At least it's not just America.

I don't know if this is a new thing, but I only just heard of it a couple days ago on some podcast or other. There is a website called "Quillette." And holy shit, it is freakin nuts!
It seems to be based in Australia or maybe the UK,  but it does employ internet gadfly Andy Ngo as a "sub-editor." Anyway, this is the article that I heard about on the pod.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man: A Profile of Boris Johnson

written by Toby Young

"Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man" is an awfully dramatic way of referring to a clod like Boris Johnson.



Christ, just add an eyepatch and subtract 50 pounds and he's this guy:

You know, I thought it was only American conservatives who could look at a shambling, disheveled, bloated buffoon and see a superhero,

but whatever it is, it seems to infect the British right as well.

I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. . . With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. 

Yeah. "looked like."

Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him.

 

Oh my God! "Übermensch!"

If by "imposing physical build" you mean "layered in middle-aged baby fat," and by "broad Germanic forehead," you mean "heavy cro-magnon brow," then sure. That's the ubermensch all over!

You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest

Okay, first of all, fuck you for making me picture Boris Johnson in lederhosen. 

Second, yeah - I could imagine him in lederhosen. Stuffing bratwurst into his buttery face in a biergarten somewhere, but wandering the Black Forest? 

Third, you're kinda tipping your hand with all the German stuff. Why not compare Johnson to some formidable British hero? I mean, you must have one, right? Some medieval king or something? When you start off by referring to Hitler's favorite philosopher, drop in the term for Hitler's super race of ideal pure Aryans and the only metaphors you have for power, strength, and toughness are all German, you're kinda giving the game away.

You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill.

Okay, yeah. I could imagine him wandering lost in a forest, looking for imaginary made-up creatures to battle. I could see him as a LARPer.

Basically, this guy with worse hair.

 This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

Okay, we get it. You reads the Cliff's notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Geez!

Also, where are you seeing "coiled strength?"

He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.

Yeah, now THAT sounds like Boris Johnson. And now, I assume you're going to explain how this buffoonery was actually evidence of his genetic superiority or some other such quasi-Nazi shit?

 The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. 

 

Of course! He meant to do that! Jesus Christ!

He couldn't possibly have just been in over his head and getting rightly mocked and ridiculed by his fellow students. No, it must be that he was screwing up intentionally. To, um. . . make some kind of a statement. About Oxford. And how they take things too seriously. That is totally the sort of thing that a freshman could get away with doing at Oxford! If there's one institution in Britain than knows how to laugh at itself, it's Oxford!

In Boris, though, it was as if I’d finally encountered the ‘real’ Oxford, the Platonic ideal. 

Jeez, get a room!

Also, that rumbling you feel is Plato turning over and over in his grave.

 While the rest of us were works-in-progress, vainly trying on different personae, Boris was the finished article. He was an instantly recognizable character from the comic tradition in English letters: a pantomime toff. He was Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night demanding more cakes and ale, Bertie Wooster trying to pass himself off as Eustace H. Plimsoll when appearing in court after overdoing it on Boat Race night. Yet at the same time fizzing with vim and vinegar—“bursting with spunk,” as he once put it, explaining why he needs so many different female partners. 

Oh my God.

Oh my GOD!

So many female partners?

That's a long, convoluted way of making excuses for him being a pig.

He was a cross between Hugh Grant and a silverback gorilla.

Well, you're half right!

My uncle had described him as a “genius” and as a boy he’d been regarded as something of a wunderkind.

And there you go with the German again. You just can't help yourself, can you?

There was the occasion when he was holidaying with his family in Greece, aged 10, and asked a group of Classics professors if he could join their game of Scrabble. They indulged the precocious, blond-haired moppet, only to be beaten by him. Thinking it was a one-off, they asked him to play another round and, again, he won. On and on it went, game after game. 

Oh, bullshit. That never happened. You expect us to believe that this guy

a ten-year-old version of this guy, had a stronger vocabulary than a group of classics professors? It doesn't pass the laugh test!

At the prep school he attended before going to Eton, Britain’s grandest private school, he was seen as a prodigy. A schoolmaster who taught him back then told his biographer, Andrew Gimson, that he was the quickest-learner he’d ever encountered. In the staff room, the teachers would compare notes about the “fantastically able boy.”

Oh God.

Oh, no. 

No no no no no no no..

What did those degenerates do to poor little Boris? 

There is no way that having English private school teachers comparing notes on you in the staff room can possibly lead to anything good.

That's something out of a Morrisey lyric.

Belligerent ghouls

Run Manchester schools

He grabs and devours

He kicks me in the showers

Kicks me in the showers

And he grabs and devours

Okay, this isn't funny anymore. I'm sorry. If Boris needs a sycophantic glowing hagiography to feel okay about himself after what he went through, then by all means, go right ahead. Just maybe lay off the German stuff, huh?

The stupidest six words of all time

So today I saw on my Twitter an article from Wonkette about Jordan Peterson

And it contained probably THE stupidest six words ever spoken, written, thought, or conceived of.

First, some context. Peterson, who for some inexplicable reason is someone that a ceertain segment of the population thinks is a serious public intellectual, was opining on why women should all be running around plopping out babies all the time.

He said:

There's a serious conversation to be had with young women. A woman asked me a question on my Q&A this month. She said that her friends are really down on her, because she claims to not be a feminist, but even more importantly, because she wants to have children. And they're telling her that only an evil and cruel person would bring a child into a world this terrible, and worse, to do the damage to the planet that that child will inevitably do. And people are very serious about this. And they are very hard on young women.

Okay, that never happened.
I'm guessing that this woman doesn't exist, that no such question was asked. Especially seeing as how what Peterson claims the woman "asked" was not a question, but a statement.
The only other possibility is that Peterson did actually get this "question" on his website or whatever and was too thick to realize that the person "asking" the "question" was bullshitting him. Because no one is responding to their friend's stated desire for a cute cuddly baby by telling her that she is "evil and cruel." This is an obvious lie,. But it's not even the stupid part yet. Well, it's A stupid part, but it's not THE stupid part.



Her is THE stupid part. The stupidest part. The sentence containing the stupidest six words ever assembled into a single phrase:

I always think of the Pieta because I kind of think of it as the Christian equivalent of the crucifix, 

Yes, there it is. Did you catch that? "the Christian equivalent of the crucifix." The CHRISTIAN equivalent of the CRUCIFIX!

Peterson is saying that there is a thing that exists which is a version of a statue of Jesus Christ on the cross, but is a CHRISTIAN version of that.  How do you respond to that? I have no words.
A Christian equivalent of this:

Like there's a non-Christian version of a crucifix.

I mean, you could certainly have a Buddhist equivalent of a crucifix. Or a Muslim equivalent. Or a Hindu equivalent. But a Christian version of the crucifix is like an athletic version of the Olympics. It boggles the mind that this is a person who is taken seriously by anyone.

Here's the whole quote:

I always think of the Pieta because I kind of think of it as the Christian equivalent of the crucifix, you know, you have Mary there with her broken son in her arms. And I think that the great adventure for women, at least in part, this is the maternal adventure, is to bring a child into the world, knowing full well the consequence is a crucifixion-like brokenness. And that it's still a mark of faith in the possibilities of being, to participate in that and not to hide from it and to say: 'Well, despite everything, I'm going to act out my faith in life and in the possibilities of being and I'm going to bring someone into the world who will be a net force for good rather than evil. And that's my moral obligation.'

Holy Saint Stupid on an idiot stick!

Where to begin?

Pewrhaps by boasting that I have seen the Pieta in person?



No, that would be rude. But true!

Anyway, this dolt thinks that even though a woman would know full well that the end result of bringing a child into the world is going to be " a crucifixion-like brokenness," She should somehow wish to do that anyway? Like if you told some woman that she has a rare genetic condition that will cause any sons or daughters she has to die a slow painful death while they are still young, you're supposed to find it admirable for her to say "well, that's okay. I really feel like I oughta have some kids anyway?"
Or the fact that he thinks that having babies is a "moral obligation," no matter how much pain and suffering and "crucifixion-like brokenness" those children would be fated to endure?
Or that he thinks that having a child whose fate it is to endure a "crucifixion-like brokenness" is not only a moral obligation, but also an "adventure?"
Maybe the worst part is that he thinks he has the right to tell women what they are "morally obligated" to do with their baby-making parts.
.
It's hard to fathom how much stupidity, arrogance, and just general shittiness Peterson can pack into one brief paragraph. I've read that bit over and over and each time I notice something new, some new nugget of idiocy or hubris or general dickishness to marvel over. A better writer than I could probably write a book about just that one paragraph.
You could probably get at least a magazine article out of the stupidest six words in the history of the English language.

Everything Wrong With America in One Headline

CEO tries to play hero, pay for students' late lunch bills: School board says no

MIKE SCOLFORO | ASSOCIATED PRESS | 8 hours ago

First of all, how eff'd up is it that there are families in the richest country in the world who can't afford food for their children? How eff'd up is it that there are children in this country whose only decent meal some days is their school lunch.

And how eff'd up is it that, instead of addressing the poverty problem in this country, instead of guaranteeing people who work for a living can actually earn a living, our society would rather wait around and hope that some wealthy person decides to swoop in and be a hero.

And how eff'd up and just plain EVIL is a school board that refuses to allow that rich guy to be the hero that saves the day?




Okay, to get the whole story, we have to go back a couple of days to this:

Kids could end up in foster care over unpaid school lunch bills, district says in letter
Associated PressPublished 7:59 p.m. ET July 19, 2019 | Updated 8:01 p.m. ET July 19, 2019

KINGSTON, Pa. — A Pennsylvania school district is warning children could end up in foster care if their parents do not pay overdue school lunch bills.
The letters sent recently to about 1,000 parents in Wyoming Valley West School District have led to complaints from parents and a stern rebuke from Luzerne County child welfare authorities.
The district says that it is trying to collect more than $20,000, and that other methods to get parents to pay have not been successful.

Who does this? Who threatens to take people's children away? Christ, these parent owe an avcerage of $20 each! Who could possibly think that they should have their children taken away?

Wyoming Valley West's lawyer, Charles Coslett, said he did not consider the letters to be threatening.

Yeah, just like John Yoo did not consider torture to be torture. Of course they were threatening! What non-threatening interpretation is there of "You can be sent to dependency court for neglecting your child's right to food. The result may be your child being taken from your home and placed in foster care,?"

"Hopefully, that gets their attention and it certainly did, didn't it? I mean, if you think about it, you're here this morning because some parents cried foul because he or she doesn't want to pay a debt attributed to feeding their kids. How shameful," Coslett told WYOU-TV.

Why on Earth would you think that? Why would you possibly think that these parents are just choosing not to pay for their children's food? People are generally willing, if not eager, to pay their debts.

 

With a few notable exceptions.

I mean, I guess it's part and parcel with the general conservative mindset that people are poor because they choose to be. Or at least because they prefer sloth and  poverty to hard work and responsibility. But even if you believe that crap, my God - we're talking about feeding their children! No parent is going to choose not to shell out a few bucks to feed their kids!

Anyway, this story made the papers, and some kind CEO decided that he should pay off these people's debts so that they don't have to worry about having their children taken away, which is honestly what Jesus would do, and this school board asshole says no? I mean, this guy must realize that he is the villain in this parable, right? That this parable ends with the school board president being bound hand and foot and cast into the darkness where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, right?

Todd Carmichael, chief executive and co-founder of Philadelphia-based La Colombe Coffee, said he offered to give Wyoming Valley West School District $22,000 to wipe out bills that generated the recent warning letter to parents.

Coffee Hero!

But school board President Joseph Mazur rejected the offer during a phone conversation Monday, Carmichael spokesman Aren Platt said Tuesday. Mazur argued that the money is owed by parents who can afford to pay, Platt said.

Oh my GOD!

Who CARES?
Even if you're right, WHO CARES? You're getting your money either way!
If I go into your cafeteria and buy lunch and then say, hey, you know what, here's a hundred bucks, I'm buying lunch for the next few kids in line, are you going to say no? Are you going to be upset that they aren't having to pay for it themselves? It's a fucking gift! People are allowed to buy gifts for other people! Even people they don't know. Even people that you think don't "deserve" it. Even if every single one of these parents is secretly rich and just doesn't want to pay their bills for some stupid reason and they're just being irresponsible jerks, the coffee guy is still allowed to buy them gifts.

What if, instead of just cutting you a check for $22k, the coffee guy went to each individual parent and handed them the amount of money they owe so that they can, in turn, give the money to you to pay off their kid's lunch tab? Would that be okay? Or would you still have a problem because these parents aren't being punished for their poor life choices like not being born rich and not graduating from medical school?

“The position of Mr. Carmichael is, irrespective of affluence, irrespective of need, he just wants to wipe away this debt,” Platt said.

In a letter sent to papers in the Wilkes-Barre area on Monday, Carmichael said his offer was motivated in part because he received free meals as a child growing up near Spokane, Washington.
“I know what it means to be hungry,” Carmichael wrote. “I know what it means to feel shame for not being able to afford food.”

Carmichael said he was struggling to understand why district officials would not welcome his help.

Yeah, we all are, sir. We all are.

How many of these conferences are there?

I knew there was CPAC. And the Values Voters Summit. And the Stone Mountain Klanbakes. But this is one I'd never heard of until a couple days ago.

A CONFERENCE IN WASHINGTON, DC

JULY 14-16, 2019

I will give them credit for this, though. At least they went ahead and held this in the ballroom of the Washington, DC Ritz Carlton. No feigning "common man" credentials. No pretending to be grassroots or representative of some anti-elite salt-of-the-earth plain folks. Nope, They went straight to the hotel chain most emblematic of decadent wealth, right in the heart of the nation's center of elite power. At least they're being honest.

But that is the ONLY credit they're going to get, because this conference presented a rogues gallery of some of the most despicable, depraved degenerates the right wing has to offer.

Confirmed Speakers:

Amb. John Bolton

Keynote

Tucker Carlson

Keynote

Sen. Josh Hawley

Keynote

Peter Thiel

Keynote

Okay, I don't know who Josh Hawley is, but the rest of these guys?

You've got John Bolton, the man who can only get erect watching videos of Iraqi bombing victims.
You've got Tucker Carlson, the pretty-much-official spokesman for white ethno-nationalism. And Peter Thiel, a man who made his fortune on the internet, which was created, developed, and paid for by the federal government, and now preaches libertarianism because he thinks that the government should just stay out of his business and not tax the money he made on a system FOR WHICH THE TAXPAYERS PAID!

There's a bunch of other speakers of whom I am glad not to have heard, but a few familiar names stand out. Like

      Daniel Pipes

A man who has made a career out of warning gullible bigots that Muslims will come to your country and totally do Sharia Law to you! Somehow!


and

Amity Shlaes

whom I really only know as the author of a ridiculous revisionist history of the Great Depression which posits that the Great Depression wouldn't have lasted so long had not FDR intervened. Which is kind of like saying that infection would have cleared up sooner if you hadn't used those damn antibiotics.


Oh, I found a quote from that book!

“The big question about the American depression is not whether war with Germany and Japan ended it. It is why the Depression lasted until that war. From 1929 to 1940, from Hoover to Roosevelt, government intervention helped to make the Depression Great.” ― Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

It's even stupider than I thought! Because, you know, if there's one thing that Herbert Hoover was known for, it was his policy of using the government to intervene in the economy!


There's the truly idiotic Salena Zito, whom we've discussed before: (here)



And someone of whom I had no knowledge until I saw her quote from the conference on Twitter the other day, Amy Wax.






that quote being:

“Let us be candid: Europe and the First World, to which the United States belongs, remains mostly white for now. And the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people,” Wax said, according to a transcript posted by Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who attended and reported on the conference. “Embracing cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”

Changing the name from "white nationalism" to "cultural distance nationalism" doesn't make it any better. It's like when Philip Morris changed its name to Altria. That didn't make their product any less toxic.

So why another right wing conference? What is different about this one? What is this one going to cover that the CPACs of the world have left out?

Well. let's let them explain.

About

Politics in America, Britain, and other Western nations have taken a sharp turn toward nationalism—a commitment to a world of independent nations.

Yeah, that's not really what nationalism means. But I assume you know that.

This has been disorienting to many, not least the American conservative movement, which has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, grown increasingly attached to a vision of a global “rules-based liberal order” that would bring peace and prosperity to the entire world while attenuating the independence of nations.   

And by "peace and prosperity," we of course mean invading, nombing and overthrowing the governments of any country to whom we take a dislike.

The return of nationalism has created a much-discussed “crisis of conservatism” that may be unprecedented since modern Anglo-American conservatism was formulated by Russell Kirk, William Buckley, and their colleagues in the 1950s.

Yes, then as now, the crisis is over how much of the racist part to say out loud.

The conference on “National Conservatism” will bring together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.

Or, to put it a bit more succinctly, Ein Volk, Ein Rich, Ein Fuhrer.

We see this public conference as the kick off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of national conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.

Okay. sure! American conservatism in opposition to theories grounded in race!
You betcha!

Oh, man! Good luck with that!

Terrifying Headline of the Day

Mike Pompeo unveils panel to examine 'unalienable rights'

There is no way in Hell that this can possibly be a good thing. Or even a neutral thing. Or benign. There is no way on God's green Earth that Mike Pompeo is looking to increase the number of unalienable rights. Unless yopu are a Christian small-business owner who wants the right to deny service to any people whose existence you find troubling. That might possibly be a new right that this commission discovers. Other than that, though, there is no way that this panel wasn't convened to try to find ways to make current rights a bit less unalienable.

Mike Pompeo is a far-right theocratic lunatic. We all know this. Even the fairly conservative Economist had this to say about him:

Several things have earned Mr Pompeo the reputation of being a kind of latter-day Crusader. One is a video clip in which he argues vigorously that at least some individuals are motivated by their Muslim beliefs, and by things they read in the Koran, to commit terrible violence. . . What is more striking is the remedy of Christian solidarity he proposes: Islam-inspired terrorists “will continue to press against us until we make sure…we know that Jesus Christ is the only solution for our world.”

Then there was this, via The Intercept:

At an evangelical church in his district that specializes in addressing “Satanism and paranormal activity” — and standing in front of a Christian flag — Pompeo in 2015  spoke of the “struggle against radical Islam, the kind of struggle this country has not faced since its great wars.” He warned that “evil is all around us,” citing reports of terror plots, and cautioned the congregation not to be deterred by those who might call them “Islamophobes or bigots.”

The Kansas lawmaker is best known in the national media for his zealous investigations of Hillary Clinton’s response to the 2012 attack on the U.S. government facility in Benghazi . . . He has pushed for broad National Security Agency powers and supports interrogation techniques broadly viewed as torture.

So, yeah, that's the guy you want to put in charge of determining which human rights are "inalienable." The guy who's fine with torture.

Oh, and he's real strong on religious freedom. He totally believes that people should be free to practice their faith as they see fit. Except for Muslims, of course!

Earlier this year, the congressman shocked the Islamic Society of Wichita, a local mosque in his district, by publishing a statement denouncing the group for inviting a speaker he alleged had ties to Hamas. The speaker had spoken four times to the mosque in the past without incident.

But Pompeo, in his statement, released without prior notice to the mosque, charged that the Islamic Society of Wichita’s event was an insult because it coincided with the Christian holiday of Good Friday, and that if the mosque failed to rescind the invitation, they would be “responsible for the damage among religious faiths that is sure to follow.”

 Pompeo appeared on Secure Freedom Radio, a program hosted by anti-Muslim campaigner Frank Gaffney, to boast that he had used Gaffney’s organization as a resource to research the speaker. Gaffney is notorious for spreading fears about Muslims, claiming absurdly that President Obama is “still” a Muslim, that Gov. Chris Christie had committed “treason” for appointing a Muslim judge. He runs a website that claims that Islam is not a religion, but a political ideology bent on destroying Western civilization.

So, yeah. A guy who supports Frank Fucking Gaffney, a guy who believes that Muslims should not be allowed to hold any governmental positions, that to appoint a MUslim to the bench is actually "treason," That's the guy who's going to decide who has what rights.


The panel is being headed up by former US ambassador to the Vatican


 Mary Ann Glendon.



Here are a few excerpts from an interview she gave to Crux, a website dedicated to "taking the Catholic Pulse."

ROME - Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon believes the entire human rights movement has fallen victim to a new form of skepticism that risks bringing it to collapse, with religious freedom being in the most precarious position.

Glendon said her biggest concern is for religious freedom, which she said risks “becoming a second-class right that is regularly, or too often, subordinated to a whole range of other rights, claims and interests,” particularly in the United States.

Oh, good. Someone who thinks that rights are a zero-sum game is heading up the human rights panel.

While it might seem surprising, Glendon said there are a number of prominent legal academics arguing to toss out religious freedom laws on grounds that, with freedom of speech and expression and assembly, a law specifically guaranteeing religious liberty is “a relic of a superstitious [age],” and is no longer necessary.

No there aren't. No "prominent legal academics" are arguing that we should get rid of religious freedom. If there were, she would be able to name at least one. How many does she name?

So what are Pompeo and Glendon saying about their approach to the whole "rights" thing?"

In remarks at the State Department on Monday, Pompeo noted that “words like ‘rights’ can be used by good or evil,” decrying how some have “hijacked” human rights rhetoric to be used for “dubious or malignant purposes.”

Holy shit! Just leading right off with the whole "too many rights are bad" theory!

Glendon, in brief comments, echoed that, telling reporters that "basic human rights are misunderstood by many, manipulated by many, and ignored by the world’s worst human rights violators."

Oh, and here's a couple more things she said to Crux:

Another major concern for Glendon is in developing nations, where “Western-funded human rights organizations are coming in and claiming universal human rights status for their agenda, treating people in those countries as if they are ignorant and they better get with the human rights program.”

“It smacks of neocolonialism, and makes people very angry,” she said, adding that at the moment, “very little is known about the financing of the scores of NGOs that are promoting one right or another.”

Neo-colonialism. Yeah, 'cuz did you ever think that maybe some countries don't want to have rights for people? Hmm? Ever think about that? If some other countries want to kill people with different political or religious views, what right do we have to tell them otherwise? Unless the people being persecuted are Christians, then obviously you have a moral obligation to intervene.

When it comes to church-state relations, particularly the current push for abortion and euthanasia to be declared human rights, Glendon said the debate needs to happen but outside of a courtroom.
“If the issues are decided in the courts, you’re going to get an all-or-nothing decision where it makes the losers very angry and disappointed,” she said.

And she would know, as her people have been on the losing side of these court decisions for a while now. If they had been winning these court cases, I'm sure she would be equally concerned with the feelings of the losers.

Also, yeah, I can see where all-or-nothing decisions about rights might be problematic. I mean, what if the courst just decided that, hey, LGBT people should have all the exact same rights and priveleges ans any other human being? Isn't it better to slowly add in a couple rights at a time? Maybe they can serve in the military, if they don't let anyone know who they are. Then, maybe they can serve openly. Then, maybe they can get married now. Then maybe some day down the road, we make it so that there aren't a couple dozen states where a person can be fired for being gay. You have to approach these things slowly, or otherwise, the bigots will be "very angry and disappointed." And we can't have that. Their feelings need to be considered at least as much as other people's rights.

“If we want to save our democratic experiment, it’s gotta take place in the realm of bargaining, education, persuasion, convincing your fellow citizens of the justice of your cause, and then you vote.”

Yes, if you think you should have human rights, you don't go to court! You have to convince everyone that you deserve to have rights. Then we vote on whether you get to have rights or not. It's called Democracy, people!

Anyway, these people are going to decide what rights we have and who gets to have them. We are well and truly fucked.

Culture Warrior of the Day

EntertainmentGOP Senate Candidate Upset Over 'Homosexual Activities,' 'Wife-Swap TV Shows'

Okay, first of all, let's dispense with the obvious. The television show "Wife Swap" was NOT about "wife-swapping." It was absolutely not about swinging. I know that the title of the show implies that it would be, but believe me, it was not. (Much to my chagrin).

A Republican Alabama official seeking to unseat Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) in the 2020 election complained that “homosexual activities” have supplanted “good TV shows” of the 1950s and 1960s.

Seriously? There aren't good TV shows because people are too busy doing homosexual activities to make them?

“There are no more good TV shows on like ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Virginian,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘I Love Lucy.’ 

I don't know what you consider "good" TV shows, apparently Westerns mainly, but we just ended an absolute golden age of television with shows like Deadwood and Hell On Wheels that should satisfy any fan of classic horse operas.
And if you honestly think that sit-coms like Andy Griffith and I Love Lucy could hold a candle to Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, or Frasier then I'm not sure we really have anything to talk about. You think we don't have any good TV shows anymore? You must not have Netflix.

 

We don’t have those shows anymore. We’re too interested in homosexual activities,” Senate candidate John Merrill, Alabama’s current secretary of state, said at a Saturday campaign event. 

Are there. . . are you seeing a lot of shows about homosexual activities?

Did you pay for the super extra premium cable package with all the adults-only channels? You know you could just turn on ESPN or something.

Instead, Merrill said, Americans are “too interested” in seeing “how people are trying to date on TV” and “having wife-swapping on TV.”

Well, I'll give you that first point. There are definitely too many dating shows on TV. As for the second part, dude. Just turn off the Spice channel!

“The foundational principles which we have grown up as a nation are no more,” Merrill told AL.com.

Yeah, the principles on which this country was founded, like "black people should be slaves" and "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" and "hey, let's kill all the Indians!" Whatever happened to those good old fashioned foundational principles?

He repeated his view that people are too willing to watch “the wife swap TV shows and the shows that are not morally uplifting” and not based on “biblical foundations.”

Okay, once again - Where are you seeing all these shows about wife-swapping?

And second, "biblical foundations?" You think shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza were based on "Biblical foundations?"

Who would Jesus shoot?

Turning the other cheek

God, will someone please tell these idiots that the culture wars are over and they lost? Of course, they still can't accept that they lost the Civil War, so it probably wouldn't do any good.