"No longer like a toad in these foul cellars will I secret the venom of hatred -- for you shall bring me love!" - Erik
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« June 2017 | Main | August 2017 » July 31, 2017I give up Politics is bad enough, but when some female Marvel employees post a picture of themselves drinking milkshakes and the Men's Rights nitwits freak out and start ranting about SJWs, it's time to give up on the human race. By fnord12 | July 31, 2017, 12:13 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage| Link
I said i was "objective", you idiot. Not an Objectivist. By fnord12 | July 30, 2017, 7:20 PM | Boooooks & Liberal Outrage| Link
Do it. Take away their insurance. This is indeed bonkers. By fnord12 | July 29, 2017, 9:11 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
The Great Recession never ended This has seemed obvious but it's good to see it spelled out and quantified. We need a major infrastructure spending stimulus bill. Bernie, Hillary, and Trump all campaigned on one, to various degrees. Hillary's was too small, Trump's relied on private corporations too much, and Bernie's was, ofc, just right (honestly, his could have been bigger too). But at this point anything would help. By fnord12 | July 27, 2017, 2:11 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
More Jersey flooding Scientists: 21 N.J. towns to face chronic flooding by 2035. By fnord12 | July 23, 2017, 11:51 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Pathetic opposition party Between the Thomas Frank editorial Min linked to below and this one by Steven Thrasher, the Guardian is on fire. By fnord12 | July 22, 2017, 11:52 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Main Stream Media is Useless I haven't been able to read most of it for the last year because it's turned into the "All Trump, All the Time" outlet. Thomas Frank on how the media continues to fail: I believe that the news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But as long as they understand that war as a crusade to reestablish the old rules of legitimacy, they are going to continue to fail. Until the day they get it right, the world will burn while the in-crowd parties obliviously on. I'm not holding my breath for the media to eventually "get it". What's worse is the people who still rely on them for information. Ugh. By min | July 21, 2017, 11:42 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link 1st Edition Landsharks By fnord12 | July 21, 2017, 5:49 PM | D&D| Link German is Awesome Add it to my ever-growing list of languages i want to learn. They have words for everything! fremdscham -noun By min | July 21, 2017, 1:50 PM | Good Words| Link The Russian perspective Some nice background from Matt Taibbi. Of course, no amount of rational context is going to defeat this level of ignorance from MSNBC hosts: By fnord12 | July 21, 2017, 11:35 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Recap 79 Traipsing Through Mangar's Training Ground By min | July 20, 2017, 10:31 PM | D&D| Link
Seems like a real liberal champion Kamala Harris seems to be the 2020 candidate that the rich Clinton backers are getting behind. So here is some background on her: As California Attorney General, she was the champion of an extremely punitive truancy law (which mostly affects black and Latino youths). She supported the death penalty. She laughed at marijuana legalization. She supported using prisoners as slave labor. And yet she was not-so-tough on crime when it came to corporate criminals like Steven Mnuchin, now Trump's Treasury Secretary. As a Senator, she's offered tepid, caveat-laden support for Single Payer ("as a concept, I'm completely in support of single payer, but we've got to work out the details, and the details matter on that."). She mainly seems to have come to prominence for her performance in the Russian Show Trials. By fnord12 | July 19, 2017, 3:28 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Why don't they know what they're sponsoring? Whatever you think of BDS, a bill criminalizing it, with a minimum civil penalty of $250,000, and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison, seems insane. Even more insane is that a lot of Democratic sponsors (not just supporters, mind you, but sponsors) of the bill don't even seem to know what is in it. By fnord12 | July 19, 2017, 3:21 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Flooding away Jersey's poor Atlantic City meets climate change. By fnord12 | July 19, 2017, 3:19 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Individuals can't fix structural problems on their own I've been saying this since Al Gore's movie ended with telling us to change our lightbulbs. By fnord12 | July 17, 2017, 11:56 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Thanks for Finally Making a Wonder Woman Movie, I Guess? But... What the FUCK was the bullshit origin story about? Amazons were created by Zeus to soothe Man's violent tendencies? They actually showed a painting of naked women coming out of the sea to drape themselves over warrior men. Plus, Zeus was benevolent and kind and made Man to be the same until Ares corrupted them? WHAT??? I'm pretty sure that is not how the story goes. Zeus was a huge dick. All of the gods were. There was no Garden of Eden paradise situation before Ares/the Serpent came and messed it up. Edith Hamilton is going to come back and kick all your asses. The story I know is the Amazons were souls of women who were victimized and/or murdered by men. Hera and the other goddesses and Hermes took their souls and brought the women back to life on Themyscira. Wonder Woman was sculpted from clay and given life and powers by these same gods. She wasn't the child of Zeus. Ew. In George Perez's run, Zeus actually demands Diana sleeps with him cause he's Zeus and he should get to try out all the pretty girls. *shudder* Yeah, yeah. I know DC turned her into a demi-god in the comics continuity, too. I have been deliberately ignoring that piece of idiocy for the last several years. Successfully, too, until i saw this movie. How much more of an empowerment story is it when you've got women who were abused but are given new life and learn to be warriors and scholars and everything they wanted to be? Compare that to "Zeus created some handmaidens to use their nurturing ways to soften man's natural aggressive tendencies". Argh. I'm so pissed off about this that i'm barely appreciating the scrap they've thrown me by finally, after decades, making this movie. The rest of the movie was fair. Nothing too great, nothing too terrible. Kinda slow in the middle. I did have a problem with the silent exchange between Wonder Woman (nobody calls her WW in the movie, either, which is annoying) and Steve Trevor before they have sex. Look, we live in a society where people think they can say shit like, "Her eyes were saying 'Yes'" or judges might agree that "she implicitly said yes even though she was unconscious". So, while Diana giving Steve the "come hither" expression and Steve correctly interpreting it was totally fine in this context (esp since Diana was physically capable of putting a stop to anything she didn't agree to), i would still like a verbal exchange between the characters because society still needs to learn that while the good guy in the story might get the girl, it shouldn't be taken as a given and he should still ask. By min | July 14, 2017, 12:15 PM | Comics & Movies| Link
Jurassic Parks This week was Dinosaur Week in the Supermega-household. In addition to classics like One Million B.C. and The Giant Behemoth, we watched 4 Jurassic Park movies with various degrees of regret. Jurassic Park 1: Jurassic Park - It was chockful of bad dinosaur science, but wasn't super terrible. I was left with questions though. Other than the girl turning on the lamp when the last thing they wanted to do was draw the attention of the T.Rex, i didn't have too many strong feelings about the characters deserving to be eaten.
After surviving that (Jeff Goldblum, why didn't you just let her fall?), Miss I-Don't-Need-Your-Help continues to wear the blood-soaked jacket as they try to escape the island. Guess who follows. There are just some people you need to break up with and not look back.
They were the most horrible people. They caused the deaths of no less than 3 people and still thought they were the good guys. And in the end, because of Tea Leoni, the pterosaurs escape their enclosure and you see them fly past the main characters' plane. Instead of horror, they basically go, "Ha, I guess they're finding a new place to nest." AND THAT'S IT! "People are going to get killed and eaten. Isn't that heartwarming and amusing?!"
Second, the movie was really about parents sending their teenaged and pre-pubescent sons off to be eaten by dinosaurs. Having come to the realization their children have ruined their lives and their relationship, they arrange for the boys to take a "vacation" in Jurassic World without them. At the airport, mom swears they're going to have "so much fun" and after the kids walk away, dad darkly comments, "So much for that last family breakfast." The film wants you to think he's referring to their divorce, but i know the truth. We were told how many pounds of meat the dinosaur park needs to feed its inhabitants just before the kids are put on the plane. I know what's really going on here. In the end when the parents show up, mom's not crying because she's happy her sons are alive. She's crying because she now has to take them home again. Oddly, this turned out to be the best of the JP movies because of that last fight between the T. Rex and the Plotosaurus. All the human stuff was shit, but the dinosaur fights... This trailer is all true: By min | July 13, 2017, 10:48 PM | Movies| Link Who Carries Paper Anymore? By min | July 13, 2017, 10:38 PM | Ummm... Other?| Link Actually, going veggie is pretty great but i know how you people are Maybe this is the pressure point we needed: either let us regulate the fuck out of these 100 companies or you all have to go vegetarian. By fnord12 | July 13, 2017, 9:13 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Shell game Once again, Democratic discipline broke down. The amendment this time was beaten in committee, 13-10. Two Democrats, Patty Murray and Michael Bennet, both of whom accept a lot of pharmaceutical money, voted no. Interestingly, two Republicans from states bordering Canada who voted for almost exactly the same measure earlier in the year - Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine - now voted no as well. This often seems to happen with controversial bills. The math will allow a large-ish number of members to cast a vote in favor of a popular policy disliked by industry, but if there's any danger of it actually passing, there will suddenly be defectors or converts. The political damage is limited to just a few poor souls who have to wear the unpopular vote. This is why you should never trust a politician like Cory Booker who tells you that he supports your issue but couldn't vote for this particular version of it because of some minor (bullshit) flaw. By fnord12 | July 12, 2017, 7:45 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Why you lie to me, Hasbro? Shoulda sold the rights to ROM to Marvel. No one wants a ROM toy if he can't fight a proper looking Dire Wraith: Also, WTF is a Visionaries' Leoric? By fnord12 | July 11, 2017, 9:50 AM | Comics| Link
Life Comes At You Fast Conservatives: Solar power will never work. Also Conservatives: Solar power is working too well. The linked article is also a good example of why the press sucks. There is absolutely no reason to print the baldfaced bullshit from the utility lobbyists with a straight face. "Unfair to homeowners who do not want or cannot afford their own solar installations" made me snort so hard i nearly lost a nostril. By fnord12 | July 10, 2017, 8:44 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Jersey is a land of contrasts The good: "New Jersey is at the top of the list for having achieved the greatest reduction in our prison population in the country -- a 35 percent decline since 1999." The bad: "New Jersey has the worst racial disparities within our prison population in the country. " Link. By fnord12 | July 8, 2017, 12:10 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
"After 2016, Democrats should pick a side again." Vox was Centrist Central during the primary, so it's interesting to see them increasingly put out pieces like this. By fnord12 | July 7, 2017, 4:18 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Universal programs Dovetailing with Ryan Cooper's article below, Jeff Spross has 4 dumb ideas that the Dems should avoid. By fnord12 | July 6, 2017, 10:41 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link Scourge of the Time Traveling Socialists Odious loser and failed Hillary Clinton campaign strategist, Mark Penn: By fnord12 | July 6, 2017, 10:28 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Frontrunner Bernie By fnord12 | July 5, 2017, 12:20 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Make government simple By fnord12 | July 5, 2017, 12:10 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link |
