Sadly, No!

Satanism. In a bottle.

Timothy Whiteman (No, I’m not making that name up. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an on-the-nose writer name in all my time writing for Sadly, No!), The Wingnut Examiner.com:
Trayvon’s Skittles, Arizona Iced Tea and something called “Purple Drank”

So as the overlong and bizarrely descriptive title notes, we’ve made some big changes behind the scenes that we’d let you all know about.

The biggest news?

We have moderators now! Yup, Sadly, No! has finally grown up and put on its big boy pants and upgraded some of you to the super-envious position of mucking out our shit so us glorious front-pagers do not have to stain our royal spats whilst we fop around on our gilded carriages.

So yeah, Big Bad Bald Bastard, bbkf, Oregon Beer Snob, and VCarlson have joined us behind the scenes to help take care of business and so far have been doing a fantastic job that we on the writing team are greatly appreciative of. Who knows, later on, we might even fix the blog roll or our contact page or stop running the site on daily sacrifices to Vishnu. The sky’s the limit, baby!

Additionally?

We might try organizing some meatspace reader meetups for those who are interested in it. The conversation in the last thread about a potential future Chicago meetup makes me think a West Coast meetup sometime could be fun.

Beyond that, we on the front page have been using Google+ Hangouts to confer and plot our dread master Soro’s will, so that’s the cheap and free option sometime in the future if people are interested in doing an e-meetup sometime.

Also, we are planning to update some of the other pages of the site so that they include modern additions.

But enough about all that. Let’s jump straight to the wingnuttery!

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• EEEEEEE! Trayvon Martin wasn’t some kid bringing home a drink and some candy for his little brother! He was a black person! I mean DRUGGIE! Doing vile evil drugs like… cough syrup because… if it turned out he used a traditional young-person method of getting drunk on the cheap and without having to show ID despite their being literally zero evidence this ever occurred then it would mean he was a criminal and therefore perfectly legal to shoot… right?

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I have found it on occasions, recently, difficult to breath, to peer throught the veil of tears while processing the loss of one of my betters. The fact that I have to attempt this encomium in a public venue, while choking back tears, adds to the adventure.

Doghouse Riley has shuffled off his mortal coil at the age of 59. I am not sure exactly where I saw his first comment, eventually leading me to his blog, but I have read everything the dude wrote there and it was always brilliant. Born in a retrograde state that somehow managed to produce Vonnegut and Riley, I have managed to find a small measure of solace and pride in the place in which I was born as a result.

There is a pantheon of writers online that I aspire to and realize an unlikliness to join. Douglas Case was one of them. His humour, humility, sagacity and singular brilliance will be missed, dearly.

Another scribe has suggested that Twain would be looking over his shoulder had Riley been a contemporary. I cannot disagree.

R.I.P.
…

“White Heaven is for decent, good, God-fearing Christians who just happen to, well, hate everyone and everything relating to black people. That means no Muhammad Ali, no hip-hop music and no fucking Jesse Jackson.”

Alan Keyes, Rød America:
Which race is truly victimized?

Flip. Post about Zimmerman. Flip. Post about Zimmerman. Flip. Post about Zimmerman.

It is often said, by us heartless demonic liberals that conservatives suffer from a failure of empathy. Unable to put themselves in the shoes of those who are suffering. Those who have less of the advantages shitbird conservatives squander. Those who are brutalized and oppressed at their hands.

And while those things are, one might say, a wee bit DUH. I would strongly argue that these failures are NOT due to a lack of empathy. Hell, I would even go one step beyond and argue that conservatives are FULL of empathy.

Look no further than George Zimmerman, child murderer, wife beater, and possibly more. Conservatives just can’t stop empathizing with him and his “suffering”, placing themselves in his shoes, identifying with his paranoia and gun nuttery, the way mean old liberals view him as a racist just because of a couple of incredibly racist incidents like stalking and murdering a kid for being black in his neighborhood. Can’t stop feeling sorry for him being the coddled child of a politically connected figure whose various soldiers can be counted on to bail him from whatever “oops” he might get himself into. Can’t stop fantasizing about how it must have felt to live the dream of getting away with offing one of those filthy escaped slaves.

Much like they had trouble pulling themselves away from identifying with Anders Breivik or Scott Roeder.

No, they have empathy in spades. What they lack is imagination. They can empathize with someone perfectly as long as they are a tribe member, have the same paranoid overprivileged fears as them, the same soft-life uneasiness that leads to barricading oneself in one’s gated community with a small hillside of guns and ammunition and chattering one’s teeth at the thought of encountering someone with a tan. Is in essence, nearly 100% just like them, or at least, what they’d like to be if they had the ovaries to live their ideals in the way these murderers did.

What they have a harder time with is imagining what it’s like to not be a terrible person. What it’s like to be the target in the guns, the victim of the paranoia, the poor regular person just trying to get by in a world they made wretched. Which often leads to the twin defining aspects of modern conservatism. 1) IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION and the way they displace themselves on their enemies because if all you can imagine is yourself, then your enemies must just be twice as you so you can be the good guys and of course 2) Bizarre conspiracy laden justifications for the horrible people and actions they end up actually identifying with. Ways in which it’s not their fault or someone else made them do it.

And to this stage, up steps Alan Keyes.
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No flashing ahead to the results of this poor decision.

There is a drinking activity known as “shotgunning”, I say like the complete teetotaler I am (Hey guys, did you know you can ferment vegetables or fruits in order to induce an altered state of consciousness? Oh, really? Majority of the sum of human history has already known this? Oh.). Usually this technique is employed in college party circles where finances and lack of palate ensure that the beer on offering is only of the lowest quality possible and thus quickly imbibing is one’s only hope for saving one’s taste buds the agony of being able to remember drinking Bud Light or PBR (Is it wrong that when I drink, I mostly like to drink for taste? The answer is yes. Extremely. Bad Cerberus.), I say as if you didn’t already know this.

Well, the point I was trying to get to before you so rudely interrupted me, random imaginary reader, is this. Oftentimes, when I dive into the floating cheap beer infested swimming pool that is Outer Wingnuttistan, I drink carefully and slowly, swirling every rotted mango microbrew failure around for true palate immersion.

And while this is clearly a solid method for ensuring a long, prosperous and not at all prone to food poisoning life, sometimes, my taste buds, having listened to vile liberal college professors, decide to go on strike and demand the sweet release that only a binge drinking purge can provide.

So who am I to deny the tortured metaphor any further? Let jam the sharpened blade in and guzzle deep of whatever may have once resembled dignity among these overwrought wastes of space.

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As a non entity, I used to peruse the front page here on at least a weekly basis for years, and then discovered the comment section* and decided that I really enjoyed the community that had assembled here. I lurked for awhile before diving in and becoming one of you. It is generally how I roll (getting to know the ways, customs and flow of a place before opening my big fat mouth.)

During what I would call my tenure here (starting about the time I would cough up hairballs of hopefully humorous (thanks Manq) gibberish in the comment section) there have been a number of changes in personae in the place, both above and below decks.

I would like to assure the patrons of this place that Management (currently comprising of previous patrons and possibly an original or two) is looking into the least invasive pesticide solutions to deal with the Dutch Elm situation that has become a concern.

In the interim, please set your default response to ignoring** and while I have sympathy for some of the badinage, patience is ebbing.

Nymjacks of the turd will end up in the sewer along with the turd.

Consider this a navel gazing open thread, penis gags and puns a go go.

*and all of the lovely and brilliant and funny people, some of whom I had crossed paths with in other places, yet many others that were new to me and fucking hilarious.

**Don’t take the bait.

If the source you quote to support your argument is yourself, would it be reasonable to expect that you can properly quote what you wrote not even one year ago? Not if you’re Megan McArdle.

Original argument:

Between 1992 and 2008, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded rose almost 50 percent, from around 1.1 million to more than 1.6 million. According to Vedder, 60 percent of those additional students ended up in jobs that have not historically required a degree–waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier.

[Emphasis added and really, mail carriers?]

Not yet a year later, what has become of this “fact”? New Coke version:

Yet playing with the interest rate on student loans is not going to give much of a boost to the middle class when already 60 percent of college graduates are taking jobs that haven’t traditionally required a college degree. Better educated waitresses may be a fine thing for America, but is it really bolstering our bourgeoisie?

[Emphasis added, misquoting in the original.]

I would call it a big jump to go from 60% of of the additional 500,000 college grads taking jobs that have “historically” not requiring a college degree to 60% of all college grads taking up jobs as waiters, etc… As in, a jump from 300,000 to 960,000. Must be one of those it’s a hypothetical, not a statistic sort of thing.

Shorter Rep. Steve King, The Poor Man’s America’s Shittiest Website™
Rep. Steve King Slams Norquist Over Attacks on Immigration

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Step One: Determine whether you want a husband or a beard.

Suzanne Venker, Rupert Murdoch’s Flesh-Eating Taint… News:
Men — the new second class citizens

I was recently on vacation (to the place where I was raped… no, no, it was way awesomer than you’re imagining and WAY less triggering that I had been bracing myself for*) and so was unable to deliver the swift ballkicking this post so richly deserves in any timely fashion. But that hardly means I should let such an easy target pass by without retroactively applying some ballkickification (totally a real world).

Why? Well…

Verbatim (Yes, these words were typed without anyone spontaneously bursting into flames):

• From boyhood through adulthood, the White American Male must fight his way through a litany of taunts, assumptions and grievances about his very existence. His oppression is unlike anything American women have faced.

Yes, a paean to how White American Men are the most oppressed Amateur Mode whiners on the face of the planet!

Published June 12th.
Read the rest of this entry »

A quick and dirty one to relieve the pressure on the bilge. I started a variation of the following theme a month or three at Roy’s place and will revive it here. The gag revolves around starting with the masthead of a place previously unknown and a comment on the first sentence or paragraph leaving the rest for you ravening hounds and kittens. Let’s begin with the Masthead: There is a veritable life raft laden with mangoes in the following image. Have at the delicious bounty.

We are gonna deal with the first sentence in this case: “Sheeple is an oft used word when people describe the manipulations exhibited the current Executive Branch and POTUS administration.”

[blink, blink, stares across the sidewalk, glances admiringly on the newly installed parking meters, blink, blink] I got nothing for now, so consider this an open thread, I may cough up something else after work.
…

I’ll admit up front that I paid very little attention to the trial of Trayvon
Martin George Zimmerman. The bits and pieces that did fall into the bit bucket
confirmed for me the correctness of this strategy. Having read a raft of commentary from
the legal perspective of the particular reading of the Floridian implementation of the
“Stand your ground” “law” last summer, led me to the conclusion that “shoot a Nigger and
claim self defense” had become the law of that land. There are times when discretion is
the better part of valor when it comes in service to the maintenance of a semblance of
sanity.

When the story initially broke, I thought that something smelled funky in Denmark, but
felt inclined to wait before waltzing to a conclusion, though when initial details emerged:
I.E. the recording of the conversation with the police dispatcher, I knew that I had witnessed
my first lynching. When I saw a picture of a group of Zimmies including a guy (white) wearing
a hoodie holding on to a pack of skittles and some tea; when I read that Zimmerman had
crowd-sourced nearly a hundred thousand dollars through a paypal account, I became certain
that I had witnessed an actual “high tech lynching.”

Young Black men have always been acceptable targets for murder most foul. Clarence Thomas
himself was completely aware of this fact when he cynically employed the phrase “high tech
lynching” as his defense agains the allegations of Anita Hill during his confirmation
hearings.

I love hyperbole. It is my stock in trade and in general I appreciate its employment, but
Thomas tried to gut-fuck that pooch to death in what might constitute the first salvo in
the Republican war on shame or on anything else that might fall within the realm of the
genteel.

They have been successful. While it should be hyperbole to state that Trayvon
Martin was lynched, it is not. There was no rope involved, but that matters not.
There were no post-cards of crowds bearing witness, but that matters not. There was not even
a white girl/woman involved, but that matters not. What matters, and makes this a high tech
lynching is the fact that armed with the indesputible fact that Zimmerman sought out and
shot an unarmed teenager, millions of people surged forth in support of the man that tied
the rope around Trayvon’s neck. And now millions celebrate Zimmerman’s release…There is
your lynch mob.

I have been trying to search for a small bit of funny in this affair and have failed, miserably.