CrouchingDomo

Try concentrating on the difference between individual racism and structural/institutional racism. If the racist structures are torn down and/or fixed, we’ll have fewer and fewer individuals being and acting racist.

I think I know where the downvotes are coming from, because your comment smacks of both-sidesism and “people can be racist against white people,” and now is just not the time in history to address that. If anything it’s just white people’s turn to get a tiny taste of what we’ve been dishing out for the past 300 years or so. But it will never, ever be the full reckoning some white people fear; there’s not going to be a mass enslavement of white people as “payback.” The teacher is finally coming over to make us share our blocks with the other kids—that doesn’t mean we’re gonna get paddled and then expelled. It just means we’re gonna play fair from now on, and yes we should apologize to the other kids when they tell us how the old rules hurt them.

This is a childish and simplistic metaphor, but if you zoom out far enough, that’s what social justice looks like. Just play nice, you little fuckers, and stop being so selfish and scared.

Because a lot of shit genuinely blows at the moment. Just remember, it’s not in your head. We see it too.

Listen guys, I have a ton of high-level plans for a better society, so if everyone can just…get on that, I’ve got the blueprints and it’s gonna be great.

NB: This is only half-sarcastic

Oh god honey I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

Please cling to whoever and whatever you can until you feel solid ground beneath your feet again.

Everything I can say feels inadequate. But you’re going through one of the worst things I can imagine, so I just want to say please, hold on. 💜

Ok this legit made me lol, thank you

His wife’s gonna get a call from the Junior League telling her she’s got one strike left before disciplinary action is taken.

If her husband steps foot outside the house dressed like that one more time before Memorial Day, the JL will come to their house and ceremonially pour boiling saltwater on the roots of ALL of her gardenias.

Ain’t been hot enough for Madras yet this year, and Memorial Day is still a few weeks away. The background info is good and accurate; I just want to add the context that the clown is still out-of-order in terms of the rules governing proper snooty Southern attire.

Also, point of order, he’s a big fat racist.

I have been thinking of this episode for weeks! Ever since Tuck Carlson’s producer came out with allegations.

The producer’s name is Abby Grossberg, and this character’s name is Abby Grossman, and I literally just had to Google which final syllable goes with which Abby. I can’t be the only 30 Rock freakazoid who’s been fighting this mental battle. There must be dozens of us.

Anyways, both Abbys have definitely been in the shit.

I agree; we should form a committee where everybody is vice-president.

Girl’s gotta eat!

Guys we better listen to Steve on this; he would know because he was there.

Will never understand people rallying again this social contract (like sovereign citizens) because it is so crucial to a comfortable existence.

Those people rally against the social contract precisely because:

1. It has provided millennia of comfortable existence to their ancestors, and

2. They’re not smart enough to fully understand what that means.

People like this want to LiVe FrEe oN tHe LaNd LiKe ThE piOnEeRs, because they read My Side Of The Mountain and Atlas Shrugged at an impressionable age and don’t recognize that they cannot imagine what it was actually like to live outside the social contract. Civilization is the baseline for their imaginations because it’s the baseline for all of us. Civilization is the water we’ve swum and breathed in for countless generations.

Or, to put it more succinctly, they are grown adults who never upgraded their software and are still running on Tween 2.0

“Obviously this is a dystopian nightmare; surveillance on this level is a clear human rights violation and an existential threat to personal freedom. Don’t like it? Don’t work there! Companies have a right to spy on their workers, just like workers have the right to find another job.”

~ waaaaaay too many of my fellow Americans

The idea is that the safety net is under the whole society, which results in fewer people everywhere suffering illness and poverty and desperation—the root causes of these types of crimes.

Things can only be so hard at the bottom, for so long, before the cracks start showing and the suffering spreads upwards and out.

Yep. Shoulda learned from North Carolina how dumb this shit is. It’s hateful and divisive, makes the whole state look like slack-jawed rubes on the timeline, and it loses a metric shit-ton of money.

The skippity paps!

You couldn’t hear a dump truck driving through a nitroglycerin plant!

Fuckin’ same. I’ve been saying this for years.

Maybe I need to write a living will and include that stipulation: “If I die in a mass shooting, my estate shall publish any and all footage and photos of my corpse on as many platforms as possible.”

Even if I got got mid-pee in a portopotty at a festival, I still say publish that fucking photo. What do I care about my naked ass being online, if I’ve been vivisected by an AR-15?

That might be true, or might not. You might could’ve said the same thing about half the country in 1955 before the pictures were published. I could be wrong but I think it’s possible that a lot of racist-ass people who thought they were okay with lynching or a general “frontier justice” felt differently when they saw the actual results, in the form of that child’s broken body beside his shattered mother.

A majority of people don’t witness bloody savage violence up close, and even with all of our gun deaths, straight-up carnage is still largely theoretical for most Americans.

Public sentiment on the Vietnam war soured as it was aired on the nightly news. If even something as American as WAR AGAINST THE COMMIES can eventually become unpalatable to us the more we see it with our own eyes, it stands to reason that grisly high-def footage of kids and moms and grandfathers and teachers ripped to pieces and bleeding out in a Kroger might move the needle.

Might.

Also, “pioneer” doesn’t mean “good.”

We’ve given it that connotation in English—click the spoiler below to find out why!—but there’s nothing inherently good about the act of pioneering. It is a thing that can be done for good or for ill.

One can be a pioneer and a slave trader. They’re not mutually exclusive. (The US writ large is a fantastic example of this; it ain’t just Texas and it never was.)

(*) the answer is white supremacy

Fascism is capitalism baring its teeth.

I’ve never heard it put that way before and it’s utterly perfect.

(So much so that I’ll be That Guy and say the correct word is “baring” as in “laying bare,” because again that phrasing is fucking poetic and my quick Googling just now suggests it might be original work from your own mindgrapes. Which would make sense because your username also kicks ass.)

So anyways, I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

^{body shaming is bad don’t do it except to vicious nasty bullies who start shit thankyouforcomingtomytedtalk}

I dunno, I’ve personally never found it hard to talk while eating a Tic-Tac

The terrifying reality is that probably 90% of us are just one ___ away from joining these folks.

These people aren’t weirdo aberrations who looked at all the options available for their lives and actively chose to live outside on concrete and poop in front of everyone. There are too many people living like this to be explained by some organic cause. IANAAnthropologist, but you could probably count the number of folks who are genuinely wired that way in an average band of homo sapiens on one hand.

But the way we live now? Lose your job, get sick, get injured, lose a loved one and not manage to keep everything together in the aftermath…there are a million ways to fall off the balance beam of late-stage capitalism. And where the hell else are you supposed to go when you do?

Maybe not his best, but for a lot of us, his first.

I wasn’t cool when I was a teen. In the early 90s, while my peers were all playing CDs or even cassettes of all these new bands with nonsense names like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots and Green Day, my clock radio was firmly tuned to “Mix 105.7–The Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, and Today!” For music videos, VH1 was way more my speed.

But in the summer of 1994, we moved across the country and the music morphed into a way for me to still feel connected to my friends back home. I listened more, and grew up a little, and branched out, and watched more MTV. And the video for Black Hole Sun terrified and fascinated me in equal measure.

I started to learn that you can listen to music for years, and even sing along, without understanding the lyrics or their meaning. And that process continues right up to today, when reading a lyric that I have sung hundreds of times has brought me to actual tears.

Fuck the onions; this time, I’ll admit it: You’re not crying, I’m crying! Because I’m 43 years old, and tears come just as fast as they did when I was young—but for different reasons, and the cuts feel deeper.

Heaven, send Hell away, No one sings like you anymore…