Everybody Hits Chris

I actually don't have anything to say about the Oscars incident, other than to assert my continuing belief that violence is even worse than roast-style celebrity jokes. But I also believe, and I'm clinging to that, that nobody but me came up with the joke in the headline, so let the record show that.

for no particular reason pic.twitter.com/FK14B7tJB2

— DMS (@philosofacespin) March 28, 2022

Violent imagery

Kathy Griffin and photographer Tyler Shields, via Slate.

Hi Republicans it is actually never funny when a crazy white person shoots up a church with a semiautomatic weapon, even if it's not really a church or you don't like the people getting shot https://t.co/HsDAE81d05

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 14, 2019

One of the things that made it funny was the utter impossibility of the event it imagined. There is no way this fantasy could be realized on the subject of our #EmperorTrump

Shooting up churches is different.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 14, 2019

And when it happens conservatives like to say that it is caused by mental illness and has nothing to do with Republican politics. Which is, curiously enough, something certain conservative journalists like to say about Donald Trump.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 14, 2019

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 14, 2019

Trump Failing Another Turing Test

Exchange in the comments on yesterday's post:

Me: He doesn't think he can get out of it with a Sharpie, he thinks he can get out of it by denying it "very powerfully", like Putin or MBS. The Sharpie is pro forma, because it's the custom to offer evidence and because the problem is, for a change, so simple that he can do it himself. It's true he was surprised and annoyed that it wasn't good enough for people—that's because he doesn't understand the relationship between evidence and conclusion whereas your approach seems bent on insisting that he does.

Jordan: But at a certain point, he picked up the Sharpie and drew that curve onto the map. In that moment, what was he thinking? Are you saying he wasn't dealing with evidence and conclusion?

(I'm not picking a fight -- I'm genuinely interested and confused.)

I'm not very happy with the post, not just because I haven't succeeded in communicating my idea to the community but even more because I haven't succeeded in communicating it to myself. If we write to find out what our idea is, and that's a huge part of it for me, then I failed. I liked a part of the post nobody's interested in, the first paragraph, and Jordan's stuck on a point I think is obvious.

So I'm not picking a fight either, but I want to try coming at that point from a different direction, if I may, that I've written up a bit before on the Twitter, which is the subject of Trump "joking"—the pattern where he says some abominable thing

Brooks does a funny

Photo from Burritt on the Mountain in Huntsville. Alabama.

David Brooks trotted out his humor-column machine for the first time in a long while, for a piece ("The Moral Indecency of the Away Message"), where the conceit was going to be parody out-of-office messages, but he could only think of one, revealing his suspicion that people who set their email to send an automatic response when they're on vacation are really trying to avoid him while they're available to more important people, like this fantasy correspondent:

As you know, away messages are the most dishonest form of modern communications. When we say we are away on vacation, we actually mean we are on vacation from people who need us more than we need them. If you are the sort of person I normally suck up to, you should know that my sucking up takes no breaks. For you, I am totally plugged in.

He needs to get over that.

Then there's the difficulty of redeeming one's frequent flier miles, which he seems to have confused with the difficulty of resetting a forgotten password, an issue I sympathize with, but it's so padded with distracting improbabilities that it sinks:

Literary Corner: Somebody Else Came Up

Via Observer.

How I Realized That Peace Between Israel and Palestinians Is a Very Important Thing

by Donald J. Trump 

When we had in Saudi Arabia, we had
one of the great conferences in history.
Many of you were there, probably all of you
were there. It was one of the most beautiful
two days, that and China, two of the most
incredible events I have ever seen.
I have never seen anything like it.

And we had, I believe,
58 Muslim countries, the leaders, the kings,
the emirs, the absolute leaders from every —
there was nobody in second place. They
were the leaders of the whole thing.

Reason to write jokes for conservatives:

They'll pay for anything that makes them feel smart.

How we bankrupted Starbucks by spending money in there all day. Via.

Supplement to Steve M's piece on Amazon no. 1 bestseller "Reasons to Vote for Democrats", which many Republicans mysteriously believe is getting bought up by Democrats eager to know the answer, only to find out all the pages are blank. "Blast it, Eleanor, we've been snookered!" Like Steve, I don't think it's Democrats who are buying it:

.@PrisonPlanet 90% of customer reviews give it a five-star rating, so it looks like the buyers like it a lot. Wonder who they are?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 10, 2017