Advice

Find someone who cares about you as much as Google News cares about telling me who might own Hulu someday. 

(This is the kind of high quality content Bluesky is missing out on by not sending me an invite.)

Dystopia New Game +

It’s funny, I think of myself as pretty pessimistic these days, but if you’d asked me a couple of days ago, “Hey, Bryan, if a random citizen decided to kill a homeless person in the NYC subway by putting him in a headlock for 15 minutes, how would establishment institutions and media treat it?” my answer wouldn’t have been “like a perfectly normal thing anyone could, and, in fact, should do in that situation.”

I mean, I know we’ve been dehumanizing people experiencing homelessness for decades. And I know even supposedly blue cities have policies around getting rid of those people instead of helping them. And I know the past year, especially, the right has been leveraging the increased in unhoused populations as part of their “Democrat cities are full of poop and murder” narrative. I just thought opening day of hunting season was still a few years away. 

Insert Hod Dog Guy GIF Here

Yes, will McCarthy be able to defuse that time bomb, that, according to this NBC News headline, just spontaneously appeared for no reason at all in Kevin McCarthy’s lap?

If only there were some string of news stories NBC News had a way to access, showing some kind of history or pattern of one group of people refusing to raise the debt ceiling until their wildly impractical, ideological, and unconnected demands are met. Heck, let’s go a step further. Imagine if that existed AND Kevin McCarthy was able to be connected, in some way, with that group? 

It’s like that would recontextualize the whole situation from a public servant struggling to defuse a situation out of his control to a story of an inept asshat who took over a dozen tries to even get his job being in way over his head in a situation entirely his own doing. Oh well! No way to know for sure!

Successfully

 Fox Business making some interesting tweaks to the English language to fluff Elon even when his penis-extension disastrously explodes.

CROSSPOST: My Figure Photography Magnum Opus Is Complete

https://www.oldnerd.net/2023/04/fig-photo-series-my-magnum-opus-is.html

Rare But Nice

Gotta say, it’s refreshing to see barricades being put up to prevent right-wing violence against law enforcement and public institutions. I usually only see those kinds of measures being employed when a cop is about to be acquitted of murdering an innocent Black person.

I don’t know if Donnie Boy is going to be indicted tomorrow, although obviously I hope he is, and also in Georgia and also anywhere else they can get his hands on him. I also very much want to see the Patriot Moat the usual gang of idiots are discussing down in Mar A Lago because that’ll be hilarious.

Obviously, as we’ve seen, the odds of a few well-heeled assholes committing acts of domestic terrorism and hurting people are higher than they should be, and the odds of them forming any kind of coherent force that accomplishes more than smearing shit on society’s collective walls is way lower than they think it is. Much like with Jan 6, they are simultaneously dangerous and ineffective, to the point where you don’t want them to try some shit, but you kinda want ‘em to try some shit. 

Pointy-Headed Racist

This is super-obvious, but it bears repeating that one week ago, Scott Adams was an unhinged dingus that no publication with any of the values or principles they claimed to have THIS weekend should have been supporting in the first place  

You can be plenty awful in today’s society and still keep your core career and livelihood. You can, in fact, be MORE awful now and get away with it than you could have been at any point in the last 30 years, and the constant vilification and complaining about cancel culture (FKA political correctness) exists for the sole purpose of letting awful people get away with being awful to a degree that was formerly unacceptable.

Now, in order to suffer consequences, you have to be VERY racist in a way that gets publicly noticed to a degree that a few big players feel compelled to take public action, which creates the environment in which other, more timid big players realize that the disadvantages of not replacing Dilbert with some other bullshit the people who still read the funny pages will glance over out of habit outweigh the brief onslaught of right-wing How Dare You’s who swarm when one of Their Own is threatened.

The degree to which you have to fuck up is roughly proportional to how much money you make for other people. You make a LOT of money for other people, and you have to publicly say you like Hitler in order for capitalism to jettison you. Scott Adams makes SOME money for other people, but it’s mostly out of habit at this point, so he only had to be very, very racist on a podcast whose contents got widely publicized for him to finally be cast off.

I assume, as is traditional, that Martyr Syndrome will kick in shortly and offers to speak at a plethora of low-standard wingnut gatherings will pour in for a couple of years, since nothing Adams said falls that far outside the boundaries of mainstream conservative thought. But if this finally removes Dilbert from the public consciousness two decades after it stopped being even remotely relevant, , I’ll take it.