Snarkoleptic

Snarkoleptic's Journal

November 28, 2016

Yet another emboldened Trump supporter goes absolutely bonkers in public rant.

Racist White Woman Trump Rant in Chicago Store 11/24/16.
Cringeworthy raw video-

November 27, 2016

Patton Oswalt's chilling Facebook Rant

https://www.facebook.com/pattonoswalt/
Posted in it's entirety as it's just a rant on his FB page.

This is a long entry, sorry.

It's also WAY more emotional than factual, so feel free to shoot holes all through it. But be aware of how cognizant I was of its whimsical framework when I started writing.

So, sixteen days into the reality of Donald Trump being our President-elect, and I'm reading New Yorker and Jacobin and Slate and NY Times articles, trying to make sense of just what the fuck happened, and how the fuck do we go forward. The Democratic Party is in shards on the floor right now. I think we're going to have eight years of Trump and his clean-shaven looters scraping out the carcass of the country before fucking off and blaming it on progressives and lesbians and PC and rap music.

There's been a VERY disturbing spike, in my Twitter mentions and Facebook inbox and Facebook mentions from pro-Trump people. The spike itself isn't disturbing. I was regularly dinged by people on the other side of the cultural playground. I always figured, live and let live.

The disturbing part is how many of these people (when I check their Twitter or Facebook profiles) fancy themselves comedians. And the ones who insist they're comedians, that THEY'RE funny, all send messages which are the same variation of, "Your career is OVER. No one wants to hear YOUR kind of comedy anymore. You or ANY of your friends."

Over and over and over.

Fuck you, funnyman. It's OUR turn now.

So many alt-righters (or just people on the right) are failed or frustrated comedians. Just as so many far, far left wingers are. Comedy is too PC! It's not PC enough! It's racist! It shames white men! IT DOESN'T FIT TO MY STANDARDS, SO THEREFORE I MUST DESTROY IT!

Being funny isn't something everyone is born with, and even the ones born with it have to work and evolve and have humility while they do so. For the untalented but still entitled, there's a gut full of envy to carry around when they see other people getting laughs where they can't.

And then I flashed back to an essay I read by Clive James about the doomed polymath Egon Friedell, who committed suicide in Vienna the day of the Nazi Anchluss. Two SA men came to his apartment to arrest him. All over the city, Jews were being beaten in the street, businesses burned and looted. Egon was one of the leading lights in Viennese culture -- historian, philosopher, cabaret performer. Think of an Austrian Greg Proops. A Viennese Stephen Fry.

Egon threw himself from his window as the SA men battered down his door, screaming, "Watch out! Get out of the way!" to the pedestrians as he plummeted.

I think -- I'm guessing, I know -- that Egon sensed something even MORE sinister behind the Nazi uprising. Something fueled not by nationalism or racial pride but by bog-standard showbiz envy.

I'm going to let Clive James take over here -- he writes so much better and clearer than I ever will:

"Horrific evidence suggest that the Austrian Nazis, when their armbands were still in their pockets, put the café talk high on their long list of Jewish intellectual pursuits to be trampled out of existence when the great day came. The future firebrands and executioners had been listening in for years, probably inflamed as much by sincere disapproval as by thick-witted jealousy. After a single orgiastic day of violence in March 1938 there was no-one left who had anything to say worth hearing. Hugo Sperber, already worn out from too many years living on thin pickings, was thrown to the ground and kicked until he fell silent for good. Fritz Grunbaum, one of the stars of the "Simplicissimus" cabaret, was arrested within hours of the takeover, shipped to Dachau, and beaten to death. Whether in Austria or Germany, it has never been the fault of the Jews that they were so slow to realize the catch of the assimilationist ideal: the more indispensable to culture they became, the more they were resented. Hitler needed no telling that there were a lot of brilliant Jews from whom German-speaking culture had gained lustre. That was what he was afraid of: of a bacillus being called clever, and the phosphorescence of decay being hailed as illumination. For him, as for every racial hygienist, the whole thing was a medical problem, and the last thing he was likely to contemplate was that the medical problem might lie within himself. He didn't know he was sick. He thought he was well. Convinced racists think they are healthy: their conscience can't be appealed to, they have no better self that might repudiate the lesser one. And they bend all the powers of human reason to the unreasonable, without reservation. For the Jewish intelligentsia, cultivated to the fingertips, it was very hard to grasp the irrationality they were dealing with -- the irrationality counting down the hours until it could deal with them. Even in Auschwitz, some of the enslaved musicians must have thought that Schubert's writing for strings would melt Dr. Mengele's heart, as it had always melted theirs. And it did melt his heart. It just didn't change his mind. Similarly, there were probably crytpo-Nazi kibitzers who laughed at the running commentary of Hugo Sperber as he played cards. But that was exactly why they wanted him dead. They wanted THEIR jokes to be the funny ones, and they got their wish."

You catch that part about Hugo Sperber, holding an audience in the cafe?

(Listening in to Hugo Sperber's running commentary in the café while he played cards...flash forward 68 years...reading comedians Live Tweeting the debates. Chuckling, but full of envy at the likes and RTs)

All over Vienna during the Anchluss there's seemingly mindless, unorganized looting and attacks -- yet two SA men are SPECIFICALLY sent to Egon Friedell's apartment? Who sanctioned that? Someone gave specific orders. An envious, frustrated someone, I'm guessing. Someone who sat in the audience at one of his shows, entertained but resentful of the laughter surrounding them, in the wormy, jealous darkness.

I am terrified for what may or may not happen Saturday, January 21st.

Be safe, everyone.

Take care, comedians.

November 26, 2016

Did Trump Win Through Vote Flipping and Vote Stripping? (MUST SEE)

November 26, 2016

Not-so-LOL cat

November 26, 2016

Ahead of recount, Wisconsin has already wiped out 5,000 imaginary Donald Trump votes

This is going to get ugly, esp since the SCOTUS is 4-4.

http://www.palmerreport.com/news/ahead-of-recount-wisconsin-has-already-wiped-out-5000-phony-votes-for-donald-trump/234/

Earlier today we reported that three precincts in the Wisconsin county of Outagamie had revised their vote totals downward for Donald Trump by more than a thousand votes combined, with local officials insisting to their local ABC News affiliate that it was a mere arithmetic error. But as more revisions come in throughout the state, a total of nearly five thousand Trump votes in Wisconsin have now been taken off the official board because they apparently never existed to begin with.

At the end of election night the New York Times reported that Donald Trump had won the state of Wisconsin with a total of 1,409,467 votes, giving him a winning margin of 27,257 votes over Hillary Clinton’s total of 1,382,210. These numbers were based on what the individual counties and precincts were reporting that night. But now seventeen days later, based on various Wisconsin precincts revising their own totals, Dave Wasserman of the respected Cook Political Report has updated the totals. Donald Trump now has 1,404,536 total votes in Wisconsin, while Hillary Clinton now has 1,382,011 total votes.

Two things immediately jump out, as first spotted by music critic Dave Greenwald. The first is that, even ahead of the forthcoming recount in Wisconsin, Donald Trump’s lead has already shrunk to just 22,525 votes. That means 18% of his “lead” has already vanished, based on precincts catching some of their own incorrect numbers, and internet gawkers catching others. But the second thing that jumps out is that the revisions have served to erase thousands of votes from Trump, while affirming that Clinton’s vote total was essentially correct to begin with.

Some have questioned the credibility of Palmer Report, so please note the data was provided by respected and non-partisan Cook Political Report
Link to the data (see Wisconsin at the bottom of the 'Swing State' list)-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19

November 24, 2016

Mining Would Be Exciting For Kids: Trumps Secretary Of Education Wants Legal Child Labor

Seriously, WTF is wrong with these people?
Betsy DeVos is a far fringe lunatic. Her husband is a (SC)amway heir, her brother is Erik Price of Blackwater infamy.

http://winningdemocrats.com/mining-would-be-exciting-for-kids-trumps-secretary-of-education-wants-legal-child-labor/

On Wednesday, Trump announced Betsy DeVos as the person he wants overseeing education in this country for the next four years. DeVos is a billionaire conservative donor who supports school vouchers and diverted public funds to religious schools, which would be a major violation of the separation of church and state since tax dollars would flow to “Christian” schools.

But DeVos is even more dangerous because of her ties to groups that want to take poor children out of the classroom and stick them straight into the workforce doing dangerous jobs like coal mining.

Acton Institute is funded by DeVos, and it advocates for the end of child labor laws.

They are on the streets, in the factories, in the mines, with adults and with peers, learning and doing. They are being valued for what they do, which is to say being valued as people. They are earning money.

Whatever else you want to say about this, it’s an exciting life. You can talk about the dangers of coal mining or selling newspapers on the street. But let’s not pretend that danger is something that every young teen wants to avoid. If you doubt it, head over the stadium for the middle school football game in your local community, or have a look at the wrestling or gymnastic team’s antics at the gym.

Here's a link to the Thinktank-
http://blog.acton.org/archives/89837-bring-back-child-labor-work-is-a-gift-our-kids-can-handle.html

The abundant prosperity of the modern age has brought many blessings when it comes to child-rearing and child development, offering kids new opportunities for education, play, and personal development. Yet even as we celebrate our civilizational departure from excessive child labor, we ought to be wary of falling into a different sort of lopsided lifestyle.

Alas, as a day-to-day reality, work has largely vanished from modern childhood, with parents constantly stressing over the values of study and practice and “social interaction” even as they insulate their children from any activity that might involve risk, pain, or boredom. As a result, many of our kids are coming far too late to the arena of creative service and all it brings: dignity, meaning, freedom, virtue, creativity, character, and neighbor love.

Operating out of fear of the harsh excesses of “harder times,” we have allowed our cultural attitudes to swing too far in the opposite direction, distorting work as a “necessary obligation of adulthood,” a gift too dangerous for kids. Working from these same distorted attitudes, the Washington Post recently published what it described as a “haunting” photo montage of child laborers from America’s rougher past.

November 22, 2016

Alt-Right Denormalizer

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/18/new-google-chrome-extension-replaces-the-term-alt-right-with-rebranded-white-nationalism/
New Google Chrome extension replaces the term “alt-right” with “rebranded white nationalism”

Are you tired of hearing racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, and misogynists legitimize their vile hatreds by claiming they merely represent a new ideological movement, the so-called alt-right?

If so, Google Chrome’s “Alt-Right Denormalizer” may be exactly what you need to call out the bigots and all who abet them for what they are, from President-elect Donald Trump to common message board trolls.

If you purchase the Alt-Right Denormalizer from Google Chrome’s web store, it will automatically replace the term “alt-right” with “rebranded white nationalism” wherever it comes up online. The nifty feature is reminiscent of Google Chrome’s “Drumpfinator,” which was launched after talk show host John Oliver encouraged viewers to refer to Donald Trump by his original German surname, Drumpf, as a way of de-mystifying his presidential candidacy.

November 21, 2016

OK, this is distrubing - 'Hail Trump!': Richard Spencer Speech Excerpts

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/?utm_source=twb
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

Spencer has popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the movement he leads. Spencer has said his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

November 21, 2016

Make America Hate Again - "Dear Terrorist Bitch"

Res ipsa loquitur
https://twitter.com/SikhProf

November 21, 2016

Thanksgiving Toolkit - (Showing Up 4 Racial Justice)

http://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/thanksgiving
More at the link, including

DISCUSSION GUIDE
Remember:
• All White folks need to talk about racial justice this year, including those of us who see ourselves as progressive. Those
conversation are opportunities to discuss what we can do to address racism in ourselves and our communities, and to
challenge the scapegoating of “other” White people- especially working class White folks and/or White folks living in rural
or rust belt towns.
• Conversations with Trump supporters aren’t about proving yourself right, they are about changing hearts and minds.
• Drop shaming, blaming, and stereotypes.
• Be prepared to listen, especially when you don’t agree. Be sure you aren’t just waiting to plan a response.
• The election just happened, and emotions are high from all perspectives. Check in with yourself, and remember the high
pressure environment we are working in
• Many people will not be reached with a framework of “white privilege” or “systems of oppression,” particularly rural, poor,
and working class people. Use language and references that more people relate to
• Online only goes so far. Once things get tense, take the conversation off of Facebook, email, or text message. Meet in
person or have a phone call.
• Find a stopping point. You are not likely to change someone’s world view in one sitting. End when the conversation is in a
place of agreement, and revisit it again later

Profile Information

Gender: Male
Hometown: Chicago
Home country: USA
Current location: Chicago
Member since: Fri May 4, 2007, 12:12 PM
Number of posts: 5,997

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