Category: Stupid

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Well, fuck.

somehow the united states surrendered to the russians, the nazis and the confederacy all in one night

Not sure what else to say really. Unless someone comes up with an explanation involving the very clever disappearance of literally millions of ballots from several states, “it is what it is”.

At least in 2016 you could argue that the people didn’t know what they were getting with Trump. That’s just bullshit in 2024.

Funny that I have a very American anecdote to illustrate what this feels like, but it’s 100% true. When I moved to the USA in 1999 (Fairview NJ) a buddy of mine came along to help out and visit New York. The day after we unloaded we get out early to go to the city, and my neighbor introduced himself. Now we both had beards at the time, and the guy opened by asking us if we were “from the House of David”, which I didn’t get right away… not wanting to antagonize the guy who lived above me I mentioned we were heading to the city, he said “what do you want to go to the city for, it’s full of [n-word]s and [sp-word]s!” I froze a little bit and realized that I really, really wasn’t in Montreal anymore and that this was the kind of new reality. I don’t remember much of what went on after, besides my handling it in my socially-anxious way of being very polite and then just kind of leaving.  I vaguely remember the k-word popping up at some point in the advice he gave us. It felt almost unreal TBH. The guy was very friendly to me — he saw me as a fellow white guy — but clearly our world views were divergent, to say the least.

Today I feel largely the same way about this election as I did about that introduction to my upstairs neighbor. I really wanted to think that Eddie (not his real name) was of another generation (IIRC he was in his mid-60s) and that this kind of shocking social attitudes would change over time, But judging from the campaign that we’ve seen from Trump, the vote tells us that no, there hasn’t been any progression. There has in fact been a huge regression. And it’s not “just” a racial thing either. It’s also a victory for misogyny, transphobia and hate in general.

It’s like if you visited a friend of the family you think you’ve known all your life, but then you find out that he was secretly a klan member the whole time.

Is there a silver lining to all this? There is for me, and it’s that I’m not an American. I know that the culture will cross borders like a metastasizing tumor, but at least I know that as of January 20th my life is not likely to change in a very direct way.  If nothing else, I don’t have to look on my neighbors with suspicion, although that may well come here as well along with the culture.

It’s a pessimistic view, but a realistic view. But, what do I know? My take on things as expressed previously was so wrong it’s practically embarrassing (but I’m leaving it up).

i want to believe poster, seen in "X-Files".
Me too, Mulder. Me too.

I really wanted to believe that America was better than this.

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The ultimate “fuck you” from the City of Montreal

Imagine this scene – it’s 11h30pm and you just got home, you were supposed to be about 500 miles away except for an incredibly frustrating car issue (more on that in a later post). So you park in the drop-off area in front of your apartment building because you need to take your daughter and your dog to your apartment before looking for a proper parking spot. So you wake up the little dear, leash the dog, grab as much luggage as you can, head upstairs, put the youngun to bed and make sure the K9 has food, take a leak, then get back there. You’re up there maybe 5 minutes before you head back down to find a place to park the whip.

Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.

And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.

That pisses me off.

I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.

I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos  — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.

Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.

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This is a normal title for a political article in 2024

Yes, this is a screencap of the Rolling Stone web site, not altered.

Trump allies urge him not to be a "raging asshole" at debate
Standards are pretty low in 2024 presidential politics
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Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism

If nothing else positive comes out of his acquiring Twitter, it will at least have provided the public with an opportunity to see how obsessed Elon Musk is with race-related conspiracy theories.  A surprising amount of it is just plain creepy.

Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism (Mother Jones)

 

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Really Donald? You want to go there?

Today’s moment of zen is Donald Trump posting this on “Truth” Social, showing the world that he hasn’t gained an ounce of self-awareness — or indeed world awareness — in the past 4 years. Four years ago hospitals had to hire freezer trucks to store the body of the COVID dead because they were literally running out of space in the morgues.

Donald Trump asks if you're better off now than 4 years ago, not thinking for a second about what was going on 4 years ago

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It’s time to admit I overestimated humanity

Does the internet make people stupid? I mean, it seems like a silly idea. After all the internet gives you instant access to the entire knowledge of the world (along with a whole lot of BS) so surely that can’t be a bad thing… well, after seeing this screenshot I am not so sure.

A person on the internet asking if ramadan is a new tiktok challenge

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The Hypocrite Party of Canada

The Hypocrite Party of Canada (formerly known as the Conservative Party of Canada) has been clutching its pearls since yesterday about a tweet by Dale Smith that referred to Pipsqueak’s speech saying “when a horse is that lame you shoot it”.  By being willfully obtuse the Hypocrites are shouting from the rooftops that Smith “threatened violence on an MP”, which doesn’t nearly pass the laugh test, and want Smith to be expelled from the press gallery.

It’s funny, I can’t recall that much outrage back in 2019, when a Tory Senator spoke to a group of protesting truckers and told them to “roll over every Liberal left in the country”.  The name of the Senator is David Tkachuk, and this was actually reported at the time: https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/david-tkachuk-united-we-roll-ottawa-convoy_a_23674517

And Senator Tkachuk double down when he was asked to apologize: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/conservative-senator-won-t-apologize-for-telling-protesters-to-roll-over-every-liberal-1.4307250

There is no record of the Hypocrite Party of Canada ever taking any measure in response to this, or even issuing any kind of statement whatsoever to put pressure on the Senator.

If the Hypocrite Party of Canada want to play this game, we’ve got receipts.

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How I am Better than Donald Trump

I managed to get put in Twitter jail for saying that a politician in the USA who falsely claimed to be a combat veteran “rode into town on Stolen Valor and should be railroaded out with tar & feathers”. Anyone with two or more working neurons would take that to mean “he tried to capitalize on lies about military service and he should be roundly shamed and ridiculed”, but clearly Twitter’s staff does not have such a luxury of neurons.

Donald Trump basically had to completely ignore the service’s ToS and repeatedly violate it for years to get such treatment, and I did it just by making a simple joke while sitting at home. That’s how I am better than Donald Trump.

Of course there’s also the whole thing about me not being a misogynistic, racist con man with a history of defrauding charities, *very* close friendship with sexual predators and over 30 sexual assault allegations. But today I’m just concentrating on how I’m better at getting my Twitter account suspended.

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Life imitating art — but it’s “Triumph of the Will”

Donald Trump had one of his rallies on Saturday but a lot of people are saying that the former president has gone too far at this latest event. I didn’t feel like actually listening to Trump speak for 10 seconds, let alone two hours, but then this photo taken at the event started circulating. See if you can tell what makes this photo interesting, it’s very subtle…

Trump rally salute
Trump rally salute

Hmm… let’s go to video, that’s the Newsmax feed. Newsmax was one of very few stations to broadcast this event. Even Fox News gave it a miss. Check out the second video in this tweet:

It’s not just Trump either, this video was taken at a rally for the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania held on the next day:

This is getting pretty creepy.

 

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Dream final?

Oh boy, FIFA’s gone and done it again. Its own site proudly trumpets “Dramatic semis produce dream final“, and the article goes on to proclaim that a Japan-USA rematch is “the gold medal match fans the world over were hoping to see”.

Well, it’s the final that FIFA was hoping to see, clearly. When you put things in those precise terms, FIFAbots, people might at some point assume that the result of the Canada-USA match was rigged. And given FIFA’s own notorious problems with corruption and people at very high levels passing brown envelopes full of money up and down the chain to ensure expected results (let’s not kid ourselves, that’s how Qatar got the next world cup) it really should make more people wonder whether FIFA has perhaps taken a position on the match that was not exactly impartial.

And when I now hear that FIFA is looking into punishing Canadian players for their post-game comments, while the real outrages that took place on the field remain unquestioned, I can’t help but see Sepp Blatter as your traditional mafia don, preordering the result of important games and exacting a capricious, autocratic revenge on anyone who dares question his dictatorship. Remember how this is the same idiot who didn’t think there was anything wrong with Thierry Henry’s infamous handball which sent big-market France to the World Cup finals and sent small-market Ireland homeward.

It’s time to call a spade a spade here. FIFA and its leadership are corrupt to the core and everybody knows it. It’s time for serious football to organize in an organization which is not so completely and utterly rotten.

edit: I’ve decided to save a copy of FIFA’s “dream final” text to this post, as I have a feeling that it will probably be heavily edited later.