Freak Fest

Iowa State Representative Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican, plans to propose legislation that would charge public universities $2 for every $1 in state funds spent on programs to comfort students upset about the presidential election results.

I say, they are all idiots. Bobby for making a big deal out of something so small and silly. And the universities for participating in the silliness and feeding the narrative of public universities being freak factories that do nothing but waste public money.   

We Need to Stop the Crazy

Who wants to join a movement where these kinds of freaks abound?

Women are not liberated because we can be forced to have babies (by rape and restrictions on birth control) and then forced into marriage or the workplace while we are still doing the 24×7 job of caring for these babies. Short of a universal basic wage or gift economy, I don’t see how that can be fixed.

She lives in Seattle, not in Iran. Blabs stupidly about privilege and intersectionality but has no idea how absolutely disgusting this ridiculous self-pity looks in somebody who has known nothing but coddling and opulence her whole life. 

People like this have absolutely no idea how repellent they look to most of the world. There are women who are really raped, really forced to give birth, really denied access to money. But they don’t live in Seattle and don’t write about intersectionality.

More on What the Dems Need to Do

The only places where the Democrats were very successful in this election cycle are the ones where unions did an enormous amount of work, organizing and getting out the vote. The Dem leadership should ditch its entire GOTV operation, get rid of everything and everybody involved, and invite young union organizers to mount a completely new system from the ground up. There is very little time left before the 2018 election. This needs to be done now. Plus, the organizers of Bernie’s campaign should be brought in to share their expertise because their campaign was fantastic. In most cases, they were these very same union people, so that won’t be too hard.

Blog Pride

I’ve had over 4 million hits on this blog (on both platforms combined) but what I’m most proud of is that there are people who have been reading it for years and there are even those who remember it from its old Blogger platform. I’m also proud that idiots, creeps and superficial chirpers don’t even have to be moderated. They fall off on their own.

Another thing I’m proud of is that we don’t have a commenting policy here. Every once in a while, WordPress acts up and sticks somebody (usually reader Dreidel) in moderation for some reason, and I’ve got to rescue them from the Spam box, but that’s about all the moderation the blog requires these days. This just goes to show that you can have a popular blog with a wide readership that maintains a high level of discourse without any special efforts at policing the commenters. 

Thank you, everybody, for reading and / or participating.

Consumerland

An op-ed in the NY TIMES suggests 12 steps for voter despair, one of which is the following:

I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks, etc.

The statement is followed by “I will support the Southern Poverty Law Center”, so it’s got to be serious. People have had their brain so devoured by consumerism that they don’t realize how deranged they sound. 

Voters in despair will be better off realizing that this irreflective consumerism is the reason why our politics looks this pathetic.