Shit that Pissed me Off – 5/4/18
Comedian Roasts the President and Everyone is Pissed off – At Her
The White House Correspondents dinner was this weekend. It is an event in which a comedian is hired to roast the President and the White House Press Corps. For the second year in a row, Donald Trump opted not to attend.
Because he’s a coward who isn’t capable of listening to a single negative thing said about him. That alone should piss you off. Donald Trump is a coward. Doesn’t matter the awful things that may or may not have been said. He couldn’t take the softest of softball jokes about him.
At least he knows it, I guess. So he holds a campaign event where everyone loves him and then tweets about an event he didn’t attend like some kind of smug asshole. Which is the role he was born to play.
I did an internet search for smug asshole and this was one of the top five results!
Michelle Wolf spoke truth to power and she didn’t pull punches. The predictable result was conservative politicians upset because she made jokes about Trump’s pussy grabbing (he said it you magnanimous fucks) and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ lies (not her appearance – watch the actual video).
In the end, she called out the press and that is probably why they turned against her. She pointed out that whether or not the press corps likes Trump, they made him. They profit from him and even as Trump takes unending potshots at them, they are secretly happy to have him around.
She then pointed out that Flint still doesn’t have clean water.
You can complain that she wasn’t telling a joke when she said that. You can even argue that her comedy routine wasn’t funny (I laughed but comedy is subjective). But the fact is her final message – that all of this is bullshit because the people of Flint should be able to drink water and none of us give a fuck about that any more – got lost amidst reporters falling all over themselves to feel sorry for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Newspaper Prints Uncensored KKK Flyer on Front Page
The headline on this article is misleading because it suggests the paper was supporting the Klan intentionally.
They weren’t. They reported there was KKK activity in Colonial Beach, Virginia and reproduced a flyer that had been handed out. They were careful to say they did not support the KKK, they were just reporting the news.
And that’s true.
But if you are going to reproduce part of a KKK recruitment flyer, maybe you shouldn’t include the contact information.
Maybe they were thinking that including the phone number would result in a lot of anti-klan messages being left on what I assume is a voice mail system because no idiot would just hand out their phone number like that without screening the calls, would they?
I mean, they are a white supremacist asshole so it’s possible they would.
Even so, in addition to giving the number to anti-klan pranksters, they gave the number to thousands of people who might actually be interested in joining the klan.
Those people were already racist so maybe I shouldn’t be so upset. But why help?
Meme that Pissed me Off
I’m anti-gun but I still try to maintain an open mind on the subject. I believe there is room for people to own guns responsibly while still finding ways to increase public safety. Don’t ask me what it is because I don’t actually know. But I think saying “get rid of all the guns” is as useless a starting point as “guns are not a problem and I want all the guns!”
So memes like this are the worst.
First off, you have to give the creator of this meme credit for some fat shaming right at the end there. Well done, owner of multiple guns!
But the bigger issue here is the idea that tools are all created the same. The function of a pencil is to allow you to put writing on a piece of paper. It is not to make you a better speller. The function of a car is to allow you to rapidly move from place to place and stop using the car example anyway because driving is heavily regulated! Driving drunk is illegal! And you need hours of practice before you can get your driver’s license!
Spoons are designed to get soup to your mouth. And I love soup. So lay off the spoons. And the fat shaming.
Guns are designed to kill. You can say all you like about the person firing the gun ultimately being responsible. I agree. But when you make it easy for an incredibly efficient killing tool to get into the hands of someone who wants to use it to do exactly what it was designed to do, I feel like there is a fair conversation to be had.
You can also kill people with a pencil. Or a car. Or even a spoon. But that is not what they were designed to do and they don’t do it nearly as efficiently!
So no, I don’t want anyone’s guns (or their spoons). But I’d like the conversation to be built around something other than bullshit false equivalences like this one.
Speaking of drinking water in Flint, Michigan, three black teenagers from Washington, D.C. actually did some work on water purification. Their project was so compelling, it became a finalist in the NASA High School Competition, that challenges kids to use NASA technology to solve real world problems. They are the only all black finalist team this year.
Part of the judging system is a public vote. And the teens were doing OK until a bunch of racist fuckwits decided that the only reason three black girls were getting votes was because black people were voting for them and that wasn’t fair!
So when racist trolls on the internet get upset about people of color (and women) enjoying any kind of success (earned or not), they go on a massive campaign to ruin that success!
Their reach was such that NASA was forced to shut down public voting (good for them) because the vote had been tainted.
I’m sure the racist dirtbags consider the result a win. Because even if the girls win, the racists can just claim they would have lost if online poll results had been factored in so the win doesn’t really count.
So what did we learn? That racist jackasses care more about their own petty bullshit than they do about clean drinking water.
And they have that in common with our President.
Grail Diary 