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When You Get What You Wish For…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on September 11, 2025 by chemiclord

I am not even going to pretend to celebrate the miserable life of Charlie Kirk. Not for someone who willfully created this political environment expressing truly heinous and disgusting “opinions.” A man who willfully stoked hatred, and who called for the oppression of the oppressed. A man whose only real guiding principle appeared to be pushing the boundaries of what would be considered proper discourse. He was a real life Twitter troll manifest in flesh, and that is nothing to laud.

If Charlie Kirk wanted people to speak kind of him in death, he probably should have tried not being a worthless, vile, antagonistic, miserable, deplorable piece of rancid pig shit in his life.

I’m not even going to pretend to mourn the death of a man who up until the day he died held the belief that people dying to gun violence was an “unfortunate” acceptable cost for the right to bear arms. Though I suppose one could say that he died for his beliefs, I guess. That’s more than most of his ilk can claim. So, I guess he has that going for him.

And I’m certainly not going to mourn his death when other far more deserving victims that damn day were shot in a school in Colorado. I also think there was another shooting incident elsewhere, but my short digging couldn’t find mention of it thanks to Charlie Kirk burying pretty much all other news outlets in horrible pandering to some sort of comity that he absolutely did not deserve.

I’m also not going to try and shame the reaction from a growing number of the left celebrating the monster’s demise. I really don’t give a shit how uncouth “polite society” might think it is. The amount of political violence aimed towards the left is so tilted against them, that I am not at all surprised that a relatively large segment is going to cheer it finally turning the other way.

This is the world that the right wing created, so the idea that they are appalled that the left would finally start pushing back with the same sort of bitterness and bile should not be the slightest bit surprising. Patience and understanding runs thin over time, and this has been an environment that the political right wing in America has been shaping for a very long time.

Though I strongly suspect, like most of these amoral cretins that perpetuate these shootings, we’re likely to discover that trying to plot their political leanings will be a lesson in futility. The sort of person that decides that shooting someone dead is the next rational step in their lives likely holds very little rational beliefs at all, with the only consistent trait among them of being shaped by the cult of violence that is increasingly finding purchase in every corner of American life and society.

So no, I neither celebrate nor mourn the life and death of Charlie Kirk. He doesn’t deserve my, or anyone’s sympathy. He doesn’t deserve mine, or anyone’s, sorrow. To put it more crudely, fuck Charlie Kirk, the horse he rode in on, and the casket he leaves with. Good riddance, and rest in piss, asshole. You, at least, got exactly what you wished for; which is something I can’t say for most of the victims of gun violence in this country.

If there is one thing that I mourn beyond those who did lose their lives tragically yesterday (it’s actually not entirely clear if anyone in Colorado has died outside of the shooter, because even trying basic current updates for that gets Charlie Fucking Kirk news spit back out by the goddamn AI algorithms), it’s that I already know where this political violence takes us, and it is nowhere good.

As satisfying as it feels to learn that the vile gun advocate died due to gun violence, absolutely no one is going to have the epiphany that all of this is heading towards a massive cliff, and once this train flies over the edge, it’s going to lead to a whole lot more people across all walks of life, winding up dead with their blood flowing in the streets.

The tit-for-tat has only started. Now begins the escalation.

Good luck, America. We’re gonna need it.

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On the Epstein “Conspiracy…”

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on July 12, 2025 by chemiclord

Maybe it’s just because I tend to be skeptical of conspiracies in general, but If I had to offer a loosely-educated guess, the “list” Epstein made basically had every interaction he had with anyone wealthy or powerful, and not necessarily clients.  The creep went out of his way to integrate himself with anyone with any meaningful influence, and I sincerely doubt all of them were interested in buying what he was selling… but it would make for excellent blackmail nonetheless.

I strongly suspect if the “Epstein List” had anything particularly salacious beyond what had already been leaked… someone clout-hunting would have leaked it.

As for the entire “Epstein was murdered” angle, I have yet to see anything particularly compelling about the evidence that can’t be explained by “shitty prison doing shitty prison things.”  Would I be surprised that a shitty prison doesn’t exactly have the best surveillance?  No.  Would it surprise me at all that they still use crappy equipment from the 90s?  Nope.  Would I be astonished that the guards wouldn’t exactly be invested in making sure a pedophile in their midst stayed among the living? Not at all. Am I surprised that Trump is trying to cover this all up because all of it makes him “look bad?”  Not in the slightest.

At the end of the day, I have to believe one of two scenarios.  Either a secret cabal of wealthy and powerful individuals who could have offed Epstein at any number of opportunities decided to choose the worst possible time when he was under the biggest microscope of his life to kill him and guarantee exactly the sort of scrutiny that they spent literally decades trying to avoid, going through an elaborate scheme that would inevitably involve people outside their cabal that had no particular reason to stay silent…

… Or a dude used to a billionaire’s lifestyle was looking at a lifetime in a shitty prison with all his allies, clients, and associates now pretending they never knew him, and decided to check out early while creating exactly the sort of chaos and scrutiny his clients sought to avoid.

I dunno, the most likely scenario seems pretty obvious to me.

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How Democrats Win…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on June 26, 2025 by chemiclord

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on this.

On a purely straightforward, taking solely on its face sense… sure?  There is a lot of truth to this… but there’s also a lot of problems with this stance.

Something I like to say about Democrats is that we aren’t particularly a majority in a traditional political sense.  We are a majority of minority interests.  And yes, there is a degree that Democrats must have a very big tent to have the numbers in order to enact anything.  Yes, such a coalition is going to have a very broad swath of interests, and more than a handful are going to wind up mutually exclusive of others.

(See also: the Gaza and Israel conflict; even in completely good faith, that is a fault line in which what one side wants frequently requires you to outright dismiss the wants of the other.)

But…

There are some groups that some of our caucus want to bring in that have not been shy about what they want from the Democratic coalition, and frankly, what they want should be an utter dealbreaker, even if it means we don’t have the numbers to win elections.

Case in point, every time a politician says we need to court “the white working class?”  Fuck that shit.  The “white working class” hasn’t exactly been secret about what they want.  Sure, they make mouth noises about how they could accept “Democratic Socialism,” but you better not be giving anything to those “people who don’t deserve it,” ya know… like black people, or trans people, or gay people, or unmarried women, etc.

Or when a politician talks about “courting moderates.”  Yeah, we’ve already fucking done that.  The right flank of the Democratic Party are people who would be conservatives if it wasn’t for the outright vile bigotry and deplorable vileness of the current GOP.  Anybody worth poaching from the center right has already been fucking poached.  You’re looking at a rounding error number of voters at this point.

And there’s a degree that I get it. The nature of such a coalition is going to lead to most of us being largely unsatisfied with the end result of all the jockeying and pandering and compromise.  The problem is rather than accept that, a critical mass of us would rather embrace conspiracy theories and that a minority of the party has somehow managed to seize the levers and are using it solely for their gain at the expense of everyone else in the coalition.

And it’s not just “one side” that does this, either.  There is just as much centrist bellyaching when a “progressive” wins (just listen to some of the whining in the aftermath of this NYC mayoral primary… or how AOC deviously uprooted an establishment Dem by… (checks notes)… actually interacting with constituents of her district and earning their trust ) as there is when leftists insist that “centrist Dems” like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice with the nefarious scheme of… (checks notes)… getting millions more primary votes than Bernie Sanders.

A lot of the times when I hear talking heads mumble about “expanding the coalition” what I hear is, “I would rather waste my time looking for some mythical silent majority of secret socialists or secret liberals than try to work with the people already in the tent.”

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On Doctors and Disrespect…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on June 22, 2024 by chemiclord

Well… that was an interesting Friday evening, wasn’t it?

A former Twitch employee seemingly fresh of a lapsed NDA, Cody Conners, decided to drop this little tactical nuke into the middle of social media as the weekend began:

Now, I’m not going to do a terribly deep dive into the fallout, mostly because I couldn’t give one tenth of one shit about the court of public opinion or the number of keyboard warriors who don’t understand the context of “innocent until proven guilty” (here’s a primer, the general public is under no obligations that a criminal court is, even if the general public should pump the breaks more often when it comes to source-less allegations and accusations).

I’m also generally not one who likes to speculate on things with incomplete evidence, but in the case of a general five-tool asshole like Dr. Disrespect… why not? Especially since there’s a lot that really doesn’t seem to add up and piecing together how it could have went down is a relatively amusing thought exercise. For example… why didn’t Twitch do anything other than ban him? Shouldn’t the police have gotten involved? Etc…

So here’s my shot at it.

My guess is that Dr. Disrespect was absolutely sliding into the DMs of a girl under 18 and getting freaky. However, that isn’t necessarily a crime. Depending on the state, the age of consent is actually 16. Some other countries are even lower. Right there, you have a fairly simple explanation why you weren’t seeing any arrests.

With that said, even if what he did wasn’t a crime, Twitch wouldn’t have liked the idea of a thirty-something high profile streamer (that they had just paid a lot of money to) having text sex with someone under the national voting age on their platform. A platform that Twitch’s parent company, really wanted to market as a non-controversial place for people of all ages.

Twitch then paid a lot more money for him to go away, and Dr. Disrespect got really really quiet about the… well… disrespect. At least, until a former employee decided to throw red meat into the barracuda filled waters known as Twitter.

(Yes, I refuse to call it X. Eat my ass, Elon.)

But at the end of the day, regardless of whether my speculation is correct or not, my thoughts on this doctorate of clownery are the same today as they were four years ago. We’re talking about a company who didn’t even cut bait with this man when he led a camera crew into a public bathroom with children in it that did get a prosecutor asking questions. So, whatever it was that the sick doctor did, it probably wasn’t good, and he probably doesn’t deserve terribly much respect.

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So Jon Stewart Did a Thing…

Posted in Grumblings with tags , , , , on February 13, 2024 by chemiclord

I have… reasonably positive memories of Jon Stewart during his first run under the bright lights of the late night TV talk-o-sphere. The Daily Show under his run had some surprisingly deep dives into the sorts of issues that the people whose job it supposedly was refused to do. He spoke (meager) truth to power in the ways that our “legacy media” either couldn’t (or actively wouldn’t) do.

But at the same time, I had noticed he had started falling for the same “both sides” horse-race driven nonsense of the people he long criticized for a while. When he stepped away, I had thought that part of the reason was because he had recognized that after some self-reflection.

(Some behind-the-scenes revelations that he struggled with internal biases and race-related prejudice didn’t endear me, either, for what its worth.)

So, I was not eagerly awaiting his return to the bright lights as much as some might have thought. I saw very little evidence that he had done the soul-searching necessary to find the groove he had during his first run on The Daily Show from the few appearances he had done in the interim.

And as a result, I was not particularly surprised that when he made his grand return… he pretty much sounded exactly like the media he once loathed, just with his typical bombast and comedic delivery.

Now, the issue here really isn’t the facts. Both men are exceedingly old. The problem is that the facts in this case don’t tell us anything particularly useful and obscure and muddy the facts that actually matter… the exact same game that the legacy media used and Jon Stewart railed against for so very long.

Joe Biden is 81. Donald Trump is 77. If I wanted these sort of cutting observations, I could find it… well… at every other legacy media outlet in the United States of America. The only thing Jon is doing differently is the delivery.

As far as the cognitive issues go; would I be surprised to learn that Biden has lost a step (or two, or three)? Nope. Dude’s 81. My grandmother at 79 couldn’t even remember the names and faces of her own children. I’d be more astonished if he was as sharp as he ever was.

But when I see Donald Trump struggling to put two thoughts together coherently without going off on some completely unrelated tangent, I refuse to believe that we (as a collective) genuinely care about this issue. It’s just the same “bothsides” nonsense to try and sound impartial without actually putting in the work to inform us as a society why it actually matters.

I really don’t care how Donald Trump pronounces “Pennsylvania.” I care about how he apparently can’t tell Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi apart.

Cognition failings should matter, just not in the way that we’re choosing it matters. The Office of the President of the United States is one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the world. Someone who says things like he would invite Russia to bully and invade members of an alliance when they don’t pay up (demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how said alliance works while recalling a conversation that nigh assuredly did not happen in the way he claims it did, if it happened at all), probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the office, for example.

Or if they slip up and say “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” at a press conference.

If you don’t want to see the difference between those two observations, then there’s little I or anyone can say that will make you.

But you’re supposed to be better than that, Jon. Or… at least, you tell us repeatedly that you are.

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