What are they getting at?

 I didn't want to click onto the ad to find out, but is the picture suggesting, "you can do this instead", where "this" is "become an escort"?

Update: Another version, 32% less prosty.

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Girls Got 'The Sads" the Boys Don't

 And that makes it even worse!

Most of the boys wanted Trump to win.  Should they mope around and pretend to be sad, as a way to cheer-up the girls?   Would the girls pretend to be sad if Harris won, to cheer-up the boys?

If this was a fancy East coast private school, maybe a majority of the boys <i>wanted Harris to win</i> and were also disappointed.  This would give them even less reason to performatively comfort the girls.  They've got their own crosses to bear.

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Fake McSweeny's for November 13th

 November 13, 2024

Sure, I think the majority of the country are literally nazis, but if you think it'll cause me to do some soul searching, you'd be wrong.

by Lisa Borders

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The Little Ap That Can

 I've been using this since 2012, an eternity in internet time.

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Little Mermaid

 

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Revised McSweeny's Article for November 8th

 

Rape Allegations Really Do Ruin

 
Men’s Lives, Because No matter

 
how thin the charge, people who

 
already don't like that man,

 
will belive he's guilty,

 

despite a complete

 
lack of evedence

by Bobbie Armstrong

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A Must Save from Zero HP Lovecraft

 Dear Liberals,

I want to start by extending my condolences to you, from the bottom of my heart, and with all the sincerity that I have. You have lost in a profound way, and moreover, most of you are very confused about why that happened. I am writing this letter now to explain it to you in the most sympathetic way that I can, without any gloating and without any snark, because as much animosity, as I might feel towards the left or the liberals in the abstract, what I really believe is that the majority of Harris voters are victims of a deception, which has been going on since before you were born. It often feels, in daily life, as if there is nothing in the world upon which we can agree: but let’s start with the most obvious: in the past three elections, the polls leading up to November 5 dramatically underestimated the turnout for Trump, and they overestimated the enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate. You can spin a million theories about methodology and the science of polling and so on, but at the end of the day, the reason the polls were off is that the people doing the polling are all “respectable” people. They are members of society in good standing. They maintain the standing by going along with what appears to be the public consensus. They suffer from a systemic bias, which tells them that the blue team is good and the red team is bad. In every way, it is possible to be good or bad, the blue team is better than the red team. The blue team is smarter, the blue team is more moral, the blue team has the best economic policies, they care more about other people, they are the most competent and on and on and on. And as we all know—I think this is something else we can agree on—if Coca-Cola sponsors a scientific study to determine if Coca-Cola is bad for you, they find that it isn’t. And if the blue team sponsors a study to find out if the blue team is the best, they find that it is. For the most part, the people doing the study—whether it’s an electoral poll or an investigation into the trade-offs of an mRNA vaccine—the people doing the study are good people; they are sincere and they are honest and they really want to find the truth. But although sincerity and honesty are among their motivations, they are also inevitably, part of the blue team, and their money comes from the blue team, but more importantly, their prestige and their moral legitimacy come from the blue team. As a result, they engage in motivated reasoning. If they come up with a conclusion that goes against the blue team consensus, they run the risk of losing their standing, their jobs, and their reputations. Every researcher and every information-gatherer, from the most decorated scientist, all the way down to the lowliest election poller, has some form of this bias, and it bends all their conclusions toward the socially correct answer: “the blue team is the best.” The blue team is the team of the public sphere: most university professors, most technology professionals, most everyone working in media, and almost every single person in the sprawling bureaucracy of the US government is on the blue team. There are a few noteworthy exceptions, and they are constantly vilified and excoriated by the blue team: Fox News, X dot com, the Joe Rogan podcast, etc. I don’t want to put words in your mouth but you probably believe that those media sources are all wrong about basically everything, and that this is due to a “right wing bias” which is maybe connected to racism and sexism and homophobia. And perhaps you are correct. I am not asking you to believe all those awful people are correct. All I am asking is that you consider, with an open heart, that all of your blue team media is also deeply biased, in a different direction, and in many important ways. I think many of you are searching for answers right now and trying to understand. Instead of asking your own blue team media (anything not vilified as red team, no matter how it presents itself, is blue team), I am here, a right winger, and I am offering to explain it. I am a straight white man. If you were to meet me in person, you would probably guess that I am one of you. It’s entirely possible that you know me. I might be your coworker. I might be an old friend, perhaps I’ve even cooked dinner for you. But despite the fact that you know me, you really don’t know me at all, and the truth is you never cared to. It’s a funny little irony, but if I don’t “come out” as a right winger to you, you assume I am on the blue team. And I know from experience that you will treat me very badly if you start to suspect I’m on the red team, which is why I keep my head down. You may think the things I am about to say are delusional or that I am misinformed. Maybe that is so, but these are my perceptions, and it behooves you at this moment to try to understand them. For all of my life, from some of my earliest memories, I have been told that I am uniquely dangerous or deficient in some way because of my race and my sex. When I was a little boy, I remember going to a department store with my mother, and there was a wall full of clothing for little girls, and all of the shirts had cutesy anti-male slogans on them. They said “the future is female” and “boys are icky, throw rocks at them.” And I’m not trying to sit here and tell you that I’m processing some lifelong trauma over that, but as much as it is a cliché on the red team, I invite you to imagine how a little girl would feel if she saw a giant display of anti-female slogans, which said to throw rocks at little girls. To be honest, if you voted for Kamala, I don’t really think you can imagine it, but I’m asking you to try. You are tempted to retort here that’s society implicitly gives these kinds of anti-female messages to girls. Perhaps you wish to quote some statistics to me about the wage gap or about gendered violence or about rape. I contend that all of the statistics which paint a supposedly sexist or racist picture of the world are cooked in exactly the way that the polls showing a Harris victory were cooked. To be clear, many people did in fact vote for Harris, and plenty of men commit violence against women. Nevertheless, the blue team consensus is that the world is stacked against women, and constructed for the benefit of white men, and no one is permitted to do science which ever contradicts this consensus. Moving on, I am not here to argue about any specific statistic or study. During the BLM riots of 2020, I tried to show a statistic to a liberal woman, an official government statistic, showing that only 14 unarmed blacks were shot by police between 2015 and 2020, and average of less than 3 per year. We can stipulate for the moment that is three too many. When I showed this to my liberal female interlocutor, she said, “how dare you show me statistics, we are talking about my feelings.” That is the level of evidentiary rigor that I am used to in these conversations. I’m telling you how I feel here. I had an Indian boss at a large corporation who told me that he thinks all the English should die. I am a man with Anglo heritage. And again, and as cliché as it is, what do you imagine would happen to a white man who says he thinks all the Indians should die? In high school, there were clubs and social organizations for women, for gays, for blacks, for latinos, for asians, for everyone except whites. And when I asked why that was, I was told that I ought to feel bad for asking, that all of society is somehow a celebration of whites. But this claim doesn’t line up with my perceived reality at all. I don’t even want a white identity club, in fact I have no interest in such a thing, but try to consider, even for a second, the magnitude of the double standard. No matter where you look, every racial identity is something to celebrate except whiteness, every gender identity (I have refrained from putting scare quotes on this phrase, even though I think it doesn’t exist) is something to celebrate except for being a heterosexual male. Where is this supposed celebration of straight white maleness occuring? It certainly isn’t at my office! It certainly isn’t at church! All the churches I see in my neighborhood have pride flags on them and offer wednesday night prayer groups to end the sin of racism. And they sure as hell are not celebrating white males on television! All the TV shows and all the movies and all the commercials and all the video games and all the books in all the bookstores are the same. They are all centering “marginalized voices” — a term which I have come to understand means “celebrating everyone who is not straight, white, or male.” I don’t even care if you want to celebrate those people. Have at it. Celebrate whomever you want. But after a little while, the claim that those people are marginalized no longer stands up to scrutiny. It feels to me as a white male that society is set up to be a celebration of everyone but me, and that I am also supposed to celebrate this. I have been told for as long as I can remember that I am “pale, male, and stale,” that I am supposed to “step aside,” and that every great accomplishment in the history of the world was secretly actually the accomplishment of gays and blacks and women and gay black women, whose accomplishments and brilliance I and my kind have maliciously suppressed since, presumably, the advent of recorded history. As you stumble around trying to figure out what Kamala’s campaign did wrong, what could they have done to reach white men, you need to understand that she started 10 feet underground. The thing I have described just now has been my experience for my entire life, under every president, whether Democrat or Republican. Donald Trump is almost the only person in politics who has ever signaled, in any way, that he actually saw me, a straight white man, as a human being with valid concerns. Kamala’s campaign was decidedly not very woke. I see dems complaining that she tried to appeal to the center. Lord knows she never went so far as to actually talk about her policies, as if she even had any. At one point, the Harris campaign put a video depicting a white man jacking off, and threatened that if Trump won, he’d take away our porn. Can you even begin to fathom how insulting this? “You are a bunch of jack offs, vote for us if you want to keep jacking off.” And yet, in the end, it really had nothing to do with Harris as a person at all. The petty contempt that her campaign had for white men was almost refreshing compared to the vitriol I felt from Hillary or Obama. I actually think Harris could have made up a lot of points with white men if she had just got on camera, candidly, and said something like the following: “Straight white men, my party has unfairly demonized you for the past 60 years, and I am here to admit that, and I’m sorry.” But alas, I suspect would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Kamala to apologize to a white man. No, quite the opposite, the Harris campaign wheeled out Tim Walz, a man we perceive as having no dignity at all, as a lickspittle, as a kind of Uncle Tom with the races reversed, and has the audacity to hold him up as some kind of example for us. The message is plain: we are all equals, except you. You are the last among equals. Do you really think there is some combination of magic propaganda words that can overcome all of this? Go ahead and say what you’re thinking, “oh boo hoo, the white man wants to play a victim, he’s entitled, our poor crybaby” etc etc. When blacks and gays and women cry about their victim status, I’m supposed to celebrate it. But that’s not what I’m doing here, in any case. I’m not crying at all, in fact, I’m dancing, because Donald Trump won. We have the supreme court, the senate, the house, and the presidency. We even won the popular vote. You lost because your blue team biases have steered you so far off course that you are no longer able to think clearly about any of these things. You have lost the minimum viable truth needed to operate in the real world and hold on to power. You can take this rare opportunity to be humbled, and to wonder what else you might be wrong about, or you sneer at me, as history leaves you behind. Love, Zero HP Lovecraft

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We Shouldn't Have Expected Much From Harris

The thing about Harris, is that she's never really needed to work very hard: Her parents were both extremely intelligent and she probably could have gotten into a highly selective school. Instead she chose Howard; a decent school, but it isn't Berkeley or Stanford. For law school, same thing.

In California, getting nominated as a Democrat ensures you will win, so she never had to work at developing political skills.

Harris floundered in the Democratic primary but was chosen by Biden, who promised an African American woman.

Having never learned political skills or the habit of hard work, it would have been shocking for Harris to have suddenly developed these things.

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Dream Outcome

Not a prediction:  Just an outcome I would like, with a little tidbit of goodies for the losing side:

• Trump wins in a landslide with over 300 electoral votes and wins the, meaningless but will shut-up the idiots, popular vote as well.
• One week after the election.  Biden pardons his son Hunter and the next day resigns office, for health reasons.  This would make Harris the first female US president.
• Trump serves two years, accomplishes a lot and then resigns office, making JD Vance president, with enough time to show his mettle. 

My actual prediction:

• Trump wins
• The left does all the insurrection-type things they accused the right of doing, but rename it "resistance".
• They hound him with BS for his entire term, just like they did in his first term but he still accomplishes a lot.
• At the end of his term, he retires and (since he can't run again) they don't bother with the legal persecution this time.

My analysis:  Trump needs only one of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.  Trump is slightly favored in PA, Harris in MI and WS.  If we round it all to tossups.  Three 50:50 chances comes to 1:8 for Harris and 7:8 for Trump.

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 With 26 losses, this makes my 1,000th win.

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Pre-Postmortem

There are signs that Democrats know they will lose.

The smart move for Democrats would be to keep the fraud too small to make Harris win.  She was a hail Mary, when (unexpectedly) Biden's dementia became too obvious to hide.  If the cheating is similarly obvious, they risk civil war.

The problem and the risk, is that the fraud was set in motion before it was obvious how poorly the Harris campaign was executed and lots of votes have already been entered.  I saw a case yesterday on X where a single voter ID cast 29 votes from various addresses (none of them residences).  These votes have already been counted and cannot be uncounted.

The panic they feel, is that she will lose.  The panic they ought to be feeling, is that the cheating they've already done and cannot stop, will set off a civil war.

Community Notes

 I've never seen someone Community-Noted this comprehensively:  Kristof is going to walk funny for a week.

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Why Didn't Harris Go on Joe Rogan's Show?

Harris has a busy schedule--That's the stated excuse for not going to Austin. Sure, but isn't her primary job right now to win votes? Finding the time to have a conversation with one of the world's most popular podcasters seems like a no-brainer. Or maybe not. Maybe she knows that being on Joe Rogan's show would reveal her basic lack of substance. The play was to spin it as a dispute over terms. Naturally the MSM Praetorian guard will make it Rogan's fault--as if Harris ever intended to be on his show.

It raises a question in my mind: If Harris knows that she lacks substance, why does she want to be president? It seems like a terrifying job, even for a hyper competent executive. How would this not be a complete nightmare for somebody who knows that she has meagre skills or ideas? Has she thought this through? I think not. I think that even the decision to run for president was, like her previous jobs, just 'phoned-in'

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Torn In Half

Not being Jewish, I can only be a spectator to what's happening but I imagine it's going to be somewhat traumatic for some.

You see, many Jews are very left wing, as well as being (naturally) proud of their Jewish heritage:  No group has, given their numbers, produced so many outstanding talents in music, art, writing, movies, science and law.  It used to be easy to choose a party:  Both major parties had small numbers of anti Semites among their members, but one party was to the left and one to the right.  Now it's not so easy:  The left wing party is clearly the one which harbors a larger contingent of anti Semites and the right wing party has become economically more aligned with the working class.

Logically, Jews ought to be Republicans now--they are the worker party and they are pro-Jewish and pro-Israel.  Old habits die hard and I expect there will be some acrimony. 

Added:  I put a laugh emoji by a Facebook post which claimed (laughably) that Harris is a friend and protector of Jews and which either insinuated or outright claimed* that if you care about the Holocaust, you'll vote for Harris.

* (it was long and I skimmed it--I would go back and quote it in full but I've been unpersoned, unfriended)

The response:

All I can say is "good riddance".  Only a colossal asshole would come to that conclusion, instead of the obvious and charitable one (which is how you act around everyone, but especially friends), that Harris isn't somebody Jews ought to trust, compared to Trump, who has a daughter and grandchildren who are Jews.

Added:  If he's invoking the Holocaust as justification for choosing Harris over Trump, it isn't me mocking the Holocaust.  The guy needs to get himself a mirror.

Also:

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We Know

 

Yes, Jonah pointed this out a while ago.

In other words, yes, we know this about you.

Sleuthing

I'm still Facebook friends with lots of people that we, my wife and I, were actively friends with a wile back.  Most of your local friendships have been with the parents of friends of our children.  There are some people we know from work, a local running club, neighbors, etc.  But I didn't grow up around here, so there are no childhood friends within 1,000 miles.

Anyway, getting to the point.  I saw a post on Facebook of a friend who had been to some kind of event, probably a wedding and there were a bunch of pictures, which I scrolled through.  What I didn't see, were any pictures of her husband.  Curiosity overcame me and I scrolled through her photo album:  After 2017, he is nowhere to be seen.

A quick Google search turned up three items:  1. A man matching his description listed at a nearby address, which is different from their house. 2. A public record of the sale of the house, from the two of them to just the (possibly former) wife.

I discussed all of this with my wife and we are both somewhat sad about all of it and she related a story that she probably told me about before, but had forgotten:  She went to some movie with her, as she calls them "lady friends"  after words, some of them went to a local, townie kind of place for drinks.  She noticed a disheveled man walk by on his way in and afterwards recognized him as the husband.

Item 3. which I kept to myself, (she doesn't read my blog--which I suppose I should mind, but don't.) is that I turned up a police blotter from our local paper, dated about 7 years ago--around when she spotted him:  It indicated he'd been arrested for DUI and it was a repeat offense.  I didn't want to tell her this, because, depressing.  I does raise a question in my mind:  Did his drinking break-up the marriage, or did the break-up lead to excessive drinking?

It should be noted that whenever we got together with this couple, they both drank, not excessively, but also, not sparingly. 

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Feelings

 From the NYT

And in quiet conversations, some female Harris supporters can’t shake the uneasy feeling that men in their lives are struggling to support a woman — especially a Black and South Asian woman — even if they don’t want to admit it.

Maybe there's another feeling available, one which views men more charitably but comes at the cost of requiring some self-reflection.

Maybe the men in your lives would be delighted to finally have the chance to vote for the best person and have the pleasure of having that person be a woman.  What they are more likely struggling with is whether to enjoy the voting for a woman part, but at the cost of knowing that they like the other guy better.

My question for these women:  What do you think the men in your lives would think, if they knew that the women in their lives think they are sexist and racist?

Perhaps reflect:  Are you voting for Harris because you always vote Democratic?  If your men voted for Obama and for Hillary Clinton, maybe you should wonder if lack of support for Harris has something to do with traits which have nothing to do with race of sex.

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 26th loss

Tomcat

This had to be one of the more unusual mascots for a military aircraft, but somehow it seemed apt.

OTOH  My Dad flew the RF-4C Phantom II and I never saw this:

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Brave!

Passed a campaign sign on a jog earlier today:

"Voting Prevents Unwanted Presidencies."

Massachusetts hasn't given their electoral votes to a Republican since 1984.

Your vote won't matter, but kudos for your bravery! 

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 25th loss.