Rush Limbaugh Dies at 70; Turned Talk Radio Into a Right-Wing Attack Machine
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Two red italic text sections?!? Yes. This top one is just for you, dear readers. It’s just a few different notes. First, this isn’t a perfect transcript, but it is very close. Second, while yes, I very much want you to engage and comment here, it’d be extremely helpful if you also liked and commented on the video, as well. Hell… it’d be even better if you also subscribed to my channel and maybe even shared the video. Like I say… I don’t know if this is gonna become a thing, but it sure as hell isn’t if I get only 9 views, no likes, no comments, no engagement on it, etc… where’s my motivation to do stuff like this if basically no one’s gonna see or interact with it?
Also… I do say, in the video, that burning out on writing about Trump is part of the reason I stopped blogging. It’s been a few years since I last posted here about Trump, but it’s still true. That was my sigh of relief when he finally lost. I have almost no expectations for Biden to be truly progressive, although it does appear as if he’s been listening to Sanders a lot to start out his presidency so… maybe I’m wrong? I still have zero hope for any kind of truly universal healthcare program, but we might actually get a universal basic income! That’s pretty cool. I do wonder if the Green New Deal can actually get through Congress a little easier now, as well, but I’m not sure.
Finally, do yourself a favor and watch with the subtitles turned on… if you can. Doing so will provide a slightly fuller experience, I think…
Anyways… let’s get to the video and transcript…
It’s official! We’re doing a fundraising drive!
My role right now is to snork, and hopefully I have a couple readers who will be informed about this by me…
Some of my blogging colleagues have a lot to offer, as well!
T.D. Walker is auctioning off a Creative Coaching session! If you’re experience writer’s block or… really… any kind of creative block, then you definitely want to jump on this opportunity.
William Brinkman wants to give you a PDF of Bolingbrook Babbler articles from before they moved to FtB and then will do a reading from their book The Rift: A Bolingbrook Babbler Story. I… wish I had some money right now. That PDF seems super cool, honestly…
Finally, HJ Hornbeck wants to livestream Super Mario World! And depending on how much is donated, they’ll play World Randomizer on the “Way Cool” difficulty! I actually wanna see that, so… maybe help us hit those goals? Thanks!
I’ll post more updates (in separate posts) as they drop, so stay tuned!
Okay look. I’ve heard so many times how people are sick of the dark and gritty. These are superheroes.
And with Superman, Wonder Woman, etc, I fully agree.
But not with Batman. I can genuinely say that I hate a light, goofy Batman. If your Batman dances in clubs and runs around with cartoon bombs and keeps shark-repellant spray on his utility belt, I’m out.
See here’s the thing… Batman’s origins are dark. He watched his parents get murdered in front of him. Then he took that and decided to dress up as a bat to run around a city beating up criminals.
Now granted, there’s a lot of political talk to be had, here, and from a Socialist perspective, I’m definitely not a fan of Bruce Wayne. All this money, and what does he do with it? Larp as a superhero beating up poor homeless people. He could sink his basically infinite wealth into, I don’t know… giving homeless people homes, a universal basic income, universal health care… but no. He gets himself a “magic tech” Batsuit and beats them up, instead. From a Socialist perspective, Bruce Wayne is terrible.
But from the perspective of a comics fan who started with Batman… I can’t not love him. But yeah… I’m sorry… I want my Batman dark.
Trigger Warning: The following discusses the violent arrest of an 11-year old neurodivergent biracial girl by police after she suffered an episode of psychosis because a neglectful, possibly bigoted doctor abruptly took her off her antidepressants cold-turkey for some unknown (again, probably bigoted) reason. Please be aware.
I want to thank friend and fellow blogger Iris Vander Pluym for initially writing about this and alerting myself and the rest of FTB to it.
Iris wrote in depth about this, so I won’t. Please read her post. What I will say is this… please sign the petition. Saraya Rees. She should not be in prison. She should be on antidepressants, and she should be home. She is not a criminal. She is a little girl who doesn’t deserve this.
Here is the petition:
https://www.change.org/p/justice4saraya-a-call-for-help-is-not-a-crime
Sign it, share it, and, if you can afford to, donate. Please.
A lot of “news media” is “reporting” on what’s going on in Portland, but it’s also a lot of pro-police propaganda bullshit (yes, even from MSNBC… because they aren’t “left wing”, people). The best way to get an understanding of what’s actually going on is to seek out teh reports from protesters on the ground, actually experiencing this shit in real time.
And so, I present to you, Crip Dyke. The following is a link to her blog where I search for “Portland”. Sadly, it’s not quite in posting order (most recent first), but you really should be reading everything…
And here’s the most recent post about what’s going on…
To be honest, the violence the federal police are instigating in Portland leads neatly into what my next post will be. That will be up in the morning. In the meantime, go read Crip Dyke’s posts on what’s going.
Thank you.
It’s basically well-known at this point that J.K. Rowling is incredibly transphobic. So much so that the cast of the films have come out in support of trans people. Rowling has been problematic for years, but for privileged assholes like me, there was always a level of plausible deniability to it, up to and including Death of the Author.
Not so anymore. I mean… really I should have seen this years ago. It’s not the first time Rowling has outed herself as transphobic… it’s just the first time she’s publicly embraced it and doubled-down.
Now, to be fair, this is decently easy for me. The reason is because Harry Potter itself doesn’t influence my life now the way it did when I was a kid. The reason for that is… kind of embarrassing… but it’s worth talking about a little bit…
As has become rather customary on my blog, I’ve been very silent… at least until I uploaded that blog on horseradish a few days ago. You’d think, what with all this extra time on my hands, that I’d be blogging up a storm. And it’s not like there’s no shortage of topics to talk about. There’s COVID-19. There’s the fact that cops haven’t stopped murdering black people in cold blood in our streets (FTR… justice for George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Fuck the police. ACAB). More trans men and woman are dying this year. Trump is still president, and an absurdly high number of Leftists still think he’s better than a Democrat, despite four years of evidence that he’s the worst thing to happen to this country since at least Bush Jr, and is absolutely the worst president of my (now 33-year) lifetime.
I genuinely didn’t think things could get worse than 2016. Holy shit was I wrong.
So. Fucking. Wrong.
And yet, despite all this, I stay silent. I’m not here talking about the pandemic, or the protests, or Trump.
Why is that?
Because I just don’t want to.
So, back on Sunday night (June 23rd), my brother and I prepped horseradish. I decided to start recording (via my phone), when we started to take it out of the food processor to put it in a container. Then I thought it’d be a good idea to share our recipe.
In the future, we want to do an actual instruction video on how to make it, while showing us actually making it. This video… isn’t that. The idea started out as a joke, but then I was like… hey! I want people to see this! Maybe I can teach them how to join us in this delicious pain! And this video was the result.
I don’t have a transcript as such, but I do have a recipe which I’ll post here, and the video has subtitles! So there’s that… it’s a bit too off the cuff for a true transcript. There’s no script to speak of. Hopefully the subtitles work, but if people want a transcript, I’ll convert the subtitles into one to copy/paste here, as well. The editing work is also super amateur. I haven’t done any actual video editing in years, so… yeah.
Anyways… here’s the video!
So… quick note. I consider my politics to be incredibly shallow right now. I am very ignorant about a lot of aspects of social, political, and economic issues, having only a surface-level understanding. I am working to change that… I’m studying. This post is the result of only one level of my studying. So I will admit up front that this post does not have a lot behind it… and most of what it does have behind it is ignorance. I’m hoping to have a discussion about this, because I think it’s interesting and I want to learn more. So please don’t expect an expert dissertation, here. Expect an ignorant lefty’s rambling thoughts about politics, instead.
The only thing I’ll say here is that there is roughly zero chance of me ever moving to the Right. The only path for me is to the Left.
Edit April 10: I thought this post was clear, but since it wasn’t… I am not, currently, an Anarcho-Communist. I’m engaging with the idea, but do not currently agree with it… yet…
I’m constantly researching my politics, trying to both strengthen and challenge my worldview. These days, I call myself a Democratic Socialist. And yet, the more I learn about Communism and even Anarchism, the more I think I could glide even further Left.
It’s so interesting reading political and economic theories from the Left. I’ve been watching a lot of Professor Richard Wolff these days, over at Democracy at Work. His series Economic Update is so fascinating. He, for those who don’t know, if a self-described “Socialist Economist”. I like what he has to say on economics, and specifically his talks on worker co-ops and Workplace Democracy, and how important they are to our future.
But I’ve also been learning more and more about the Anti-Work movement. It’s another fascinating political philosophy that says that no one should be forced into laboring in ways they don’t want to. It’s not saying that people shouldn’t work, but instead that people should have the freedom (both monetarily and in time) to pursue their interests. So yes, people should absolutely work together towards common goals and such, but no one should be conscripted into a job as defined under Capitalism and under the State. Basically, no more wage-labor, and no more Capitalism.
I’m also, of course, learning more and more about Anarchism…