That’s funny.

So all of our nerves are a little…raw right now, amirite? So I asked Siri, “Siri, tell me a funny rape joke.”

She replied: “I can’t. I always forget the punchline.”

Which is pretty funny, when you think about it. So I googled “funny rape jokes,” and here’s what I got (by no means a complete list; this is Google, after all):

A 2016 article from Splinter, one of the Gawker Media sites, with this headline: Meet the woman making rape jokes that are actually funny. It’s about Adrienne Truscott, who does a one-woman stand-up show about you-know-what. She performs it in a denim jacket, push-up bra and platform shoes. No pants:

Truscott tells her audience that she understands why people didn’t believe Bill Cosby, the stand-up dad of America, could rape anyone because a rapist is usually someone you know and trust. She jokes about how ironic it is that Tosh is “the poster child for rape jokes” because “he looks exactly like a date rapist: college educated, white and clean cut.” She role plays with men in the audience, putting cream in their coffee and milk in their cereal even when they tell her no over and over again. She says that while women are blamed for wearing clothes that lure a rapist in, all a rapist has to wear is “pants and a blind look of entitlement.” She forces members in the audience to not only laugh at her jokes, but to laugh at the ignorant philosophy of everyone from men in Congress to men catcalling on the streets.

“The one thing [women] don’t ever want to do is fuck that guy on the corner,” Truscott says.

I’d see that show. I bet I’d laugh. Back to Google:

More stand-up comedy, this time in Canada. Tip to the writer: If you report a whole story about comedians exploring rape and can’t find one joke worth including, turn in your press card. Unless this was the best you can do:

Cooper told the audience about a love note left for her by a man who, after consensual sex, proceeded to remove the condom and reinsert himself.

In the note, he had spelled the word “beautiful” wrongly. “Which made me realise that I need to get standards,” she joked. “Rapists’ standards. I want a smart rapist who can understand and spell hard words like, ‘communication’, ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’.”

Not funny, but this is Canada, after all. The Nation tried harder, and found some; I like Wanda Sykes’:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our pussies were detachable? Just think about it. You get home from work, it’s getting a little dark outside, and you’re like, ‘I’d like to go for a jog…but it’s getting too dark, oh! I’ll just leave it at home!’… [There’s] just so much freedom—you could do anything. You could go visit a professional ball player’s hotel room at two in the morning. Sex? My pussy’s not even in the building!

See, here’s what I believe: Like Jon Carroll, I think nothing is not funny. Rape, pedophilia, Alzheimer’s disease – all are funny, or can be, in the right hands. It’s all in how you tell it, and who tells it. This is Humor 101, the section in the textbook called The Duh Intro.

Today, Rod Dreher got his knickers in a twist over the Uncle Roy sketches on “Saturday Night Live,” back when it was edgy and much, much funnier. Maybe you remember them? Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman played two little girls being babysat by their dad’s creepy friend, played by Buck Henry. Dreher was trying to link them to Al Franken, but it turns out they were written by two women, alas. I remember watching them and being simultaneously squicked out and laughing my ass off, which makes them pretty successful as humor. I won’t make excuses for them if people who actually went through that were re-traumatized; I get it, but I still laughed.

Nothing is not funny. Because humor is how we cope with tragedy and pain. Humor is a victims’ prerogative, though, not the perpetrator’s. That might be my rule. Or, as Nora Ephron put it in “Heartburn”:

Because if I tell the story, I control the version.
Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me.
Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

Good weekend, all.

Posted at 12:48 pm in Current events |
 

62 responses to “That’s funny.”

  1. Peter said on November 17, 2017 at 12:59 pm

    For many years I did projects with trading firms and it was a pipeline for really crude jokes.

    So here goes:

    Q. What is the best thing about having Alzheimers?

    A. You meet new friends every day.

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  2. coozledad said on November 17, 2017 at 1:45 pm

    Dreher himself is a stock character from old comedy. He shows up in everything from Aristophanes to A Room With A View. He, along with McArglebargle, are part of that class of aspirational American vulgarians who travel to Europe to dine on spit.

    Megan’s in Durham now, swindling writing students because Duke has developed a a bad habit of licking up to libertarian twaddle peddlers like Mike Munger. I hope I don’t see her at Viceroy after I’ve driven an hour to eat there. Short of a fire, that’s the only thing that would make me turn around and walk out.
    http://www.viceroydurham.com/

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  3. Deborah said on November 17, 2017 at 1:47 pm

    Not a joke but, I found this video moving, it made me cry. I know some of you don’t like Amanda Palmer, I think this is a Pink Floyd song. She dedicates the video to the current administration http://amandapalmer.net/mother/

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  4. FDChief said on November 17, 2017 at 1:53 pm

    Yep. The whole “Darwin Award” thing is about getting a laugh out of violent death. There’s no boundary on what can be the butt of a joke.

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  5. Deborah said on November 17, 2017 at 1:55 pm

    How ironic that the character’s name was Uncle Roy. I had completely forgotten about that.

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  6. Sherri said on November 17, 2017 at 4:00 pm

    The tax bill passed by the House is incredible. If you tried to make up a caricature of Republicans, you couldn’t come up with something this insane. It’s essentially give more money to people we love (very rich people who don’t work for a living) , and take it away from people we hate, and boy do we hate a lot of people.

    We know the Republican base runs on resentment, but evidently the plutocrats are just as resentful. And for anybody who thinks both sides do it, just try to imagine a Dem tax bill as targeted towards their enemies as this Republican travesty is.

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  7. alex said on November 17, 2017 at 4:26 pm

    I’ve always been a believer that even the sickest joke can be redeemed by its cleverness, and also by a comedian who knows how to deliver it. Joan Rivers had some tremendous chutzpah that way. She’d say the most tasteless things and would just about piss herself laughing at the ensuing chorus of boos. Then she’d gesticulate wildly with her hands and say “Come on, you know you liked that” and the audience would bust a gut.

    I asked Siri what’s the most tasteless joke Joan Rivers ever told and she gave me a list of rather tame stuff including:

    Don’t you hate McDonald’s? I heard you can’t get a job there unless you have a skin condition.

    Stevie Wonder, that poor son of a bitch. Who’s going to tell him he’s wearing a macrame plant holder on his head?

    The whole Michael Jackson thing was my fault. I told him to date only 28-year-olds. Who knew he would find 20 of them?

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  8. Deborah said on November 17, 2017 at 4:37 pm

    Well, well, well, isn’t this interesting. Look what surfaced about Sam Clovis http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/clovis-expressed-staunchly-pro-russian-views-a-year-before-campaign. What in the world is with these rightwingers and Russia? I don’t get it. Was Clovis compromised with hookers over there too, when as he claims in the video he was an expert about Russia during the military at the pentagon? Is he a double agent. Makes you wonder, me anyway.

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  9. Jakash said on November 17, 2017 at 6:09 pm

    I found myself thinking the same thing, Sherri. How can one not? When lifting the restrictions on elephant trophies was announced, Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian tweeted: “It’s like the mission statement of the Trump administration is ‘Be Evil’,” to which Gene Weingarten of WaPo replied to the effect that the appropriate comparison is to Snidely Whiplash.

    The Republican agenda has long been characterized as nothing but cutting taxes for the rich and banning abortion, but the extent to which they manage to add in facets that hurt lots of non-rich folks as a bonus really is reprehensible.

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  10. Jakash said on November 17, 2017 at 6:52 pm

    Short tweet-thread from Andy Richter angrily responding to somebody having tweeted: “depression is a choice.”

    The point he highlights: Despite treatment, “I will still reach the end of my life having walked through most of it with an emotional limp.”

    https://twitter.com/AndyRichter/status/931559102660067333

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  11. Jolene said on November 17, 2017 at 7:21 pm

    The tax bill passed by the House is incredible. If you tried to make up a caricature of Republicans, you couldn’t come up with something this insane. It’s essentially give more money to people we love (very rich people who don’t work for a living) , and take it away from people we hate, and boy do we hate a lot of people.

    Indeed, it’s astonishing how many ways they have found to hurt people so that they could further advantage people who already have lots of advantages. They’re eliminating deductions that don’t affect many people, but are very important to the people who are eligible to take them—deductions for medical costs above a certain level, deductions for student loan interest, for the cost of adoption, for historical preservation efforts, for the tuition waivers associated with graduate education. I’m sure there are more.

    I suppose it’s a good political strategy in that it’s difficult for small numbers of people who have no formal connection to each other to mount opposition, but it’s cruel policy.

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  12. Deborah said on November 17, 2017 at 7:50 pm

    I personally know a few people who fit 3 or 4 of those categories and are about to face some financial burdens if it passes, I wonder if they are so removed from each other as we think?

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  13. Sherri said on November 17, 2017 at 9:14 pm

    I’m in the best place with my depression that I’ve been in a very long time, but I know it’s still there. I still feel how it skews my perceptions of myself and the world.

    It was not a choice for me to wake up in the morning and feel like I was moving through quicksand under a gray sky all the fucking time. It was a choice to keep moving, but it was not a choice to feel like that. Anybody who thinks that has my contempt.

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  14. BigHank53 said on November 17, 2017 at 9:26 pm

    Anyone who spouts that “depression is a choice” crap is someone who needs to be pushed down a flight of fire stairs, then asked why they made such a poor decision.

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  15. Dexter said on November 18, 2017 at 2:13 am

    Comedian Bridget Everett sings “What I gotta do, what I gotta do, what I gotta do to get that dick in my mouth”, and Lisa Lampenelli, who lost 107 pounds after gastric surgery jokes about when she was obese she was “not rape-able”. Have a listen to Bridget…it’s really catchy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqTSaMR75ns

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  16. Dexter said on November 18, 2017 at 2:18 am

    Ah hell..let’s have a little fun with Everett…pretty hilarious,eh? No? Oh well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xattyi_GlHY

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  17. coozledad said on November 18, 2017 at 8:07 am

    I’m old enough to remember Republican white trash refusing the damn metric system because WE THE GREATISS COUNTRY IN THE WURRLL.

    Well, greatiss country. You lost the cold war to a country with an economy the size of Italy. And they couldn’t have done it without you.

    https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/931659613111488518

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  18. Deborah said on November 18, 2017 at 9:58 am

    I saw this on Twitter today is this true: you currently can deduct expenses from natural catastrophes that exceed what insurance pays, or if you don’t have insurance. But under the new plan you can only deduct expenses for hurricanes and tornadoes not earthquakes or fires? Is this really in the bill? I can’t find this info any where else. Obviously it targets California for punishment if it’s true, but it seems too obvious for even this craven Republican administration.

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  19. Connie said on November 18, 2017 at 10:01 am

    Rape jokes are never funny. They are even less funny when posted to the comments by men. Do I have to go away until next week to avoid them?

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  20. Deborah said on November 18, 2017 at 10:13 am

    Here’s a new term I learned today:
    A kakistocracy (English pronunciation: /kækɪsˈtɑkɹəsi/) is a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the 17th century.

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  21. coozledad said on November 18, 2017 at 10:21 am

    Some day the scourge of Eurocentrism will pass. The stuff we already know about it is ample evidence for a mass jailing, but its loathsome, slimy secrets might justifiably emerge in a torrent of blood.
    https://twitter.com/AoDespair/status/931545752362541058

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  22. coozledad said on November 18, 2017 at 10:58 am

    The naval air forces should stop wasting time drawing dicks in the sky and deliver a 2000 lb bomb amidships to this Russian piece of shit’s yacht. Unless it’s come to pick up the shitgibbon and repatriate him to the country of his allegiance. Then they should just wait until it’s underway.
    http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/news/new-russian-yacht-docks-port-will-putin-friend-pay-trump-visit/jHOu5zlKUqMa0lMLsqzz6L/

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  23. Connie said on November 18, 2017 at 11:04 am

    Cooz’ comment re Eurocentrism reminds me of the high school history teacher who told us over and over that the most important date in history was 1066. That was when the Normans invaded England. Not a very important date to most of the world.

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  24. Jeff Borden said on November 18, 2017 at 11:22 am

    I’ve been debating a family member over my snarky Facebook post that the $250 annual deduction for teachers to purchase school supplies is being eliminated, which I was happy to give up so wealthy corporations and ultra-wealthy folks can have more. He responded with the old saw about how poor people don’t hire anyone. And that my tax preparation would be more than $250. I guess when you are forced to defend the indefensible, you don’t allow yourself much in the way of a sense of humor.

    The reddest states are generally among the poorest states. Why? How is it possible for even the dimmest bulb not to see how the GOP continually pays lip service to their concerns while delivering the real goods to their wealthy benefactors? Are there that many single issue voters out there, who will spurn the Dems because of abortion, guns, gay rights, etc.

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  25. Brandon said on November 18, 2017 at 12:55 pm

    Re: coozledad’s comment no. 17: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyn_Nofziger#Anti-metrication

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Mankiewicz#Anti-metrication

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  26. Suzanne said on November 18, 2017 at 1:09 pm

    “Are there that many single issue voters out there, who will spurn the Dems because of abortion, guns, gay rights, etc.”
    Yes, Jeff, there are that many voters who vote only on abortion, guns, God, and gays. I know many. More than many.
    These things are no longer political opinions, but doctrine. God commands you have a right to a gun and if we allow gays to marry, it’ll tick off God and bring condemnation on this Shining City on the Hill. The factory closed not because of poor management or because the GOP has passed laws that allow the profits to go to the top making workers little more than indentured servants, but because people turned from God and He is no longer showering blessings on the country.
    It really is that simple for way more people than you might believe.

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  27. Deborah said on November 18, 2017 at 2:11 pm

    There’s actually data out there about what issues people voted on in the 2016 election. http://www.people-press.org/2016/07/07/4-top-voting-issues-in-2016-election/ It’s a Pew poll (or survey) if you scroll down you will see a graphic that shows what Clinton voters and Trump voters say they voted on. Edit: I didn’t realize there are 5 pages to this survey.

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  28. Jeff Borden said on November 18, 2017 at 4:06 pm

    Thanks Suzanne and Deborah. Now I’m REALLY depressed.

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  29. brian stouder said on November 18, 2017 at 4:07 pm

    Well, have you ever driven onto a different part of your town, and then got turned-around on where you’re going?

    In Fort Wayne, where I have lived all my life, there is a “Sam’s Club” north of town, and damned if I can ever get there, if I’m not leaving from home. Certainly, there must be one easy thing that I could do, to get me there, but I know not what.

    By way of saying, policy-wonks (i.e. – serious politicians) will always have a harder sell to their constituency than a slick-talking medicine-show personage.

    One person takes pains to explain what the challenges are, and what effect various possible approaches to those challenges might be worth trying…while another says “Balderdash! Here’s all you need!”

    This is the down-side of supporting – as I suspect we all do – the widest possible voting rights.

    In the long run, I think things work out, as long as we abide the results of those elections, and (when things go against us) work on the next one.

    It is worth recalling that, politically, the South’s rejection of the results of the 1860 election was the direct catalyst of the American Civil War.

    The compromises on the table at that time would have preserved “the peculiar institution” – and/or compensated the slave owners for the loss of “their property” – but that wasn’t deemed “good enough”.

    “And the war came”…

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  30. Sherri said on November 18, 2017 at 4:24 pm

    Perhaps I’m too cynical, but having grown up among the white evangelicals, and watched abortion go from a nothing issue to the single most important issue ever, practically overnight, I’m dubious about how important abortion per se really is. I think it’s a really handy justification. It allows them to feel righteous while not having to examine their feelings and actions concerning race, guns, the poor, women, Muslims, and immigrants.

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  31. Suzanne said on November 18, 2017 at 4:41 pm

    I think abortion is very important to many evangelical voters but it’s also a very simple way to weed out candidates and not have to face the complexities of modern life. Deborah’s poll report showed a high percentage of conservative voters saying the Supreme Court was important to them. Why? Because abortion & the possibility of it being made illegal again through a Supreme Court ruling. But because of their black/white view of it, they are willing to bed down with the devil to get what they want, not grasping the consequences of that.
    My guess is the GOP really doesn’t want abortion illegal because once it is, their constituents will lose their focal point & might discover their pockets have been picked by the people they put into power.

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  32. Dave said on November 18, 2017 at 4:55 pm

    Brian, straight up Lima Road and it’s on the right.

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  33. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 18, 2017 at 5:18 pm

    I think Suzanne’s closer to the heart of the question than Sherri is. It has become a handy index for theoretically simplifying complexity. This is where pastors get tied in knots; folks want pastoral care to be nuanced and complexity respecting, but so many want their social policies and moral signaling to be oppressively flattening. As in — don’t even get me started on how stupid picture IDs on SNAP cards are, but to explain why it’s dumb requires a listener who will give you more than 27 seconds of attention.

    Ditto abortion in practice, versus as a litmus test.

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  34. Joe Kobiela said on November 18, 2017 at 6:02 pm

    Brian,
    Just think Smith field airport. For the rest of the crowd Well worth a trip to Nancy’s Facebook page for a throw back picture.
    Foxy lady.
    Looks fantastic.
    Pilot Joe

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  35. Jolene said on November 18, 2017 at 6:43 pm

    I’ll bite. Why are pictures on SNAP cards stupid, Jeff? Do they get in the way of sending your kid to the store for milk? What?

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  36. brian stouder said on November 18, 2017 at 9:08 pm

    Joe and Dave – thanks!

    From where I live, it’s north on Hillegas – which changes names to Huegenard (and which I’d have missed on a quiz)-

    https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1313599,-85.1856769,15.75z

    until you get to Washington Center Road, and then east ’til you get to Ludwig Road, then east ’til you see Lowes and Meijer – and then through the big red light there (crossing Lima Road).

    Coming north from downtown, I invariably jink east on Coldwater, instead of west on Lima, and then end up who-knows-where!

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  37. Deborah said on November 19, 2017 at 1:36 am

    I saw something weird earlier tonight. We were walking back from the symphony, up Michigan Ave and a tall slim young man wearing a tux was walking the other way, the odd thing was that he was wearing a monocle. Is that a thing now?

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  38. Dexter said on November 19, 2017 at 2:43 am

    In Dublin (OH) there has to be an easy way to find the Trader Joe’s but goddam if I can ever find it. On a map it looks so easy , just exit the Outerbelt at 161 and head west towards Sawmill Road and it’s in a shopping center somewhere. I have found the shopping center but where in the fuck is the TJ’s? After two failed attempts I just gave up. I have consumed many products from there but my daughter from Hilliard gets them. She + hubby landed at Honolulu a few hours ago then hopped over to Waikiki to rendezvous with another daughter and a M.I.L. I don’t know the itinerary but the vacation started with fancy alcoholic beverages.
    Nine years ago my brother and his wife ran a little hotel on Kauai so the owner, a bicycling friend, could fly to Hanoi for a cycling trip. This guy named Hans something was also the head of the tour of Vietnam my brother and his wife went on a few years before that. The deal was 18 days free lodging if they managed the place. My brother is a busy guy and he painted, fixed little things, worked the desk-phones, and they still had time for climbing,seeing waterfalls, all that happy horseshit. I had chance to take an R&R from the war and could have taken a week in Kuala Lumpur, Hawaii, Sydney, Hong Kong…but I just never got the paperwork request in on time, so I just said to hell with it.

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  39. alex said on November 19, 2017 at 10:08 am

    I’ve never taken the religious right seriously about abortion either, and it makes perfect sense to me that it serves rather more like a code word for the Christian sharia world view. One thing that bothers me about Dem politicians is that they feel they have to weasel around about it (“I’m personally opposed to abortion, but yada yada”) which doesn’t earn them any goodwill with the other side and doesn’t really affirm the principle that it’s nobody’s fucking business, which is what they ought to be saying. They used to pussyfoot around gay rights the same way, and the only reason I support the Dems over the GOP is that at least they were never actively hostile to my interests even if they did a piss-poor job of defending them.

    The religious right/tea party has been unmasked for the white supremacist authoritarian movement that it has always been. If Sarah Palin had pulled a writhing 8-month-old out of her teen-aged daughter with a coat hanger on national TV she would have had their blessings just the same as Donald Trump and Roy Moore do right now.

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  40. Dave said on November 19, 2017 at 11:01 am

    Dexter, the Trader Joe’s that you can’t find is in the southwest corner of Dublin-Granville Road and Sawmill Road. I’ve been in that store several times but always exited on Sawmill Road, since I was coming from the east.

    Completely off topic but an article in this morning’s Tampa Bay Times that might be of some interest to those here, since it’s come up several times in the past: http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/In-union-push-at-USF-adjunct-professors-strive-for-more-respect-and-a-living-wage_162644741

    I had written a much longer comment but, for some unknown reason, it wouldn’t post and I lost it. Ugh. However, when I see the governor of Alabama say that she has to vote for Moore because of Republican values, that tells me everything I need to know about today’s Republican party.

    Brian, I lived in greater Fort Wayne for thirty years but nearly all of it was in Perry Township. There were parts of town I seldom ever went to and had little reason to go.

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  41. Sherri said on November 19, 2017 at 11:49 am

    I agree that abortion is a handy shibboleth for white evangelicals, I just question how much abortion itself really matters to them. Why is making abortion illegal the goal, rather than improving the conditions that lead to abortion? Improving access to birth control leads to fewer abortions, for example, but they don’t want that.

    At least the Catholic Church has a consistent pro-life ethos, but white evangelicals can’t even claim that. It’s not about the poor innocent babies.

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  42. Deborah said on November 19, 2017 at 12:29 pm

    My sister has been spreading the erroneous story that she was a democrat and then when she learned about abortion she became a Republican in her early adult life. I know this is a bunch of crap because obviously I grew up with her, I remember in jr high she read “None Dare Call it Treason” and wouldn’t shut up about communism infiltrating every aspect of our existence in the US. Our mother was a Republican and our dad a Democrat, she always sided with mom and I sided with dad. Ever since I was a kid, since probably kindergarten I’ve thought that the Rs were the party driven by the fat cats for their purposes and they’d stop at nothing to line their pockets. The older I get the more obvious that becomes, especially today with how openly craven the tax cut bills are.

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  43. Jakash said on November 19, 2017 at 12:46 pm

    “At least the Catholic Church has a consistent pro-life ethos”

    …..

    “‘Every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible’ is intrinsically evil.”

    — Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2370.

    Unquestioning acceptance of that doctrine being more important than saving lives from AIDS through the use of condoms doesn’t seem very consistently pro-life to me, but then I’m not insisting that rules established in a very different time, for a very different world must be kept sacrosanct in the overpopulated, severely stressed environment of the 21st Century.

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  44. coozledad said on November 19, 2017 at 12:47 pm

    Republicans believe in nothing more than the scent of the man’s ass above them in money and rank. Barber says it’s a religion of greed, to which I would add it has become a religion whose central feature is a mound of human dead. It’s the religion of the gibbet and the daisy cutter bomb. A religion of chaos, theft and death. They’re the avatars of an imbecilic Kali age.

    This is not Christianity. Rather, it is an extreme Republican religionism that stands by party and regressive policy no matter what. It’s not the gospel of Christ, but a gospel of greed. It is the religion of racism and lies, not the religion of redemption and love.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/unbearable-hypocrisy-roy-moore-s-christian-rhetoric-ncna821921

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  45. Mark P said on November 19, 2017 at 1:13 pm

    Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that a woman had gained the Republican nomination for Senate in Alabama, and then it was learned that as a 30-something working in the DA’s office, she had pursued a 14-year-old boy. Imagine she took him to her house in the woods and had stripped him and herself to their underwear and had put his hand on her genitals. Imagine that other men said that she had pursued them and acted inappropriately towards them when they were in their teens. What might Alabama Republicans and religious leaders have said about that?

    Along those lines, it is obvious why fundamentalist Republicans don’t want abortion or birth control, or even sex education. They think that having a baby is god’s way of punishing women for having sex. It’s OK for men to have sex, but it’s a sin when women do it. It’s even bad when married women do it.

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  46. coozledad said on November 19, 2017 at 1:16 pm

    White people, taking those crucial steps to defend blacks from white people, rescuing “us” from the bad old days of the 60’s, right? Right?

    https://twitter.com/BoycottUtah/status/931613780223471616

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  47. Suzanne said on November 19, 2017 at 1:19 pm

    As someone said (here? On Twitter) Trump & Moore are doing more to destroy American Christianity than Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens could ever had hoped to accomplish themselves.

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  48. Sherri said on November 19, 2017 at 1:47 pm

    Fair point, Jakash. I should have said more consistent, not consistent. At least the Catholic Church is opposed to the death penalty and has some concern for social justice, even if it’s hard to tell from the conservative Catholics on the Supreme Court and the Ayn Rand Catholics like Paul Ryan.

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  49. Deborah said on November 19, 2017 at 2:39 pm

    I found this interesting and it sort of fits with the discussion we’ve been having here about what folks value and about conservatives and Trump. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/trump-corey-robin-reactionary-mind-interview

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  50. Charlotte said on November 19, 2017 at 3:06 pm

    So, turns out the supposedly-hetero, married, Christian, anti-LGBT legislator in Ohio who was busted having sex with a man *in his office* this week — has a long long history of creeping on young conservative activists. More than 30 have come forward: https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/932262354615783425
    (And dudes — in the office?!? Ick. Is there enough disinfectant in the world?)

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  51. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on November 19, 2017 at 3:16 pm

    Jolene – you’re halfway there. The state is going to spend something like $8 million to install the needed technology to implement photos on IDs when under federal law you can’t require people to display them to clerks, and there’s a massive percentage of current SNAP recipients who, again under the federal guidelines which are indifferent to state fun and games, are exempt from any photo requirement due to hardships, like handicaps, age, et cetera. Plus you have family usages as you rightly infer, which would do what to the system to militantly enforce? Grocers want to promote ease of use, since SNAP income is now more than their margin in most stores. So it’s pure gesture, in the name of saving money, that saves in fact no money. But burdens a few innocent victims as small price to pay for helping the right guy move forward in the GOP governor’s nomination sweepstakes.

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  52. Jolene said on November 19, 2017 at 3:30 pm

    . . . burdens a few innocent victims as small price to pay for helping the right guy move forward in the GOP governor’s nomination sweepstakes.

    Seems like that candidate should be required to explain how he or she plans to get around federal law.

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  53. susan said on November 19, 2017 at 5:05 pm

    MarkP @44 Wonder why fundamentalist men just don’t use a tight hole in a wall instead of making women’s lives miserable. That would save a LOT of grief.

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  54. Mark P. said on November 19, 2017 at 5:27 pm

    susan @52 — Personally, I think it has something to do with the fact that for that type of man, sex is an act of dominance. They are doing something to a woman, not with a woman.

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  55. susan said on November 19, 2017 at 5:51 pm

    Ah, you are probably correct. Would that it would as simple as a hole in a wall. I could draw lips on it, if they’d like.

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  56. Deborah said on November 19, 2017 at 7:55 pm

    I could not agree more http://www.ginandtacos.com

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  57. brian stouder said on November 19, 2017 at 9:50 pm

    Rest in peace, M-M-M-Mel.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/musicians-react-to-mel-tillis-death/ar-BBFc2da?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

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  58. Sherri said on November 19, 2017 at 11:48 pm

    This is part of why I get twitchy every time Someone says Joe Biden should have replaced Hillary, or mentions Joe Biden for 2020: http://therewm.com/2017/11/19/anita-hill-joe-biden-glamour-woty/

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  59. Dexter said on November 20, 2017 at 3:15 am

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntUIjp6yxj8

    Special place in Hell.

    Goodbye Charlie.

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  60. Deborah said on November 20, 2017 at 7:14 am

    Brian, you said up thread, “have you ever driven onto a different part of your town, and then got turned-around on where you’re going?” This happens to me a lot, I get turned-around when I’m trying to find my way in an unfamiliar place, heck even familiar places. I have poor spatial memory which is ironic since one of the things I had to do in my job was architectural wayfinding signage, like in airports etc. Many times I turn the wrong way when I walk out of a store, and finding my car in parking lots is always a challenge.

    So today is a travel day for me, as this is one of the heaviest travel weeks in the year, I suspect a lot of you will be traveling too. I hope to be distracted from the internet for the next month and a half. I hope you all have a great thanksgiving, don’t eat too much. I know I will.

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  61. adrianne said on November 20, 2017 at 7:30 am

    It still gives me chills to read about the Manson murders. Depraved evil.

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  62. Icarus said on November 20, 2017 at 10:07 am

    “have you ever driven onto a different part of your town, and then got turned-around on where you’re going?”

    cannot think of a specific incident but I’m sure there have been plenty. My best closest to this is when I was a grad student at DePaul, I was in one of the downtown buildings. I was use to go to the bathroom on some floor by getting off the elevator and going around a corner, something like right, right, walk in the door.

    Next quarter I had a class on a different floor and for some reason I would take a different elevator and going right, right* put me in the ladies bathroom!

    * I might have the mechanics wrong on the precise right, or left or turns, but basically it was going around a corner on one floor led to the guys room, but the same movement on the other floor or coming from a different direction put you in the ladies room.

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  63. coozledad said on November 20, 2017 at 11:19 am

    If Plutarch were writing his Parallel Lives today, he might do worse than placing Trump along with Charles Manson. Manson’s formative years in juvenile detention centers and prisons taught him the same lessons about cognitive empathy that Trump learned from his daddy when he accompanied him on rent collection shakedowns- both of them talentless white supremacists banking on the Stockholm Syndrome for a steady diet of sexual prey, both of them prophets of a coming racial Armageddon, and both of them starfuckers.

    The only difference is one of scale, both in terms of family membership, and the victim count in their pursuit of stochastic terror. The Manson Family was small, dogged, and blind to their own viciousness.

    The Republican family is much larger, but committed to the same goals. They’re part of a White Wheel that spun out of the fringe-trash sixties with a shared pathological sense of victimhood and privilege.

    Maybe Manson was onto something. He’d read correctly into the white zeitgeist, but lacked the capital, friends or the sociopathic chops to make the initial investment in a lucrative career on the backs of stupid, resentful whites. I’m sure he was thankful to the Republican Party for taking the necessary steps to fulfill his dream. They, in turn, should celebrate him as the founder of their church.

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