adaptable over a decade and a half later. I don’t know how you make the current affair fit the “Brandon” frame. Anyway, obviously the story is absurd on the face of it, but what a weapon it makes, especially given Vance’s existing wobbly popularity and the way he’s been revealing himself as a piece of shit, especially with his comments about childless women—you know you’ve probably got a bunch of those in your base, JD? Maybe not a lot, but you will have a lot of childful women who’ll find that stuff just as offensive. Indeed, none other than Meghan McCain appears to be worried about just that:

This, of course, is precisely who the Republicans are, and Meghan’s clearly frightened that women on her side might actually recognise this fact at last and not vote for Trump. Quelle tragedy. So Vance is making himself look like enough of a cunt as it is, but the couch business is delightful icing on the cake… There is some speculation that Trump will see the error of his ways sooner rather than later, and this guy is speculating that he might pick Nikki Haley instead. I find the idea of Trump picking a woman for the role unlikely at best, but if he did pick here that would be kind of magnificent, given that one of the first groups to offer their endorsement of Kamala Harris was a PAC of former Nikki Haley supporters. I think Haley replacing Vance would be about the funniest way this story could end.