Why hello, fellow friends! It is I, your friendly, neighbourhood Crip Dyke.
For various reasons, since 2020 I’ve migrated farther and farther from FTB. This does not mean I do not love FTB. I do! The factors leading me to post elsewhere more often are much more complex than simply liking another site or not liking this one. I keep saying that I’m going to post more over here — cross posting, at least — and then I keep failing to follow through. I dislike disappointing people, so I will stop promising that. I will continue to post rarely here, but not never. And you are always welcome at my new primary writing spots Wonkette (where, yes, I am a paid writer!) and another Pervert Justice, which is my own Substack (yes, with the same name). The other PJ remains much like this blog, but on a platform that mixes mild social media-esque features (“Notes” like Mastodon or BlueSky in that they are intended to be short thoughts and do not have many options for formatting, but they don’t technically have a character limit either, at least that I have found, and you know how I go on.) plus a bloggy feature for writings I intend to be taken more seriously (or at least that I hope will be read more widely) plus comments and discussions (both public and direct message “chat”).
And that is more than I originally intended to say. Even those features do not entirely explain why I have been posting here less, but they are part of that larger explanation.
In any case, I hope that some of you will be tempted to read Wonkette — more news commentary than news, though depending on how much news you read, they are timely enough that sometimes a Wonkette article may be early enough for it to be your first read on a topic — and to visit my alterna-digs.
The current post is on the same general topic as PZ’s exploration of the media’s insistence on bothsidesing supposedly violent rhetoric after the assassination attempt on Trump. For a number of reasons, this is asinine, and I hope to make a good many of those reasons clear in my post. Here, have a taste, and maybe that will entice you!
Trump built a violent house. He led a violent riot against his own VP, Mike Pence, in Republican-on-Republican violence. Liz Cheney has endured unending, gruesome threats, Republican-on-Republican threats, because the violent movement Trump built felt betrayed by her. There is currently a movement that endorses violence for political ends in the USA, and it is not one of the left.
There is much more, hopefully as thoughtful and useful as anything I’ve written here.
Be well, and I’ll see you around. If not here, then maybe on Substack or on FTB in the comments of Pharyngula, Stderr, Mano Singham, Affinity, or the other blogs I drop in on occasionally.
You thought going to a paywalled site would result in being read more widely?
Republicans have been inciting such unhinged violence at least since 1980, when Saint Ronald famously declared “government is not the solution, government is the problem!” That line of utter bullshit gave all the reactionary kooks license to hate and attack the ELECTED government for doing what the majority of us had elected them to do. And as soon as Reagan took office, the violence started (or at least ramped up), with some loony anti-tax idiot named Norman Kahl (IIRC) killing at least one cop, and the Montana Freemen starting to make noise too.
And today’s violence — including but not limited to that silly-assed attempt on Trump’s life — is the continuation of that trend. Voters need to know, and Democrats need to start loudly telling them, that if all that loony-reich mob violence can turn on Trump himself, it can turn on anyone anytime for any or no reason. NO ONE IS SAFE.
@Bekenstein Bound
What paywall site are you talking about? I haven’t mentioned any paywalled sites.
In addition, I was comparing Posts to Notes. I hope the Posts are read more widely than the Notes, though that doesn’t always hold true. Both Posts and Notes are on Substack. Whether you consider Substack one “site” or many, since both my Posts and Notes are on Pervert Justice, that’s kind of irrelevant. They aren’t on different sites. They’re merely different formats.
@Raging Bee:
Precisely so.
Best wishes, CD.
Remember how John McCain had to step in after his “pre-MAGA MAGA” Alaskan VP nominee whipped the crowd into a killing fury over Obama being a communist marxist socialist Nazi with an evil middle-eastern middle name (while simultaneously comparing herself to the biblical queen with only GOOD kind of middle-eastern name).
Remember how unpredecedented it was for a Republican post-Reagan to step in and say, “Wait a minute; he’s not any of those things you called him.” And remember how many of the pre-MAGA swore they would never vote for him for that act?
I’m already reading both wonkette and your substack.
Thank you, John!
And you, Brony!
As for you, Katydid, I don’t remember that specific incident. I tend to remember the horrors of Palin more than any decency from McCain. I shall look it up so as to be better informed.
Oops, I’d forgot to mention the “Survivalist” movement starting early in Reagan’s first term too: a bunch of loony bigots itching for a race war, all pretending they were only preparing for a nuclear war. Those guys weren’t radical leftists either.
I was, of course, referring to Substack. Those of us who won’t or can’t pay for things over the net, at the very least, and probably more people, tend to ignore Substack links due to the significant probability of getting only the first couple of paragraphs of an article followed by a shakedown demand, combined with no one seemingly knowing how to bypass it unlike at, say, the NYT or Medium. Clicking Substack links is just asking for frustration, so people without wads of disposable income (aka almost everyone, after a half-century of Reaganomics) have developed the same aversion to clicking them as if they randomly gave out electric shocks sometimes when you did that.
Even if you’re not, yourself, actually paywalling any of what you post there, people won’t know that and a chunk of your would-be audience will pass on by just because the URL has “substack.com” in it. It reads as the internet equivalent of “rich, exclusive place I’ll only be able to window-shop at”.
Well, okay, but it would be nice if you don’t tell other people that Wonkette and PJ are paywalled when they are, in fact, not.