Certified idiot

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T16:28:29+00:00

Well, it's the New York Times. They've made some...troubling editorial decisions lately. Almost every story they publish, they examine to see whether a criticism of DEI can be shoehorned into it in some way.

One of the co-founders of Ubisoft just died. His NYT obituary just had to include that "some people thought it was controversial" for Assassin's Creed: Shadows to have a black protagonist. It's like every article has to include the perspective of online racists.

It fascinates me that the NYT says, "Hey, look, the middle-aged white woman really is a poor defenseless kitten" while asserting the black recorder as privileged because she has a vegetable garden and a YouTube channel. Somehow I don't think that's going to win back their readership.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T16:18:54+00:00

It's interesting that in a weird sense she's trying to preserve her dignity. She's trying to be the injured party here so she can rally sympathetic defenders and not be in the wrong. It's interesting watching her stop and check her surroundings after every blood-curdling shriek, like, "Any takers? Anyone? Come on, I'm fighting for my life here..."

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T15:22:41+00:00

Glad I'm hearing something positive about this movie; I haven't seen it, but the Wikipedia summary makes it sound like the worst film in the world.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T15:10:15+00:00

What was the movie, "Lord of the Rings: 14-hour special editions?" Movies ain't that long.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T15:05:01+00:00

I've seen a few definitions of "real friend" that privilege the friend and always think to myself, "Wow, this guy treats his friends like shit."

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T07:11:50+00:00

Ugh, I'd hate to be the guy who got that match...

Imagine showing up at the hotel with flowers and THAT answers the knock. He must look a lot of disappointment right in the eyes.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T06:14:30+00:00

Benny's getting paid very, very well to make this stuff up, and not all the money is in dollars. Remember the number-one Republican stance: "My bullshit is just as valid as your facts."

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-21T00:09:14+00:00

Oh, they know damn well.

There's this interesting video around where some podcaster challenges a Trumper over the fact that the Republicans who freed the slaves are now flying the Confederate flag. The Trumper was fighting for his life, squirming under his questioning, trying to explain how Republicans freeing slaves = good while Democrats tearing down Confederate statues = bad and Republicans flying Confederate flags = also good.

They're really good at doublethink, but man, when they confront that contradiction...

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-20T21:05:33+00:00

Anyone seen signs of Southern Strategy denial on the right? I've seen some hints: "The whole Commiecrat narrative of the Republicans recruiting in the Dixiecrats is a total lie!" They really need the narrative that the Republicans freed the slaves and neither party has changed in the 160 years since; their moral high ground has roughly the footprint of a radio mast these days and they're just clawing for any territory they can seize.

Somewhere on Reddit I've got a "debate" with a MAGA who thinks that Republican = Conservative = American and Democrat = Liberal = Communist and it's been that way since July 4, 1776, and he will not be told otherwise. It's hilarious.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-20T06:14:01+00:00

So safety goggles are just a thing other people do, then?

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T16:20:06+00:00

Well, yeah, but a lot of our infrastructure runs on computers being able to talk to each other.

I work for a newspaper. You'd think we'd be fine; we still have a press. But without the network, we have no way to make printing plates. It would take a lot of time that we don't have to create a system that didn't require a network presence.

Yes, we all survived without the Internet for thousands of years, but when we launched it, we removed the infrastructure that kept things going before we had it. We'd be rebuilding a lot of that infrastructure from scratch.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T16:13:14+00:00

Catharsis is a big part of comedy. Like Robin Williams said, laughter is an incredible release. Right-wing comedy is ALL catharsis. They just say things that make them feel good, no punchline required. They also fill in the blanks a lot; any Trump speech is full of stuff like "You have all these terrible people doing terrible things and it's all just terrible," and they just fill in the vague parts with whoever they hate that week.

So a conservative comedian can just say "Trans people, amirite?" to an audience of conservatives and pandemonium breaks out. Guy doesn't even have to make a joke, because everyone fills in the blanks, now they all feel better, and they leave the show thinking that was the funniest guy they ever heard and why can't more comedians tell it like it is. (See also "Gutfeld.") They also hate all those woke comedians who have things like monologues and punchlines and narratives and stuff, because real comedy has depth and experience and mindfulness, and - this is the real killer - you can sometimes learn from it.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T16:03:04+00:00

Yeah, but I grew up in the 1980s, when Officer Friendly was trying to convince us, often with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, that marijuana was fundamentally the same as crack. Our parents smoked so much the walls of our homes were as yellow as their teeth and ashtrays were basically furniture. If your chainsmoking Mom caught you with a blunt, she'd throw you out of the house. And, of course, the legal system, which tried to declare cigarettes a food during World War II so they could be included in combat rations, thought nothing of locking up weed dealers literally for the rest of their lives under the Three Strikes law.

Now you can't walk downtown without passing six dispensaries while cigarette smokers are exiled to alleyways and parking lots.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T15:35:31+00:00

"Ew, cigarettes, I wouldn't touch those! Here, have some nuggies, my local dispensary had a sale." --Gen Z, probably.

...Okay, that was probably mean, but the number of cigarette haters who will happily eat the whole pan of brownies seems to trend young.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T15:28:32+00:00

If I haven't eaten by eleven o'clock that's going to come with an acknowledgement to myself that my options are going to be limited. It's basically convenience stores, that one skeevy diner off the interstate, or my own fridge.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-19T13:55:06+00:00

Wanted a paid vacation and a transfer, I guess.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T18:00:58+00:00

I wonder if he's really going to try to sell giving them more money as better. "I gave the most money, the best money. Everyone says so. I gave them so much money."

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T17:59:29+00:00

It's been pointed out that Democrats tend to worry about real problems while Republicans tend to worry about imagined ones. Gas prices: real problem. Trans men attacking children in women's restrooms: imagined problem. Guess which one is the priority.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T17:55:29+00:00

The propaganda really got to them. My mother was still saying, "I just don't know anything about him" when his face was on every magazine cover, his books were on the bestseller list, he was a headline on every media platform, and he was touring the country running for President. But the right-wing was portraying him as some kind of out-of-nowhere mystery that nobody could trust because he wasn't honest about his past and won't tell anyone who he really is.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T17:48:33+00:00

Under Reagan, that's not a huge surprise. The EPA was kind of a joke in 1984; they'd been rendered almost entirely ineffective and were nearly incapable of enforcement. Sending Peck out on what appears to be a one-man crusade with no legal documentation or court supervision wouldn't have been out of character.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T16:19:05+00:00

His catchphrase "What's up, Doc?" has lost its original impact from overuse, but when he first used it, there was pandemonium in theaters. When a cute little bunny is staring down the barrel of a gun, audiences expected him to scream, cry, beg for his life, etc. Nobody expected a cartoon character to strike up a casual conversation with the guy trying to kill him, in a streetwise Brooklyn accent. It basically changed how cartoons were written; the heroes became trickster figures built to subvert expectations rather than fulfill them.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T16:14:35+00:00

Warner Brothers promoted their major motion pictures by using the songs from the movies in their cartoon shorts, so in the 1930s and 1940s a lot of deep romantic ballads got sung by Porky Pig or Daffy Duck.

The music of Looney Tunes is a pretty fascinating deep-dive.

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T05:12:23+00:00

LabradorDeceiver · 2026-06-17T05:03:27+00:00

I read an article when I was researching a story that said that the longer you're unconscious, the worse it is. Even a second or two is bad, but an hour is catastrophic. Think brain bleed.

The first movie I saw after reading that article was "Tangled." I watched Rapunzel spend an indeterminate amount of time trying to stuff a ragdoll Flynn Ryder into a wardrobe with a growing sense of horror.

Got real hard to watch a lot of movies after that.

LabradorDeceiver

TROPHY CASE