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Anyways, the new Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, apparently has an adopted (40 year old at this point) "son" who gets in lots and lots of trouble.
The Usual People have pinpointed the guy's race (no points guessing what) as the source of all his problems, not the fact that he was adopted at 11 years old which is plenty of time for bad habits to become entrenched in somebody's personality.
Said Usual People tend to point out the 'Magic'* in somebody and have been making fun essentially of these nice people for taking in a troubled kid ie not realizing that adopting a 'Magic' kid would ruin their lives like this.
For some reason, the Usual People tend to not notice when people of their exalted race also have insanely long rap sheets, getting in these same sorts of trouble. Of course, in those cases, even if it does come up, it's definitely not a racial or genetic thing at all.
These sorts of echo chambers make me really annoyed.
Don't get me started on the other end of race hustlers claiming Mike Johnson somehow doesn't love this adopted son of his because he's missing from the last few year's family photos. Gee, I wonder why the troubled kid would be missing from family photos???? Surely he couldn't be off busy committing crimes right???*Fancy way of saying the N-word.
There is the hardcore, and the softcore. Such are times that we live in that the softcore can be so vanilla it's softer than the mainstream, but unless you are a pundit with an agenda out to manufacture some controversy, it still takes one glance to know what's porn and what's not.
And then there's the weirdo fetish porn.
Technically speaking, whether it's weirdo and fetish or not is a thing apart from its place on the soft-hard axis, but more often than not it's on the hard end, because when you're weirdo and fetish enough there's little incentive left in trying to appeal to the vanilla crowd. And so, this is where you find the ideas such as "hey, it'll be worth it to blow through a few years of our income on this Napoleon cosplay, you can trust me on that".
I was going to post this in IJBMU but it feels more appropriate here.
This year has been oddly hard on homosexuality in Africa and I'm not sure why. I mean, maybe I just always feel like people are picking on homosexuals but yesterday I was in the mall where I literally heard a gospel song explicitly stating it was taking a stand against the "spirit of homosexuality". ngl, I didn't look it up but it legit sounded like an American Mega Church singer at that, which made even more mad.
Moving on, this stuff happened.
I'm guessing everybody heard about Uganda, but here we go; Uganda enacts harsh anti-LGBTQ law including death penalty
This seemed like a major publicity stunt, because as described practically everywhere, this law already existed. People on the Online Right tried to defend the letter of the law by saying it was to prevent the sexual assault of minors (relatedly, sleeping with an elderly man carries the same sentence). Like bud, no, that's not what the people enacting the law are saying at all.
However, Uganda's status as a bastion of morality remains highly questionable, going by an oddly high rate of child illegitimacy/paternity fraud.
Anyways, as you'd expect from a moral panic, stuff's getting insane.
Two Men Arrested in Uganda After Peeping Tom Videotapes Rendezvous
In Ethiopia, I guess they'll be trawling hotels making sure any two guys splitting a room aren't sleeping together.
Man’s body dug up and burned in the street ‘after it was revealed he was gay’
Like, I legit wasn't going to go through all these posts until I found this last item (and also what happened yesterday). My gosh, what is this and why? Why not just move on with your lives and make fun of him or say terrible things about him? Why was this necessary?
Might be more than a coincidence. The way I hear of what happens over there, it's often framed as a result of crazy American fundies doing the evangelizing. Basically, about every time I hear of African gaybashings, it's presented as a result of American missionaries exporting their culture wars there. Hard for me to say how much of it is true. Not that it changes much for the average gay.
It's not true (for the most part), but it doesn't help. Yeah, basically everybody here is beholden to Christianity in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable in general (way outside the gay stuff), but I very much doubt some American fundies have to even try to bankroll anything.
The thing with the American singer thing is that you'd think they would know better, or at least not publicly be associated with such a thing, but then again, Christians.
I was compiling a list relating authoritarian things to fetishes, but ehh, it got kinda a bit too morbid.
Quoth Stormtroper:
Absolute authority is all fun and games for these people until they discover it's their turn to submit to it.
Also, there's such a thing as "Americanism" in the history of the Catholic Church. Like, back when all Cath was Trad Cath, the pope took offense to the idea that it's fine that the place is democratically ruled and Catholics living there don't try to overturn the government. Because, like, not trying to overturn a non-Catholic government is not what a good Catholic should do. Basically, it's that story about Kennedy having to convince the voters that he's not taking direct orders from the Vatican, except from the Vatican side and condemning the very notion that he shouldn't. It's quite curious to see the American TradCath tears now, given this context.
My thoughts exactly. LARPers. Somebody in that thread said something to the effect of, "you don't want to be Catholics, you just like baroque art", and I've had that notion that a bunch of these TradCath types are just altrighters who've taken up the Church as their idea of Good Old Days. At least it's less overtly genocidal than some other ideas these folks cling onto.
I feel like some of them may actually be turning towards the Orthodox Church, because it's more "chad" and "based". I guess it's because of the beards and Russia.
In here, we've got the guy nicknamed "the Ayatollah", because of how hardcore Catholic he is. Thing is, in the recent few years he's become quite an opposition figure, because he stuck to, like, Christian universalism and God-is-merciful type of stuff. Folks to the left of him were like, "wait a minute, did this guy just begin to agree with us, wtf is going on?", while the mainstream rightie types just called him a stupid leftie/plant/[insert foreign power] agent and called it a day.
(Sadly, I guess the line isn't in this trailer, but you get the gist from there being a seventh Eureka and all).
Man, I thought I hated this movie but watching this trailer again genuinely gave me chills.
I think I've never mentioned that here.
Also, I totes am working on it, it's just... uh... um...
Anyways, I'm told this fellow is the new president of Argentina:
or when I would get around to post about it.The referendum's questions are worded more politely, but yeah, that's what's taking place tomorrow Sunday. Chances are it's just saber-rattling and it's just a cheap distraction, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that an invasion actually takes place to serve as an expensive distraction.
Regardless, I keep getting inundated with ads about it.
Related: I recently learned that people in Colombia were terrified the possibility of a Colombia vs. Venezuela war ~15 years ago that they took seriously, even though we just memed about it.
Edit: Also for the record, I'm against such an invasion. (I don't know if this is the expected "obvious" opinion, but it's not so obvious for those of us who've lived our lives with the topic.)
*tanc a lelek intensifies*
(Oh, and by the way. For someone so much into bullet hell, HighFleet looks just like a game you'd enjoy. I mean, I understand there are no anime girls in it, but... nevermind.)
I've been very busy lately so I haven't been playing video games very much outside the MTG Arena daily gacha things. Feels bad man. The lack of anime girls is also a minus.
So whilst this story is about the Florida GOP chair, I'm more intererested/concerned with the fact that a co-founder of Moms 4 Liberty (the anti-sexual stuff in kid's book group) readily admitted to menage a trois with a (female) close family friend. That honestly isn't the type of person who should be at the forefront of such a movement, but now I'm concerned that (gasp) a lot of conservative frontliners are just gross, pointless hypocrites.
Oh man, c'mon...
...
Anyways. Been thinking of a few more-or-less recent cases which make for a neat comparison. On the left, the gross pointless hypocrite seems to be the kind of person who owns like a seven flats while going on about the housing crisis. Or the anarchist rapist and his enablers, when you go further towards the fringe. (And last but not least, the perennial favourite: the fly-private-jet-to-global-warming-conference guys.)
I mean Jack Murphy and Jesse Lee Peterson were last year (also that story I didn't follow about the megachurch guy's poolboy cuckholding) so it's enough time for the modern internet news cycle person like myself to forget the base state of affairs.
Plus, none of the Daily Wire's Golden Quadrangle have any scandals out yet so surely we can still trust conservative media.
Speaking of Michael Knowles, I was thinking the other day if Shephard Smith had ever done any anti-gay stuff back when he was on Fox News (I mean it was he early 2000s so probably).
Ah, I was wondering when the Brand thing would come up. I saw some of his stuff a few years ago and was quite confused as to why nobody had noticed he was insane (then again, Alex Jones and Andrew Tate).
Well left-wing hypocrisy can take many forms, like when Mini Queen G headed across the Atlantic on a 3 week boat trip, ignoring how impossible/impractical that is for literally everyone not a Sudanese/Syrian refugee. Plus, IIRC she took a whole bunch of planes when she arrived on the other side anyways.
*Commenting on overly intellectual blogs with 17 paragraph articles at that, rather than spending time with like, humans.
The word is "Sejmflix".
So, after all that time, this is the last moment the Party can pretend to cling to power by lawful means. Like, I've described they are prolonging it as much as they can: stall for time, then have the Prezzie nominate a Party plant as the new Prime Minister, then stall again. This carried them from the election day all the way to today, but finally, we're at the point where the Party government either receives a vote of confidence, or fails. The Party plant began giving an expose some three hours ago, now it's time for responses from other MPs.
That's the less crazy part.
What's crazy is livestreams from parliamentary proceedings have become ridiculously popular since the elections, in spite of parliamentary proceedings having been widely - proverbially, even - considered the pinnacle of boredom. Right now, people are filled with so much glee at the Party's removal from power that the proceedings are being livestreamed in cinemas. Yeah, you read that right. On youtube, it's ca. 260 thousand people tuned in right now. The chatbox is wild.
Relatedly I'm surprised nobody ever brings up that the 19th Amendment (allowing women to vote) was ratified the same year as Prohibition came to be (and were driven by related forces).
----
Update on the parliamentary soap opera. The new government has just been voted in. The mood among the Party goons seems to be to give out every last remaining spoils they have left to their own folks until they are kicked out of office. (For example, the school inspector known for spreading stories of masturbation rooms in Swedish schools and praying for curing the gays of gay, received a honorary badge of merit. Also, the Prezzie just gave out a presidential pardon to a neo-Nazi who harassed a gay or something, but that doesn't really count since the Prezzie is legally in office till 2025.) The voting should have been a good while ago, but one of the resident wackos got hold of a fire extenguisher and put out the Hanukkah candles.
Yeah, we had the Hanukkah candles in the house of parliament as a courtesy gesture towards the Jewish community of Poland and in general. Also, for what it's worth, we have several breeds of wackos in the parliament, he's a rather fringe one I had not described at length so far. Dude's a flamboyant kind of conspiracy theorist-slash-tradCath libright, recently getting increasingly radical.
Anyways, the vote was postponed, the Party obviously chose to spin it into an attack on the new coalition, the wacko seems to have gone a bit too far to be dismissed this time, but it was decided not to wait for tomorrow and they managed to vote the government in some half an hour ago. They also set up a parliamentary commission to investigate the wasteful abortive presidential elections we had during the pandemic, and it seems that's going to be all for today.
It's just that the current Republican leadership is incompetent. In the previous Congress (i.e. the previous two-year term), Democratic leadership didn't let this sort of chaos happen, despite also having a 222-seat majority.
Sidenote/FYI: "gay" as a noun referring to particular individuals may be regarded as offensive. Reference: my own experience and also Wiktionary citing https://web.archive.org/web/20070125105128/http://www.bartleby.com/64/C006/034.html :
More often this comes up when using the singular form of the noun. (The adjective form is not offensive in the same way, for whatever reason. Language is weird.)
Reminds me of this one overly-supercharged insult that Dr. Robotnik came up with in a fan video: "double n####r". Basically "it's stupid because you tried too hard".
Though, as far as offensiveness goes, I'd estimate it'd still be considered offensive, just also embarrassing on top of that.
This is slightly mitigated by the context that "fag" being 4chan slang (derogatory but this is the norm there) for basically any person in general, though the term was almost certainly originally because it is offensive.