#Jeb Lund

[planetofsnarfs]

So, OK, we need to talk about Katie Britt.

The Republican junior senator from Alabama was tapped with giving her party's official "response" to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address and, basically, Katie Britt managed to creep out most of America.

She also lied. Aggressively. Katie Britt's transparent lie was both hateful and nonsensical -- a stupid story that forcefully suggests the opposite of the meaning assigned to it by Katie Britt and those she invited to be as willfully stupid, cruel, and dishonest as she was eager to be.

As Alabama newspaper columnist John Archibald  put it, "America was looking for proof of normalcy. Instead it got The Three Faces of Eve."

The weirdly staged, grimly lit "kitchen" setting didn't do Britt any favors. The barren kitchen showed no sign of human habitation. It didn't look like a room that anyone you know would feel comfortable in, but more like an unfinished theater set for some low budget crime-reenactment show or maybe the kitchen where the To Catch a Predator guy was about to come out and tell some caught-red-handed perv to "take a seat."

It looked just barely enough like a kitchen to make viewers realize that's what it was, and then a beat later to wonder if Republicans were staging a woman in a kitchen to suggest that women belong in kitchens.

And then Britt started talking and everyone realized that, yes, that was exactly what this hideous un-kitchen was meant to suggest. Because Katie Britt started talking like Michelle Duggar. Despite being a United States senator, she spoke in a voice that says that she and all women belong only in the kitchen, serving men, obediently.

This is "Fundie Baby Voice" -- the breathy, stylized, submissive, Stepford accent given that name by Jess Piper in a video that went viral last year.

Piper wrote about Britt's use of Fundie Baby Voice here, offering a description that helps explain why this voice makes most normal people squirm:

I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term — they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable. ... You all know Michelle Duggar. Remember her voice? Too high pitched? Too much like a little girl? Too breathy. That’s purposeful. Michelle has to show submission to her husband in all interactions public. She stared at Jim Bob anytime he spoke. She was quiet until given a question or prompt. She was also harboring secrets and that’s something I can’t forget. Terrible secrets behind that voice. ... Some women use their fundie baby voices from habit. From years of lessons, but some have something to hide which they cover for in fundie baby voice and a good-natured temperament. From an abusive husband, to a drinking problem, to hiding a pack of cigarettes in the kitchen, it was often something.

Outsiders -- people who lack the subcultural context that Piper understands as a native -- may not be as well-versed in the "complementarian" white patriarchal theologies and kinks underlying this overwrought mannerism, but they still pick up on the general sense of it enough that it gives them the heebie-jeebies. "I have no idea what Katie Britt is saying," Jeb Lund joked on BlueSky, "but I am absolutely convinced that her husband is a good man, and the allegations of those assaults are untrue ..."

Many of the jokes flying around social media focused on this same unsettling aspect of Britt's delivery. "Getting strong 'mommy blogger who's about to be arrested for child abuse' vibes from this," someone said on Xitter. Another wrote, "I am not interested in joining NXIVM but thank you for the pitch." For those unaccustomed to seeing it performed regularly, Fundie Baby Voice is suspicious as well as off-putting -- it seems to hint at some menace behind its forced, unnatural smiles.

I think that suspicion comes from realizing that behind every woman who talks like that there is a man who wants her to talk like that -- a man who expects her to talk like that or maybe even makes her talk like that. That man is creepy. He creeps people out.

The only people who don't think that man is weird and off-putting are other men just like him. To them, Katie Britt's fundie baby voice seemed perfectly normal. She talked just the same way their wives do, just the same way they want and expect and require their wives to talk.

And that means these women have to sound child-like and baby-ish, but also breathy and submissive and quivering with emotion. As Tia Levings puts it, "They want us to sound like sexualized children."

Levings wrote about this imposed, unnatural mannerism last year, referencing Piper's video in the title of her post, "Why Kelly Johnson Sounds Like Michelle Duggar":

Why do so many Christian women think it’s a good thing to sound like a little girl? The breathy gasps, whisper voices, and baby-high pitch are on purpose. But what would make a grown woman think it’s attractive to modulate her voice that way? While the long answer might include cultural norms, southern manners, Baby Doll nighties, Marilyn Monroe to Paris Hilton, and social media, the short answer is quick and to the point: we’re taught.

Levings points to a once-popular, still influential book, Helen Andelin's 1963 best-seller Fascinating Womanhood, which explicitly instructed women to act and speak in child-like ways to help their men feel manlier, more like the big, protective, decisive adults in the room.*

The underlying idea there, again, is irreducibly creepy. It's that same idea of men wanting women to be sexualized children -- the idea that men are threatened by adult women and thus can only be attracted to those who are child-like or baby-ish.

And so here we are, again, in that kitchen set from To Catch a Predator.

"I believe there’s a correlation to sexual abuse in religious environments where women behave like children, and children are prematurely told they’re women," Levings says. How could there not be?

But all of this became more explicit once viewers realized that the centerpiece of Britt's speech was a horrifying, real story about the exploitation of sexualized children.

Britt presented this story as somehow an indictment of President Biden's policies on "the border." America's Southern border, Britt said, was in "crisis" because of Joe Biden, who created this crisis when he took office in 2021. And because of this Biden-created border crisis, children were being forced to perform sex work. Britt told the story of a woman she had met who recounted being forced to work in a brothel when she was only 12 years old:

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach: I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

Do you see the problem there? Do you notice the impossibility of Britt's arithmetic?

If Joe Biden's policies resulted in a 12-year-old being forced to work in a brothel then how could that 12-year-old now be an adult woman when Biden has only been in office for a little over three years?

Journalist Jonathan Katz wondered about that:

I was watching live, and this anecdote immediately struck me as odd. ... Who was this trafficking victim? What side of the border did these crimes happen on? When did they happen? And how did an Anglophone Republican senator get an apparent migrant victim of horrific trauma to share such a deeply personal story? Also—and not for nothing—wouldn’t a victim of such horrific abuse be a good candidate for immigration protection, if not asylum? I’d like to say that it took hours of exhaustive, painstaking research to answer all those questions. The reality is it took about twenty minutes. ... It also turned out that Britt had been telling—and usually misrepresenting—this story over and over again, for more than a year, with no one calling her out on it. What I found was that, in January 2023, Senator Britt indeed traveled to the Del Rio sector of the U.S.-Mexico border, with her fellow Republicans Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. During that trip, they held a press conference — a “roundtable,” as they called it in a press release — with Fox News contributor Sarah Carter, a former Mexican legislator, and a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero. Jacinto’s story—which the senators conveniently linked to in the press release—fit Britt’s description almost exactly: She was sexually trafficked from the ages of 12 to 16, a period in which she says she was subjected to multiple rapes every day. But contrary to Britt’s implication, those crimes did not take place in the U.S., nor even near the border. (The abuse seems to have happened mostly in Guadalajara and Mexico City.) Nor in her testimony does Jacinto mention a drug cartel as having been part of it; she describes her abuser as a “professional pimp.” In fact, Jacinto says that many of the men she was forced to sleep with were “foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.” As it happens American men make up a large percentage of sex tourists in Mexico — including in the child sex trade. So if there was a border aspect to this story it was ex-pats moving the other way. Most damningly for Britt’s political purposes, Jacinto’s trafficking happened from 2004 until 2008, when George W. Bush, a Republican, was president. ... In other words, Britt took a story she heard at a press conference near the border last year -- but which actually took place over six hundred miles away in central Mexico twenty years ago, when a Republican was president, and didn’t concern international human trafficking at all -- and dressed it up as evidence she had personally collected that “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”

It was an audacious, bald-faced lie -- one that involved further exploiting a woman who was horribly exploited as a child.

But it is also a lie that makes no sense. Britt worked hard to create a general vibe that would appeal to xenophobic white voters, stretching and straining to create an association between Joe Biden, sex trafficking, and Scary Mexicans just by mentioning all of those things in one short period of time.

But anyone outside of Britt's bubble -- anyone who didn't already associate all of those things because they had already actively chosen the white nationalism Britt was selling -- would hear such a story and think: That poor child! Did anyone help her? We should help her!

That's how normal people hear this story. As Katz wrote: "Wouldn’t a victim of such horrific abuse be a good candidate for immigration protection, if not asylum?"

Katie Britt traveled to Del Rio, Texas, near the border, and heard Karla Jacinto Romero's testimony of fleeing horrific abuse and violence. But rather than resolving to do more -- or to do anything -- to help those like Jacinto, Britt has repeatedly stolen that story and turned it into a weapon to deny asylum to Jacinto and to everyone like her.

What is Katie Britt actually arguing should be done with human trafficking victims fleeing rape and abuse in Mexico? Katie Britt wants to see them rounded up and deported -- sent backto the very place they fled.

Britt's cruelty is, like her dishonesty, difficult to overstate.

Both of those registered with viewers during Britt's SOTU response -- even before any of them watched Katz's video or read any of the later reports debunking her cruel lie.

And I think that cruelty and dishonesty -- more than Britt's painful overacting or the strangeness of her fundie baby voice -- was what skeeved people out even if they couldn't articulate what it was about this senator that was making their skin crawl.

Brazen dishonesty and gleeful cruelty make us angry. But if you start with those two things and you add in that dangling cross and that extravagant, smug performed piety then our reaction shifts from straightforward anger to also having the creeps. This woman, whose disconcerting smile stops before it reaches her eyes, is telling transparent lies about innocent victims in order to further harm those victims ... and all along she's condescendingly suggesting that she is our moral superior?

As Levings wrote:

To anyone who’s been on the inside, we recognize the signs. The fundamentalist world is all about knowing how right you are, how wrong everyone else is, and how if they’d only listen to you, you could lead them to the light. We’re astonished when someone disagrees with us. That soft voice sounds so patronizing because it is.

And, as usual, the prideful righteousness of this white fundamentalism is fundamentally wrong about right and wrong. Britt "knows" she is right and everyone else is wrong, and "if they'd only listen to her, she could lead them to the light."

And that "light," not for the first time, turns out to be Herrenvolk privilege and white nationalism.

The smugness is a pose, a pretense, and a defense mechanism that functions to distract others -- but primarily to distract oneself -- from the morally indefensible position one is advocating.

It muddies the waters enough so that instead of walking away thinking "That pretty lady in the green shirt is a vicious racist" they walk away thinking "That pretty lady in the green shirt gives me the willies."

* Jess Piper and Tia Levings were both born and raised in the white fundamentalist Christian world described here. Cheryl Rofer was not. Rofer is a nuclear research scientist retired after a long career at Los Alamos, but she was fascinated by "Britt’s highly gendered performance" and how it provided a window into "Worlds in Collision":

The folks I follow on social media were aware of a separate culture of evangelical Christians, Southerners, MAGAs. We had read articles about their culture from those who had ventured forth anthropologically or escaped. Hmm interesting, but reading about and actually seeing are two different things. We had been in a bubble. Conversely, a United States Senator who presents herself with a dipping blouse neckline showing a gleaming stone-encrusted cross, speaking in a breathy childlike voice from a darkened and apparently unused kitchen was in a bubble of her own, along with a Republican Party that thought this would be appealing. ...

[truck-fump]

Why Eric <b>Trump</b> Is Most Likely Donald <b>Trump's</b> Second Favorite Child After Ivanka - The Daily Beast

New Post has been published on https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-eric-trump-is-most-likely-donald-trumps-second-favorite-child-after-ivanka&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjUzM2UwMTY5ZmFhZTIwMGQ6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AOvVaw34_ZrV64URPR2EAg4MwTbD

Why Eric Trump Is Most Likely Donald Trump's Second Favorite Child After Ivanka - The Daily Beast

David Roth and Jeb Lund play the Thanksgiving edition of “America 20 Questions,” including answering how thankful they think Donald Trump is for …

[machine-saint]

you've got it right on with the "sneer culture" (they literally had helldump, a forum for making threads making fun of other users [including Neil Cicierega!] which had all the toxicity problems you'd imagine)

but i really don't think i'd consider SA an originator of the "punching up" culture at the time. a lot of helldump threads were making fun of people for being furries, or "the wrong kind" of queer (or sometimes just queer), or whatever. even the leftists there were happy to throw around 'fag' as an insult as late as the early 2010s (when i stopped paying attention)

if anything i would say it was the progenitor of the 'dirtbag left' type; your chapo trap houses and the like. laissez's faire, the more meme-heavy spinoff of the serious politics forum, leaned very heavily on marxism-leninism, maoism, and what have you. i think jeb lund is a pretty good emblem of that style; he was fairly active on SA.

(also it was $10, not $20, but that's a minor quibble)

what is SA?

SomethingAwful; a forum which was at the height of its popularity in the mid-2000s and for a while was one of the epicenters of "Internet culture", for whatever definition of that you prefer. Famously, they required a $20 fee to sign up, which was nonrefundable if you got banned.

Opinions vary on this, but it's generally considered that SomethingAwful was a concentrator and amplifier of the "sneer culture" that characterized much of the Internet in that area, as in "hey, let's go find someone/something that is cringe, and mock them mercilessly". SA goons (as they identified themselves) had a culture that lionized "punching up" at people they considered problematic, and for this reason is sometimes considered a primordial ooze for 2010s Social Justice. They also had a famous extended conflict with 4chan (which sort of spun out of SA when moot was banned from the forums); hence the semi-facetious quip I've made a couple times about all contemporary Culture War squabbling being ultimately traceable back to the SA/4chan conflict.

[route22ny]

I grew up in the Bay Area at the height of AIDS panic, and all of that era’s sex paranoia remains burned into my brain, repurposed for Covid-19 and the act of commingling wet breath. A few weeks into this crisis, I found myself having a ten-foot-distant conversation with my neighbor Patty, both of us incredulous at people who still tried to talk to us in-tight face-to-face, like we weren't all suddenly barebacking reality with everyone they'd chit-chatted with that day and everyone in their lives, etc. Patty allowed that she should be able to strike people she considered a threat. I mentioned Florida's attitude toward this legal principle and firearms. I suggested she become militant. I tell that to a lot of people, but I attenuate the humor of it for the audience. I tell every teacher I know to strike.

There are more sirens now. It's hard to tell, because unlike New York, everything isn't quiet. Cars are out on the road—fewer, but enough that hearing a siren can still be vehicular idiocy and not a more sinister house call. But I still hear more of them.

I don’t know why Luke asked me to write about Coronavirus in Florida. I mostly stopped writing last year when a good friend dropped dead in front of his family. (Subscribe to my Substack—we don't update regularly!) Before that, I felt increasingly overborne by events. Things ground to a halt in 2019, but the machine began to break down long before. I ended the 2016 campaign periodically sitting under my desk, high, feeling secure because I wasn't writing anything stupid and feeling good because I was appropriately afraid of everything, but people thought I was exaggerating when I mentioned it.  

I wish I could say my seriousness about the novel coronavirus stems solely from believing in science and peer review and that I would take it seriously regardless, but my spouse is immunocompromised, and my father, who lives out in the Bay Area, had Covid-19, back in March or early April. He didn't tell us kids until he was out of the woods, but for days he had fevers over 103º. My stepmom, a former emergency room nurse, couldn't get him admitted anywhere, because he wasn't having respiratory problems. He woke up the same every day: It felt like someone had parked a Volkswagen on him.

We're supposed to say he's out of the woods. I'll believe that when he dies of old age, or something more reasonable that kills men in my family, like colon cancer or car accidents. Sometimes I think about him dropping dead like my friend, only from whatever post-Covid-19 effect triggers the brain’s forgetting to tell the lungs to breathe—or from the one that leads to storms of strokes, like a brain's blood vessels recreating the burning energies depicted on a CRISS ANGEL MINDFREAK poster. Then I wonder how I would die, or my wife, or my friend in Atlanta, or my brother. I think about drowning in open air, alone in a hissing world, and being incapable of saying the overdue apologies I ran out of time for.

After a while I realized that basically all Luke wanted was to hear from a coward living in the mismanaged kleptocracy of Florida, and the thing is, I can do that! I’m frightened right now!

I considered opening with, Every day I wake up frightened, to throw a fucking jolt into a piece about facing down a pandemic in a place where they have a paradise just for the cheeseburgers. But the joke is, I'm not wastin' away here in Coronaville. Sometimes I wake up and just have to pee, on the rare days when I don't wake up from the sensation of my son elbow-dropping my head because—how rude of me—it's 6:45 already.

In this respect, I am serene: My son and I exercise outside to burn off his energy, so I'm out in the sun for hours a day. I'm tanner, I've lost weight, and my phlegm feels looser. I grew a lushly indifferent goatee. My haircut looks like something that belongs on the gatefold cover of a concept album about a form of locomotion by a band named after geography. While the term "Lebowski Phase" has been applied to my appearance and to the fact that my leg injury and medical-marijuana prescription have collided with the reality of never having to drive anywhere again, I must insist that in many respects I have come to look like Jesus Christ. I am pro life and take no pleasure in reporting this.

As I have said, I am frequently awakened by my son, whose full name is My Beautiful Five-Year-Old Son Maitland. He is a treasure who spends quarantine within earshot of 24-hour news, regurgitating West Wing Democrat observations of mine with five-year-old precocity to harvest follows for Instagram. Maitland is an influencer already on record as supporting L’Oréal, opposing Medicare For All, and, when I first read him the shaggy start to this piece, he said, "Not a good look." He's a natural.

Waking up is violent but easy. The problem is everything after that. By the time I close my eyes, I'm not sure what I felt most on any given day—anger, sadness, impotence, a resentful churning need for vengeance, despair. Any one can seem like a day's dominant emotional dysfunction and then suddenly be overwhelmed by the dread that suffuses prolonged thought about the world outside.

I am one of the people who is Taking It Seriously. Seriously Taking It Seriously, though—not the people who say they're taking it seriously and then tell you about:

• Going to a recent indoor birthday party.

• Having a multi-course dinner at a fancy restaurant, "But it was okay because it was [extremely not-worth-a-life celebration]!"

• A full-contact playdate their kid had recently with two other children.

I abhor these people. I have an existential loathing of these people, and a granular scientific indictment. I enjoy reading new articles to learn new ways in which they are a danger to me. My apprehension is rich and exquisite. May their friends shun them, and may they be abandoned by their gods.

Sooner or later, every day, I think of the threats arrayed against me and my family. Each day, I see the most recent thing said by my governor, Ronald Fuckface DeSantis, in which he explicitly endorses and declares his intent to pursue actions that all available data say will kill Floridians by the thousands. Each day, I think about how, if I do so much as suggest fostering a free exchange of ideas about the proportional value of using every means to stop him, I will be arrested.

Every day, I bounce the "Evil or Moronic?" debate around my brain. I check in with an alumna buddy in Atlanta to see whose governor has shown more recent determination to murder his citizens. I gotta give Brian Kemp credit, because he's really holding his own. Naturally, this leads to wondering if either of them have a natural or acculturated advantage in terms of idiocy and malevolence. DeSantis' enrollment at Yale and Harvard and service in the military problematizes the idiocy narrative only for as long as it takes to remember all the people you've met who've gone to any of them and were dumber than dogshit. It would seem like fate to be murdered by an oaf, but I don't know that it's not merciful to at least be murdered purposefully rather than contemptuously and indolently.

Eventually, this leads to spending some time thinking about DeSantis as a kind of lethal bro angel. It's hard not to see his shitchyeah, brah, people are dyin', it's classic! expression and recognize that the state's chief executive resembles a lout you don't want to run into walking alone at FSU after a home loss. I prefer my jokes about the governor, but my friend David Roth nailed it when he said that DeSantis seemed like a person who would describe himself as “kind of a DUI guy.”

I know there's supposedly a culture war out there. There's a truck in my neighborhood with a Q sticker, and another with a Three-Percenter sticker, and there are more than a few neighbors of the "easily victimized white dude who owns a $50,000 truck he rarely takes off the pavement and who becomes physically belligerent when you correct him" variety, but there's a reason why you really only see “war” shit on YouTube. Few Americans are hostile to general safety protocols, and even fewer act out against them. I live where hate groups and old fashioned unaffiliated redneck trash drive in from the county to make a show of rebel flags, rolling coal and honking to intimidate protests, but people line up six feet apart at Home Depot, wear masks at Publix and get takeout at the pizza place outside without insisting on barging in. Most wars don’t need one side of them to be this manufactured.

Most of my friends and colleagues from this gig live in New York, so I've already sat through weeks of descriptions of streets silent except for ambulances, and I’ve already woken for weeks to the half-twilight of nightmares where friends died in a spare white hallway. There aren't a lot of surprises in store for Florida, and no images I can describe that would make you want to turn back now. It's like we're waiting for the rolling premiere of a franchise blockbuster. The dead won't really start packing them in for a few more weeks, but all the scariest shit hit YouTube when it opened in New York a thousand years ago. The coronavirus as an image, what it functionally is, as a horror, feels as familiar as the Scream mask, and the context that makes that scary as hell already feels dangerously been-and-gone, like an apprehension that Florida had for too long before the actual scare came.

There's a hope that all this will come to little again. Despite Governor DeSantis' refusal to take the initiative on shutting down the state until the last dollar was wrung from the last snowbird, the original shellacking never came. The Tampa Bay Times sampled smartphone data and concluded that Floridians overwhelmingly took the initiative to stay home, and they were aided in their quarantine process by the fact that Florida is car-dependent and atomized.

The heartbreaking realization, as you gradually run across more people who are Not Taking It Seriously or are Expressing Moronic Skepticism, is that for a month there about 80 percent of America was on board with doing the right thing. We, a people who suck at doing the right thing even for the wrong reasons, stood on the side of doing the harder thing if it helped people who weren't even us.

I really can't tell if I feel more anger than sadness at the fact that those who were meant to encourage us in safety, to serve us by offering difficult guidance, wasted our sacrifice and our trust. They squandered the patience given by a beggared and exhausted people. All they had to do was the right thing, and if they weren't sure what that was, they could have erred on the side of saving people’s lives and hoping it counted, and they failed.  

Instead, more people will die, and we'll be shut down again, and we will realize we are fundamentally unequipped for life with Covid-19. Florida is built on enclosed air-conditioned spaces: It's dependent on divorcing yourself from Florida as a climate and place. Asking Floridians to generate a public life under the unshielded rage of God’s angriest sun and baked from beneath by a sprawling pave-ocalypse requires asking them to rebel against everything their infrastructure has taught them for as long as they can remember. It is a car culture to the flesh and bone, and a restaurant relocating indoor tables to a road patio would park its diners inches away from eternity.

A picnic day like that is months off, again. It's time to go back inside and resume Inside Time. Inside Time melts away. I saw a headline around the Fourth of July, from the New York Times, that read, "In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both," and I remember seeing colleagues tweet, mmmm, so true, and, gets at something crucial we aren't talking about, and shit like that, and I was like, "Buddy, let's get in the DeLorean and visit March." I have nowhere to go, anyway, and all life is timeless.

We have no family in the area and have had no break. It's the three of us, like No Exit, but if most of the dialogue was the word "no" and a lot of stuff about poop and butts and farts, good guys and bad guys, and what Lego Star Wars would do, but with a lot of excruciated pleading for silence because Mom and Dad Are Working Right Now and We Love You Very Much but Jesus Christ Please Stop for the Love of God I Will Give You a Dollar If You Go in Your Room and Be Quiet and Play That Kindle App That Teaches You to Read That You Pay Attention to More Than Us Even Though I Would Read You a Fucking Novel If You'd Just Shut Up and Sit Still.

I'm resigned to staying in here until 2022. I’m screaming, but I will do it. I'm lucky in that I have access to a community pool and a neighborhood where my son and I can roam around on bikes and romp and look at water and birds and turtles. When we're lazy, we have a porch where we can feel nature without feeling exposed. We have a dependable (ok!!! haha!!!) income, and I can do irregularly scheduled work that allows me to be Parent rather than Employee. Exercise, meals and stories take up enough hours that I might as well lean into it.

But we’re lucky. We have a house and prescription mood-altering drugs and one thousand years of undersleep, but we are in less immediate danger than most. The state, almost reflexively, reaches out to open more doors even as Covid-19 blows past reopening benchmark after reopening benchmark.

The inexorable march for commerce doesn’t even come from malice in many cases; people in charge just don’t know how to do anything else but extort and scold people into working under any conditions, so long as it devours most of their time. All the exploitive principles are expected to work the same even if the world they built is fraudulent. We feed meat and the virus into the machines, irrespective of what the data says, and pray for rain. Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

We have friends who are teachers, and we are scared for their spouses and kids. I don't know what Florida's plan for its teachers is other than to murder them. Again, I don't know if DeSantis is an idiot for flirting with giving enormous bipartisan sympathy to arguably the most effective labor group in the state, or a genius for flirting with finally eliminating a lobbying obstacle to conservative governance by simply liquidating its members as a class.

I worry if I start listing all the things I'm scared of, they'll never stop, but every day I see my son reach for something he should be able to reach for, and I either have a low-grade panic response and stifle it, or I have the panic response and yelp at him to get his attention and tell him to stop, startle him, and add another layer of gun-shy haunting to his day. I'm afraid he'll eventually become an animal in a Skinner Box in which all the buttons and levers are electrocuted, and there are no prizes.

I'm afraid that my son will always be emotionally arrested at two years behind the development of people the same age who had siblings in their house, or who, like many kids in my neighborhood, had parents who thought kids were invincible to Covid-19 and let them play with whomever they wanted. I worry that he may pay a price year after year even into adulthood because other kids got to practice socializing as we rode past. They got to hang out with people their own age and run around and do vitally stupid shit and say "butts" a lot, and he got look at me heartbroken and knowing empirically and epidemiologically that he couldn't play with his friends anymore but still needing to know why, and knowing that I couldn't tell him anything more sophisticated and anything less terrifying than, "So we don't get sick."

The other day he started crying and then screaming, "I hate the sickness! I hate the sickness!" repeating it in a higher and higher register, until he was up even past that piercing birdlike screech that prepubescent boys make whenever trying to sound like lasers or dinosaurs or squealing brakes. Every day I worry that I see another little bit of his capacity for happiness is dying—that the same awkward process of terror that took me from happy little kid to profoundly unhappy teen to scarred adult is even more rapidly at work, and each day another sparkling and joyous little light of childhood winks out in him, replaced by fear as a necessity of life.

I know that there is no plan for us. Conservatives don't want to be taxed or have their businesses lose money, so people are being kicked off unemployment and sent back to work with no test and trace protocols, irregular access to PPE, overwhelmed hospitals and often limited access to any care. We're doing all this as Florida blooms scarlet like paint being spilled into a mold shaped like the state. We're sending the men in the gasoline suits right at the heart of the fire.

It's a cruelly lazy little culling genocide of the working class, a Wall Street gamble that the blow to the labor force won't be more than a blip on the Dow and, a little recession aside, the One Percent will come out ten years later owning an even greater percentage of the United States. To the extent that there is a plan, that's the plan, and whether you land on the dead or the living part of any of those exchanges is more of a Your Problem than a Their Problem.

For now, it's enough to be hermits and hope the rest of Florida goes on strike by going inside and staying there and writing letters to representatives threatening to never come out. Cooking the same things, getting the same exercise in the same places, having the same awkward conversations on VOIP delay, and living every moment outside like we're three drinks in so we’re ready to get belligerent with anyone who is getting too close. Living every moment with some low-level neurasthenia that grows spine-deep and for the rest of our lives sends shuddering disequilibrium at the thought of air that never seems to move, hallways that lengthen without exits, and objects that seem both unavoidable and unclean. It’s fine. We’re all fine, here, now. How are you?

I feel a sudden Git Offa Mah Land thing about my son, a resolute commitment to homeschooling for the foreseeable future and to keeping the gummymint away. It sucks so much. I was so happy to send him to the public school just a few blocks away, instead of the shitty little charter schools nearby, but now that it’s Plague or Parents, he’s got his parents. Between us, he'll have access to 1.5 first-class educations. I still have my grandpa's service weapons from WWII, the last time America was in a war with fascism, when we took the opposing side. I'll empty a couple magazines into anyone who comes onto my property and tries to stop me from teaching my son critical race theory, Howard Zinn, and Leonard Levy's Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. I refuse to turn my back on the heritage of my youth, of watching thousands of hours of MASH, by refusing to wear a mask outside or in fact any time I am doing anything other than drinking gin that I made in a tent.

Outside, records fall and progress rolls on. A governor whose go-to pejorative for opponents of all ages and sexes is very likely still “queef” watches as even the president concedes that a Republican National Convention here would be too lethal, as the state repeatedly sets records for daily deaths, beats out all of Europe in terms of new daily cases, leads the nation in cases per day, then tries to set them again. And then, every day, our governor makes his ahegao-but-for-ethnic-cleansing face and psychotically clangs a bell indicating that Florida just became the 15,000 customer at Leadshoe Larry’s Kicked-in-the-Dick, and it’s time for all us lucky winners to line up and drop our pants.

Florida’s lethality is so tacky that it’s almost camp, but there is no satisfaction in being right about how wrong everything is. Nobody gets a prize for correctly guessing the surplus death toll. All you have to do is look someone else in the eye working in life under Covid.

I’m old now, so I have Humiliating Injury Syndrome (HIS), and somehow in the month between the Super Bowl and the pandemic, I tore a rotator cuff, a labrum, or both, by throwing a (mini!!!) football with friends. After four months, I broke down and went to get an MRI. I skulked down corridors and lurked in a corner of a waiting room, like playing spies with an opponent who was the air. Even the clean and modern fixtures felt miasmic and corrupted, like they were a parking garage in an Alan Pakula film.

Eventually a nurse emerged from an office, crinkled her brown eyes, waved and surprised me by asking after my family by name. She lives three blocks away from me and had hosted me at a party once. Later that day, as my car coasted down the approach to my house, I saw a garage door open and my neighbor’s son walk out on his way to his shift at the same grocery store that I treat emotionally like a Superfund site.

I thought about how much I unconsciously held my breath where they work, and how I unconsciously associate those places with poor choices. The danger of the world outside is so massive that I reflexively need to cordon off the threat into areas of blame and blamelessness. In a moment of crisis, years of conservative rhetorical conditioning in the discourse have taught me to reflexively pathologize those in harm’s way. There is less chaos if someone is at least responsible for something. There is less risk to me, if it turns out someone else’s epidemic is someone else’s fault.

But it is someone else’s fault. And it’s not some poor fucker doomed to sit in a box somewhere and accept paper money and hand metal money back and point at where toilets are, because that’s how he keeps the lights on. It’s not the person consigned to some life-sucking task that, on the best of days, is too humiliating and cruelly impoverished of purpose to ever be a reason why someone should die. It’s not the person around whom you hold your breath because you don’t know where they’ve been. It’s the person and people who put us all in position to suddenly feel like we’re suffocating together.

I hate that I sometimes unconsciously hold my breath around strangers, and I hate that they have heard it. I think of my neighbors, and of the workers on whom we’re dependent, and the permanent uncertain shortness of breath I feel, and I want every moment of their anxiety and mine gathered up and then rained on those who shepherded it into being, those who nurtured it and feasted on it, those who profited from it and were indifferent toward it. Those who consider themselves DUI guys and those who pay to elect them and give them sinecures and who are simply too rich to be arrested for boating under the influence anymore.

I think of how I hold my breath near good people and near vulnerable people in places I am wary of and that we all need to share, and I wonder if we will simply hold our breath for the rest of the year, and if we’ve bargained for standing near each other and holding it for all of the next. And I wish so eagerly that all our suspended futures and the air between us might catch at the throats of those who put us here. That justice for a man like Ron DeSantis might be a permanent and sucking terror: stuck always in an involuntary startled gasp at the sight of responsibility, afraid at the approach of every stranger, incapable of drawing a full and restful breath, and never knowing peace again.

Jeb Lund used to write about politics for Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Gawker, and a bunch of other places, and was the Spectacle of Trump Editor at 50 States of Blue. He and David Roth have a podcast about Hallmark original movies that is mostly funny and exasperated and not unkind, and it's not ultimately about the movies anyway. It's fine and people enjoy it. Don't make it weird. He also has a podcast where he watches every Dennis Quaid movie in a row. That is also completely normal.

Ok here’s me again with a couple more things.

You’ll want to read this in the New York Times today about a forthcoming documentary on ICE. After it was completed the filmmakers were apparently threatened with legal action by the agency over the inclusion of parts that made ICE look even worse than they already look doing literally everything else they do.

Some of the contentious scenes include ICE officers lying to immigrants to gain access to their homes and mocking them after taking them into custody. One shows an officer illegally picking the lock to an apartment building during a raid.

At town hall meetings captured on camera, agency spokesmen reassured the public that the organization’s focus was on arresting and deporting immigrants who had committed serious crimes. But the filmmakers observed numerous occasions in which officers expressed satisfaction after being told by supervisors to arrest as many people as possible, even those without criminal records.

“Start taking collaterals, man,” a supervisor in New York said over a speakerphone to an officer who was making street arrests as the filmmakers listened in. “I don’t care what you do, but bring at least two people,” he said.

Here’s one disgusting detail among many.

They followed Border Patrol tactical agents who took pride in rescuing migrants from deadly dehydration even as the agents acknowledged that their tactics were pushing the migrants further into harm’s way. They showed how the government had at times evaluated the success of its border policies based not only on the number of migrants apprehended, but on the number who died while crossing.

***

source:

https://luke.substack.com/p/all-they-had-to-do-was-the-right?utm_source=Brooklyn+Today&utm_campaign=dd6f63665c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_28_01_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1ba554d7d5-dd6f63665c-125128182

[alanshemper]

Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll seek to answer these questions, focusing on four movies: Journey Back to Christmas from 2016, The Christmas Train 2017, Entertaining Christmas 2018, and Operation Christmas Drop from last year. We’ll dive into the ways in which nostalgia for an imaginary MAGA-style past informs their character development, settings, and plots, leaving little room for messaging other than dog whistles like, ‘Let’s just go back to the good old days.’

Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by David Roth, co-founder and co-owner of Defector Media. He has written for Deadspin, The New Republic, New York Magazine, among others, and co-hosts, with Jeb Lund, the podcast “It’s Christmastown,” about the gentle, cornball, consequence-free world of the Hallmark Channel.

[longform]

Watching Florida government on the state and local level is like watching two parents bring an alcoholic home after he got kicked out of rehab and deciding that the best course of action is leaving him with $5,000 in an apartment up the street from a dive bar and then going to Cancun for the week. It was on the calendar already, there wasn’t any choice, he looked very healthy at the time!

Jeb Lund | Welcome To Hell World | Jul 2020

[shittymeninmedia-blog]

“That's what they're there for" - Jeb Lund

Jeb Lund is a former writer for The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and Gawker.

Shitty Men In Media document cites verbal intimidation of female colleagues, creepy DMs, encourages other men to have sex with blacked-out women because "that's what they're there for". 

In fact, multiple people, not just women allege terrible behavior. Another cites he has repeatedly bullied a young male staffer in one office. 

[ourrosy-mindedfuzz]

[nat-tea-n-coffee]

If anyone wants to know exactly how bad this is without having to engage in it directly, or give any of those people money, I super recommend the episode of I Don't Even Own a Television podcats they did on this with special guest Jeb Lund.

And it's even worse than you think it is. Somehow all of this post rolled into one.

Fake Martial Arts is by far the funniest subcategory of The Occult. I wish this could make a comeback. I want YouTube videos of white guys from Minneapolis who say shit like "yeah I can kill you with my chi."

[saturdaynightmatinee]

CALIFICACIÓN PERSONAL: 7 / 10

Título Original: Lock Up

Año: 1989

Duración: 106 min.

País: Estados Unidos

Director: John Flynn

Guion: Jeb Stuart, Henry Rosenbaum, Richard Smith

Música: Bill Conti

Fotografía: Donald E. Thorin

Reparto: Sylvester Stallone, Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham, William Allen Young, Tom Sizemore, Larry Romano, Frank McRae, Darlanne Fluegel, Danny Trejo, Frank Pesce, Jordan Lund, Bo Rucker

Productora: White Eagle / Carolco Pictures / Gordon Company. Distribuida por TriStar Pictures

Género: Action, Crime, Drama

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097770/

TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRBoP0HBaE

[brainstatic]

Jeb Lund can be a funny guy, but stuff like this is a great example of this weird leftist notion that everyone in the world goes around pissed off at America all the time. It’s basically the inverse of the conservative view, that everyone is filled with deep envy over America’s splendor. It’s true that the Kim dynasty has always used the trauma of the Korean War to keep people in line, but to think Kim Jong-Un represents his people’s collective will means conveniently forgetting he's a dictator. I'm also pretty sure the North Koreans are more concerned with finding enough grass and tree bark to eat, all while avoiding stepping on a scrap of newspaper with Kim Il-Sung’s face on it lest they and their entire family be sent to gulag. The post-war puppet governments probably don't occupy a lot of their thoughts. 

There was also this bizarre thing people like Lund and Glenn Greenwald always do: 

The intelligence community is apparently a monolithic group of immortals who are all the same people since the Eisenhower administration. Never mind that his own link about the Iraq War goes to a Washington Post article that explicitly states the CIA was deeply divided on WMDs, but Bush cherry-picked the intelligence he wanted to justify the war. No, it’s all the same people using the same methods for the past 60 years, and they have no connection to whoever is president. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The coming conservative "civil war" is going to be weird #1yrago

Jeb Lund writes about Trump's Vile Game of Distraction, running the wargames for what happens to his party now that he has destroyed its "beautiful dream of a permanent Christian ethnocentric oligarchy."

The twitter-consensus is that there's some kind of divide between principled conservatives and the Trumpkins who want to pick up his supporters after he's gone. Ah, but:

Ordinarily, a rich and powerful man amplifying the anguish of powerless women who claimed to have been raped by another extremely powerful man would be a noble gesture. Out of context and devoid of sound, it would have been a silent, stunning reminder that Bill Clinton would be nearly unthinkable as a Democratic candidate today. ... except, this time, it was done to distract from the very real possibility that the Republican Party nominee for President of the United States is a sex offender. That, and only that, was enough to arrest the endless forward movement of a party happy to glide on racism, religious discrimination, misogyny and xenophobia – profitably and seemingly forever.

Here's Paul Krugman, writing that Trump and the GOP are Predators in Arms, that it's naive to think Republicans care about sexual assault on any level other than its consequences for the horse race.

As many people are pointing out, Republicans now trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump need to explain why The Tape was a breaking point, when so many previous incidents weren’t. ... Of course, we know the answer: The latest scandal upset Republicans, when previous scandals didn’t, because the candidate’s campaign was already in free fall. You can even see it in the numbers: The probability of a House Republican jumping off the Trump train is strongly related to the Obama share of a district’s vote in 2012. That is, Republicans in competitive districts are outraged by Mr. Trump’s behavior; those in safe seats seem oddly indifferent.

https://boingboing.net/2016/10/11/the-coming-conservative-civi.html

[adtothebone]

“Guy Fieri's Baconated Hamapeño Chipotle-Chicken Despair Ziggurat”

[leitch]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Here are this week’s stories:

MONDAY The Thirty: The Biggest Free Agents NEXT Year (MLB.com)

TUESDAY Data Decade: The Best Ten Players of the Decade (MLB.com)

WEDNESDAY Stephen Strasburg Suitors Power Rankings (MLB.com) Debate Club: Worst Marvel Movies (SYFY Wire)

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch (subscribe in iTunes) “Marriage Story,” “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” “21 Bridges” and “Frozen 2.” Also, my annual Thanksgiving chat with Jeb Lund.

Waitin’ Since Last Saturday (subscribe in iTunes) Wrapping up Texas A&M, previewing Georgia Tech.

Seeing Red (subscribe in iTunes) No show this week.

This is truly the best holiday. Have a great weekend, everyone, and remember: The spirit of the [Thanksgiving holiday] genre is summed up in "Home for the Holidays" when two family members are fighting on the lawn while the father hoses them down. Seeing the neighbors gawking across the street, the father snarls, "Go back to your own goddamn holidays!" 

[adultstories4u]

Mera naam Vikram hai aur mujhe larkiyo ko chodna pasand hai aur lundo se apni gaand maravaani bhi pasand hai. ye baat mere school ke waqt ki hai, to tab 18 saal ka hoonga. meri dosti kuchh apne se badi class ke bacho se ho gayi aur maine unky saath kafi waqt bitaana shuroo kar diya.

pehle unky saath mai sirf school ke baad khelata tha, lekin ahista-ahista unse dosti itni bad gayi; ki maine unky saath idhar-udhar jaana shuroo kar diya aur thoda nasha karna bhi shuroo kar diya.

in sabake liye maine school se goli maarani shuroo kar di.

us waqt mujhe maaloom nahi tha; ki mai kya kar raha hu aur ye waqt mera bhawishy kidhar jaayega? mujhe unky saath bas maza aata tha, to mai unky saath time bitaata tha.

meri uchai zyada nahi thi bas theek thi aur mere jism par ek bhi baal nahi tha aur mera jism kafi chikna tha.

uname se ek larka kafi bada tha aur uski nazar mere jism par thi. woh khelakhel me, mere gaal par kis kar liya karta tha aur kabhi-kabhi mere kapro ke andar haath daal diya karta tha.

usne kafi baar mere lund ko pakrane ki koshish bhi ki thi aur kuchh baar usne pakad bhi liya tha aur jab bhi mera lund uske haath me aata, to woh kuchh jhatke maarake khich deta tha.

mai in sab baato se anjaan tha, to dhyaan nahi deta tha; lekin jab woh mera lund pakrata tha to mujhe bada maza aata tha.ek din woh larka mere school aaya aur bola, chal pikchar chalate hai.

mujhe sinema dekhne ka bahunt shauk tha, to mai jhat se ready ho gaya aur maine school ki divaar phaandi aur uske saath pikchar dekhne chala gaya.

woh ek blue film thi aur andar zyada log nahi the. ham bhi ek kone me jaakar baith gayi. woha kafi andhera tha aur koi hamen nahi nahi dekh sakta tha.

pikchar shuroo hui, shuroo me to sab theek tha; lekin, jaise-jaise sex sin barhne shuroo hue, mere lund ne khada hona shuroo kar diya aur mere saanse tez chalane lagi. dost ne mere kandhe pe haath rakha, to maine uska haath pakad liya.

use to isi mauke ka intzaar tha aur usne mere taango pe haath pherana shuroo kar diya. mera lund puri tarah se tan chuka tha aur bahar aane ko machal raha tha. usne mere pent ki jip kholi aur mere lund ko bahar nikaal liya.

usne ahista-ahista mere hast mathun karna shuroo kar diya aur maine lund me harkat hone lagi aur maine saanse tezzi se chalane lagi. maine abhi bhi uska ek haath pakra hua tha. phir, usne thoda aage bad kar mera lund apne muh me daal liya aur apne muh ko upar niche karne laga.

mere saath ye pehli baar ho raha tha, to mujhe maza aane laga aur kaamotezzana mere sar par haavi hone lagi. uske har choosan ke saath, mai apni gaand hila raha tha.

usne lund ko choostay- choostay apna lund mere haath me pakra diya aur mere tatato se khelana laga. uska lund bohat hi garam tha aur mai usko pakad ke masti me aa gaya tha.

ab usne mere puri pent ko niche sarakaana shuroo kiya aur mere niche ka bhaag pura nanga tha. usne bhi apne kapray utaar daale. phir usne apne pure saath niche daal kar meri gaand me finger karnee shuroo kar di.

phir usne apni finger meri gaand se nikali aur apne muh me daal kar geeli kar li aur phir meri gaand me finger daal di.

abhi tak woh sirf woh mere gaand ke chhed ko bahar se chhu raha tha; par ab usne unguli daba ke andar dalna shuroo kar diya.mera gaand ka chhed chhota tha, to usme dard hone laga. usne mujhe sit par ulta kiya aur ab meri gaand uske saamne thi.

usne apni jeb se tel ki shishi nikali aur meri gaand ko chikna kar diya aur apne lund ko bhi tel se bhigo diya.

phir usne meri gaand ko pakra aur apna lund meri gaand ke darwazy par rakh diya aur dhakka maara.

usne ek haath mere muh rakh liya, taaki awaaz na nikale. mujhe dard ho raha tha, par mai chilla nahi pa raha tha.

kuchh der ke dhakko ke baad mujhe dard kam hua aur uska lund mujhe achha lagane laga. woh mere lund se muth bhi maar raha tha.

kuchh der me, mai discharge ho gaya aur usne bhi apna garam paani meri gaand mai chhod diya.

mujhe gaand ke andar garam-garam achha laga raha tha.phir, usne mujhe sit par baithya, lekin gaand mai dard ki wajah se; mai baith nahi pa raha tha.

to usne mujhe niche bitha diya aur mere muh me apna lund ghusa diya aur mera muh chodne laga.

uska lund paani nikalne ke baad bhi khada| usne mera muh kasake baad kar diya aur mera muh chodne laga.

usne phir se apna paani mere muh me chhod diya. maine sab kuchh woha thook diya.

phir humne kapray pehane aur haal se nikaal gaye. woh mujhe apne ghar le gaya aur apne kamre me le jaakar meri gaand ki sikai ki.phir, jab bhi man karta, ham dono kisi ke bhi ghar chale jaate aur mai apni gaand masti me thukavaata.

The post Meri Golmol Gaand ki Mast Thukai (Desi Gay Sex Story) appeared first on Desi Stories.

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