plus ça change, huh?
I’ve been browsing editorial cartoons tonight (gosh, I’ve wasted an improbable chunk of my life staring at Google Images). Made me fink.
You have to go back a hundred years before the ideas and the artwork strike me as worthy. Like this one, from 1919 (who doesn’t revile “the mad notions of Europe”? Amirite?). Of course, these days you find these old gems mostly in course syllabi for How Our Ancestors Were, Like, Totally Retarded 101.
Editorial cartoons from about the mid-20th C onward are mostly lefty. And ugly. (One exception would be Michael Ramirez, who I think is a flipping editorial cartoon conservative mad genius).
And at some point they stopped trying to persuade the other side (me, IOW) and went straight for enrage. Ideas were replaced with ciphers. Like if they could hang a label on something (“red scare” or “McCarthyism”), they didn’t have to address the issue (whether the government ever was really and truly infested with commies and whether that’s done us any favors).
I don’t know. Maybe cartoons always made somebody mad. You’d have to ask a lefty whether Ramirez cartoons make him irrationally angry. But the modern stuff just seems awfully heavy on snark and ridicule. And they punch down (or at least sideways) more often than they punch up.
October 14, 2015 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 8
Today’s the day! Callooh callay!
This is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this is the day supermarkets in Britain which have more than 250 employees are required by law to charge customers 5p for a shopping bag.
They can do what they like with the money they collect, provided it goes to a ‘worthy cause.’ One worthy cause might be a charity for providing free shopping bags to Britons pissed off by radical green legislation that keeps making it through Parliament somehow, even though they never win an election anywhere, ever (except Brighton, ’nuff said). Bets are, the Prime Minister’s bobble-headed soft-left wife is behind this one.
The papers have decided on a sarky approach to the general public disgruntlement. And the disgruntled general public is inclined to be sarky right back about the difference it’s gonna make to ‘the environment.’
See, when they did this in Wales, supermarket bag use was reduced by 71%. Which looks like a minor something useful until you reflect that those supermarket bags have been replaced by ‘bags for life’ — which, naturally, aren’t for life. Duh. They use roughly ten times the plastic, cost about ten times as much and last about ten times as long as regular bags. That’s what we call a wash. Except, if you reuse them enough, they pick up all sorts of nifty bugs from your raw food.
Today we went shopping, put our stuff in ‘bags for life’ — and bought a roll of small garbage bags for the kitchen messy bin, where recycled carrier bags used to do. Take that, gaia! Virtue signalling is my new favorite term of abuse.
Truth is, this is just one more pointless, pushy lefty inconvenience in a life made increasingly pinched and gray by neopuritan gesture politics.
October 5, 2015 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 15
Hey, I just report the news
The headline: Salmon Spawns on Obama’s Shoes
The quote: “You see that?” Obama declared Wednesday as he gripped a fish with two hands. “Something’s got on my shoes.”…Generally you don’t want fish spawning on your feet. He said the local fisherwoman who accompanied him said the fish was “happy to see me.”
There’s video. Knock yourselves out.
September 3, 2015 — 8:40 pm
Comments: 6
Hillary’s excellent explanation
I find this mesmerizing.
August 19, 2015 — 9:15 pm
Comments: 13
Can I just get the t-shirt?
I was banging around the web today — following a link that led to a link that led to another link, deeper and deeper into the forest — when I was startled to find myself invited to join the Knights Templar.
“Oooooo!” went the little rogue braincell that plays Skyrim and yearns to LARP.
They’re vague about who they are and what they’re doing. The news on site is topically British, but the domain was registered out of Arizona. They’re equally vague on what they want to do, though it’s obviously pro-Christian and anti-Islam. It’s £60 British or $90 Murican, which seems steep for something I don’t know what the hell it is all about.
I poked around a little. According to the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH), there are 1,700 groups calling themselves Templars. Which they are perfectly entitled to do. This includes the branch of the Masons that is explicitly Christian.
So, is this one a genuine grassroots movement of some kind or an opportunistic scam? Who knows. Love their t-shirts, though.
July 22, 2015 — 9:10 pm
Comments: 11
Oh, good. Her.
Oh, good – Meghan McCain is back on the telly. The best line in the article I just linked:
Meghan McCain, who has identified as a Republican in the past…
LOL at the phraseology. Bruce Jenner identifies as a woman. Furries identify as otherkin. Meghan McCain identifies as a Republican (no, wait, not even that…she has done in the past).
If the picture doesn’t ring a bell, I first posted it shortly after this incident, when Meghan tweeted a picture of herself holding up a book and two tits.
Woman gets on my nerves, in case you can’t tell.
Anyway, I had hoped to share some nuggets of McCainiac wisdom with you tonight, but I forgot: Meghan blocked me on Twitter, ages ago. The only person who ever blocked me on Twitter.
I hope I was really mean.
July 16, 2015 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 12
Jack Ma’s huge head and tiny face fill me with awe
Jack Ma, founder of Ali Baba. Richest man in China. Actually he sounds like a cool guy, but he looks so strange, I actually googled to see if he had some kind of weird metabolic disorder I shouldn’t make fun of.
Nope, just freaky looking.
China, if you haven’t paid attention, is in deep shit.
On the domestic front, Uncle B and I have just trimmed and washed nine flipping pounds of gooseberries for the freezer. Gooseberries. They’re a misery.
Also, my pickled carrots have had eight days of the seven to nine I was supposed to give them. They’re delicious. I’ve put them in the fridge.
Does anyone know…now they’re in the cool, do I need to keep burping them?
July 7, 2015 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 13
Cheez it! It’s Angela!
I wonder how many Greeks, in their heart of hearts, think a No vote means they don’t have to give the money back?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to see someone – anyone – kick Europe in the nuts, but it’s awfully hard to see how Greece is going to wriggle out of this.
Janet Daley was good on this score.
July 6, 2015 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 18
Big brother is gay
I’ve been avoiding politics. I like to see myself as a happy warrior, so when I’m pissed, I post about freaking carrot sticks and mothereffing roses. It’s not one thing, it’s all kinds of things lurching in bad directions at the moment, but the gay marriage thing is the one that really got up my nose.
Not so much gay marriage itself (or, as I like to think of it, gay “marriage”), but the arrogance and mediocrity of the Supremes. Another 5/4 decision where the opinion of the five are completely incompatible with the opinion of the four. If that’s not a metaphor…
…happy thoughts…happy thoughts…
Anyway. I wanted to make sure you saw this. Those of you on FaceBook will know that FB provided a little app that would overlay your avatar with a rainbow in honor of the SCOTUS ass-reaming we all got. The Daily Mail is claiming this was a data mining tool to gauge (and possibly manipulate) popular opinion on the subject.
FaceBook denies it, but it’s plausible. They did something similar a few years ago, where you could overlay your avatar with an equals sign (for “marriage equality” natch). They then tapped that data to track attitudes. I find this all very creepy, but I am comfortable in the knowledge I put an absolute minimum amount of data into my FaceBook (either of them; the weasel has an account, too).
What surprised me is how few of my friends did the rainbow thing. I mean, not YOU guys. I knew YOU wouldn’t have any part of it. But most of my friends from back home (I’m sorry to say) are liberals of one kind or another. Yes, even the Southern ones (sometimes especially the Southern ones). I saw maybe three avatars with the rainbow.
Maybe things aren’t quite as bad as they look.
July 1, 2015 — 9:51 pm
Comments: 17
Keeping our priorities straight
June 22, 2015 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 16