Quotes, This is a Low, But It Can Hurt You Edition
Special LGM edition
If you think things can’t get worse, you don’t understand Republicans.
-- LosGatosCA, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm constantly assured the saintly "checks and balances" preclude any outrageous ratfucking, and yet there's any number of rats constantly limping about with extremely sore cocks. Strange, that.
-- keta, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
All ideologies have opportunists figuring out how to work it cynically for their own selfish gain. But in conservatism, working the system for your own selfish gain is the ideology.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The most effective way to lead a mob is to follow it.
-- Thursday, Lawyers, Guns,and Money, comments
The true plutocracy is post-national. When you have assorted homes all over their world and your tax returns are an opaque nightmare of offshore havens and phantom LLCs, what is your loyalty to your home country, really? For the last few years a steadily increasing number of Americans have been renouncing their citizenships. I think it's a few thousand per quarter now. Most of them are ex-pat members of the financier class who are renouncing because they would rather pay 0% in investment and capital gains taxes in, for example, Singapore than 20% in America (and have no inheritance taxes either). The renunciation paperwork costs them about $3,500 and they can still spend 120 days per year in the States, which is probably more than they'll ever need. And even that limit is lightly enforced, from what I hear. The most famous example of this is Facebook's Eduardo Saverin, who moved to Singapore, became a citizen there, and renounced his US citizenship the year Facebook went public, but there are plenty of other examples as well. The guy who bought the most expensive residence ever sold in the city of Boston is an ex-American private equity guy who now just holds Irish citizenship. So to people who only see the world in money, what's the downside?
-- Unemployed_Northeastern, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They [Russia] learned what anyone watching 20th century U.S. history would have learned: that while working through left wing and nonwhites activists will get you under permanent FBI surveillance and hostility, working with banksters and right wing supremacists will leave you literally getting away with murder.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If we want to say Christianity or European ancestry is essential to the American experience, let's just put a number on it, put our money where our mouths are and get it over with.
-- sigaba, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Millions of snowflakes are called a blizzard and blizzards fucking kill people every year.
-- Mike Hoyer, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[W]e keep waiting on enlightened self interest and the business wing of the GOP to save us but it's not ever happened and doesn't appear likely to ever happen.
It's a combination of this and consequences. On the one hand, businessmen are really not that smart. I suppose the ratio of smart to dumb is similar to most fields, but it certainly isn't better. On the other hand? They're rich. When consequences for their actions happen, they don't happen to them. Heck, the guy in the White House is there to reassure them that no matter if you fuck up your entire life, you can still fail upwards forever. So... They're not actually wrong to not freak out over anything. Even global warming will probably be survived just fine.
-- fearandloathing and CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A] world of globalised capitalism in partnership with nationalist xenophobic elites is the reality now.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
An interesting way to look at this is something I read from a liberal blogger on her Fourth of July post once: that if you accept the economic principle of every man for himself, if you accept Thatcher's principle that "there is no such thing as society," then you're also saying that there is no such thing as country. I mean, these are people who fantasize about withdrawing their productivity from society and watching it burn because it didn't kiss their ass enough. The leap from "going Galt" to "treason" is really a small step.
That we don't think of things that way is a testament to how much the rich have brainwashed society to associate "patriotism" with them and their groupies.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Can you really call yourself pro-choice if your position is essentially "I’m sick of people fighting about this, so fuck women in red states"?
-- corporatecake, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comment
The uglier your view of your fellow human beings the less duty you have to them to co-exist, share resources, care about them. So you get agressive reactionary rejection of the entire social project.
-- Aimai, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If there were a functioning counter-intelligence agency anywhere in the western world, Murdoch would have enjoyed a tragic plane crash or boating accident more than 30 years ago....instead, you know, of having been suffered to subvert the governments and societies of the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia.
-- Steve Cumming, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It's almost as if the liberal world order was propped up by powerful people until the USSR fell and then they went about immediately destroying it in order to enrich themselves.
-- Lit3Bolt, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Remember when our last amazing republican president, who had a close personal relationship with the Saudi Royal Family through his own family's links to oil wealth, ignored a bunch of really obvious warnings about a member of Saudi royalty planning a spectacular attack inside the US, and the first real action his administration took after the attack was whisking all of the Saudi royals in the US back home to safety? Remember how they directly fabricated a bunch of horseshit so they could attack a state that had nothing to do with it, with open plans to turn it into a Saudi & Israel friendly state? Remember how the company that got given uncountable billions in no-bid contracts to supply the invasion and reconstruction was the one that his Vice President was the CEO of, and who still had a ton of open stock options invested in it?
There were scandals and investigations, there were federal prosecutors, there was 'Merry Fitzmas' going round the blogosphere, and what did liberals get out of it in the end? Scooter Libby and Judith Miller.
I can understand the delight at the thought that a bunch of absolute remoras, charlatans, and failsons like Jared Kushner and Michael Cohen are going to get sent down because they did The Producers but with an American presidential election, because hey it's objectively hilarious, but... you guys have been here before. Pushing for a legal solution against the class of people who are above the law is a hard nut to crack for such dry and shrivelled nutmeat.
-- Chuck Finley, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
A modern and truly secular society could, and would, reach reasonably pragmatic decisions about abortion, gun laws, discrimination, etc., and move on to addressing actual existential threats posed by the endless raping of the planet. Strategic capitalists -- people like the Koch Bros -- understand the cynical brilliance of making sure we never, ever, ever move on from the culture wars, because a society looking at the big picture rationally would strictly regulate the actual, real-life impacts of capitalism on the environment.
-- catbirdman, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"Fake news" is pretty much defined at this point as "True information that it would be helpful for my allies to deny".
-- Alex Saltzburg, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Republicans apply the principle of "Rube Goldberg's Razor".
-- njorl, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A]ny discussion of how the library actually functions in 2018 America would need to account for their role as de facto daytime homeless shelters, which is one of the hottest topics of discussion and debate among actual library professionals.
-- Winston2209, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Remember, fellow citizens, you can't spell 'communist terrorist patsy' without 'basic amenities'!
-- Amadan, Lawyers, Guns, and Mohey, comments
My late aunt had an ectopic pregnancy long ago, and survived, as there were no laws restricting surgery to save a woman's life at that time.
-- JR in WV, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Compromising with an inflexible ideologue to get a new norm just means that the next compromise is somewhere between the inflexible ideologue and the new norm. Repeat until the compromise position and the inflexible ideologue position are indistinguishable.
-- Lurks, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There can be no more symbolically perfect use for Bud Light than waterboarding nazis with it.
-- tsam100, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They looked from Post to Onion, from Onion to Post, and already it was impossible to tell which was which.
-- Lurking Canadian, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Ever since he announced as a candidate, I have noted that Trump embodies in his person every trait I loathe. If he announced tomorrow that he was adopting every plank in Hillary Clinton’s platform plus abolishing ICE, free college, and sending everyone in the country a dozen chocolate doughnuts on the 15th of each month, I would still find him disgusting. He has the language fluency of chairs, the taste in everything of a rather dimwitted plumber, and, in addition, has an irritating voice and looks gross. Add in the narcissism, the ignorance, the bigotry, what is there to like??!?!
-- Karen, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I am very tired of the popular genre known as "Democrats, Save Moderate Republicans From The Horrible Monster We Created, But Only on Our Terms."
-- Nobdy, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Growing up in a small mostly white town, the issue of race just never comes up, and where there is only one school district, segregation isn't really possible. I lived in DC for awhile after college, and I was shocked all the time about how thoroughly race corrupted everything and everyone. For example, I didn't know that even liberal city neighborhoods are divided by race and people straight up say "black" to mean "bad", or I didn't know that there are restaurants where all the patrons are white, but all the staff are people of color.
I think the reason that racism reared up so strongly in the reason over the past several years are first off that immigrants mean that once extremely homogeneous areas now have small immigrant populations, which causes people to lose their shit (and if you live in Denison or Storm Lake in IA, there aren't exactly suburbs you can move to like the coastal, front-row kid racists). Second, a lot of rural northern whites are deeply invested in the lies we learn in school about the country's racial history, ie that racism was a bad thing that happened in the South, but MLK Jr. stopped it, so now everything is pretty much fair, and people of color who deny this story, whether by stating that some of the attacks on Obama are racially motivated, or by getting themselves unfairly shot by police, are personally attacking the good character of these rural whites.
-- The Kids Aren't Alt-Right, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
You don't elect Tailgunner Joe without a lot of people walking around discussing about how Hitler wasn't all wrong.
-- wengler, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"Instinct" is just pattern recognition. It's when you've been doing something for long enough that you recognize some things even before your conscious mind can articulate what they are. It does you no good when you know nothing about the topic,
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[This] makes me want to reach for my Smith & Wesson, my Smith Corona, and my Jack Daniels, simultaneously.
-- Princetonlawyer, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
'These were not very bright guys and things got out of hand' is going to make a lovely epitaph for our species.
-- sibusisodan, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
America's economy depends on monetizing everything that doesn't need, nor should really ever be monetized.
-- Toby Farquarson III, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Anybody who talks about the Great Society as “60s-style socialism” needs to be ignored.
-- Paul Campos, "Fear of a Socialist Nation," Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
When people say "the religious right," I always mentally translate it as "the segregationists." Never been let down by that translation.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm still shocked that there are actually people who have the gall to claim it's wrong to call a man who fucking murdered a black child just because he was black racist.
-- JMP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There's no real difference between talking about the coming martyrdom of US Christians and going to horror movies.
-- Lori, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The thing I've discovered over the years about misogynists is that most of them hate men almost as much as they hate women. (I'm not talking here about the men who are unthinkingly moving along with cultural norms - I'm talking about the hardcore haters of women.)
They are balls of hate.
-- NonyNony, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
In former Soviet Union, collusion colludes you!
-- royko, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
One of the reverse cheat codes for reality is the inability to distinguish between fact and opinion. The increasingly common occurence of the phenomenon is possibly and indicator of an inablilty to even define each of the two concepts as well as being unable to distinguish between them.
-- Toby Farquarson III, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
My therapist told me that a constant stream of white-hot profanity is a healthy response to the world as it is, so go right ahead.
-- rm, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Recall that just 30 days ago or so, one of the immigration judges tried to stop up the works because ICE was bringing 1- and 2-year-old children into the courtroom for proceedings in which these children had to represent themselves. The judge refused to move the cases forward because there was no way a pre-verbal infant or toddler could be made to understand what was going on.
The Trump administration over-ruled the judge.
-- Derelict, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The Confederacy was an attempt by traitors to the cause of the United States to create a nation whose economic engine was fueled by treating a certain segment of humans as cattle. This is what people are honoring with their Confederate toy soldiers: the failed creation of an enemy slave nation.
Depending on how seriously you take things like the Ostend Manifesto, the filibuster movement (and support thereof), and Confederate attempts to destabilize Mexico during the war, what they're actually honoring is the failed creation of a enemy slave empire.
-- CV Danes and Sly, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I think a lot of them just see empathy and basic human decency as a dangerous thing to encourage. I mean, they don't really care if you want to stop war crimes in Uganda. But if people start giving a damn about bad stuff and then see that government action could do something to stop that stuff, then that might catch on, and next thing you know....Caring and empathy always and everywhere for whatever reason must always must be mocked lest people begin to think that it's acceptable... and then the next thing you know, you are doing stuff they disagree with.
-- fearandloathing, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There is a species of "hardheaded realist" whose head is so hard that no reality can penetrate it.
-- aardvarkcheeselog, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I need our racists to understand this: You fucking lost. You lost at Appomattox, you lost at Berlin, you lost in Washington DC when the courts ordered desegregation and the government passed civil rights protections for minorities.
You are losers. Your heroes are losers. Your philosophy is the philosophy of losers. And despite all of your bitter whining and all of your twitter rants and your helping elect the racist moron in chief, you will lose this fight too. Your America will lose again. Because decent Americans will always be there to fight Nazis.
Now, you can either repent or you can go fuck yourself and stay a loser.
-- Old Man Shadow, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A]he slippery slope argument would be more persuasive if we weren't already at the bottom of the slope. We're only days removed from an Asian woman nearly losing her media job because of some rude but ultimately anodyne tweets. People like Talia Lavin already have lost their jobs. Facebook and twitter routinely shut down accounts and groups on the left, or even for things like mocking Elon Musk. By virtue of being a famous white man on the right wing, Alex Jones was uniquely protected on these platforms while less famous, less privileged users on the left routinely got shut down or shut out - which you can tell because people have been clamoring for him to be banned for years, at least since he started his unconscionable persecution of the Sandy Hook parents, and it only happened now. Suddenly remembering that it's a problem that social media companies have this kind of power is extremely unconvincing.
-- Abigail Nussbaum, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm not fighting to the death for every dumb thing someone wants to say. I only have one life, I'm going to be a little more picky than that.
-- SatanicPanic, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Sometimes you think you gotta take a wikileak, then you find you gotta take a Dump too...
-- so-in-so, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
i strongly object to the implication that Ted Cruz was ever young
my understanding is that he sprang, in full oleaginous flower, from the skull of a Calgary tar sands brokerage tout
-- Nick never Nick, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"What is your date of birth?" is the oldest hearsay exception
-- Bill Altreuter, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Conservative intellectual -
noun
A bigot who can write complete sentences.
-- njorl, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Some years ago, I saw a clip of Christopher Cox (I think then he was still a congressman from California) talking to a group of young conservatives and he said that when talking about capitalism vs. socialism, conservatives should say "free enterprise" instead of "capitalism" because it sounded better. Saying "capitalism", according to Cox, made it sound like conservatives valued "capital", e.g., money, over people (given the root of the term "socialism"). In other words, conservatives would be speaking the truth.
-- Linnaeus, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
How the fuck does one bully a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Drone strikes.
Intrigued, newsletter, subscribe.
-- corporatecake, Snarki, child of Loki, and Steve LaBonne, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If the right defines anything to the left of Pinochet as socialism people are like “OK I’m a Socialist”
-- EricK, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If you think things can’t get worse, you don’t understand Republicans.
-- LosGatosCA, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm constantly assured the saintly "checks and balances" preclude any outrageous ratfucking, and yet there's any number of rats constantly limping about with extremely sore cocks. Strange, that.
-- keta, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
All ideologies have opportunists figuring out how to work it cynically for their own selfish gain. But in conservatism, working the system for your own selfish gain is the ideology.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The most effective way to lead a mob is to follow it.
-- Thursday, Lawyers, Guns,and Money, comments
The true plutocracy is post-national. When you have assorted homes all over their world and your tax returns are an opaque nightmare of offshore havens and phantom LLCs, what is your loyalty to your home country, really? For the last few years a steadily increasing number of Americans have been renouncing their citizenships. I think it's a few thousand per quarter now. Most of them are ex-pat members of the financier class who are renouncing because they would rather pay 0% in investment and capital gains taxes in, for example, Singapore than 20% in America (and have no inheritance taxes either). The renunciation paperwork costs them about $3,500 and they can still spend 120 days per year in the States, which is probably more than they'll ever need. And even that limit is lightly enforced, from what I hear. The most famous example of this is Facebook's Eduardo Saverin, who moved to Singapore, became a citizen there, and renounced his US citizenship the year Facebook went public, but there are plenty of other examples as well. The guy who bought the most expensive residence ever sold in the city of Boston is an ex-American private equity guy who now just holds Irish citizenship. So to people who only see the world in money, what's the downside?
-- Unemployed_Northeastern, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They [Russia] learned what anyone watching 20th century U.S. history would have learned: that while working through left wing and nonwhites activists will get you under permanent FBI surveillance and hostility, working with banksters and right wing supremacists will leave you literally getting away with murder.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If we want to say Christianity or European ancestry is essential to the American experience, let's just put a number on it, put our money where our mouths are and get it over with.
-- sigaba, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Millions of snowflakes are called a blizzard and blizzards fucking kill people every year.
-- Mike Hoyer, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[W]e keep waiting on enlightened self interest and the business wing of the GOP to save us but it's not ever happened and doesn't appear likely to ever happen.
It's a combination of this and consequences. On the one hand, businessmen are really not that smart. I suppose the ratio of smart to dumb is similar to most fields, but it certainly isn't better. On the other hand? They're rich. When consequences for their actions happen, they don't happen to them. Heck, the guy in the White House is there to reassure them that no matter if you fuck up your entire life, you can still fail upwards forever. So... They're not actually wrong to not freak out over anything. Even global warming will probably be survived just fine.
-- fearandloathing and CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A] world of globalised capitalism in partnership with nationalist xenophobic elites is the reality now.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
An interesting way to look at this is something I read from a liberal blogger on her Fourth of July post once: that if you accept the economic principle of every man for himself, if you accept Thatcher's principle that "there is no such thing as society," then you're also saying that there is no such thing as country. I mean, these are people who fantasize about withdrawing their productivity from society and watching it burn because it didn't kiss their ass enough. The leap from "going Galt" to "treason" is really a small step.
That we don't think of things that way is a testament to how much the rich have brainwashed society to associate "patriotism" with them and their groupies.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Can you really call yourself pro-choice if your position is essentially "I’m sick of people fighting about this, so fuck women in red states"?
-- corporatecake, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comment
The uglier your view of your fellow human beings the less duty you have to them to co-exist, share resources, care about them. So you get agressive reactionary rejection of the entire social project.
-- Aimai, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If there were a functioning counter-intelligence agency anywhere in the western world, Murdoch would have enjoyed a tragic plane crash or boating accident more than 30 years ago....instead, you know, of having been suffered to subvert the governments and societies of the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia.
-- Steve Cumming, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It's almost as if the liberal world order was propped up by powerful people until the USSR fell and then they went about immediately destroying it in order to enrich themselves.
-- Lit3Bolt, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Remember when our last amazing republican president, who had a close personal relationship with the Saudi Royal Family through his own family's links to oil wealth, ignored a bunch of really obvious warnings about a member of Saudi royalty planning a spectacular attack inside the US, and the first real action his administration took after the attack was whisking all of the Saudi royals in the US back home to safety? Remember how they directly fabricated a bunch of horseshit so they could attack a state that had nothing to do with it, with open plans to turn it into a Saudi & Israel friendly state? Remember how the company that got given uncountable billions in no-bid contracts to supply the invasion and reconstruction was the one that his Vice President was the CEO of, and who still had a ton of open stock options invested in it?
There were scandals and investigations, there were federal prosecutors, there was 'Merry Fitzmas' going round the blogosphere, and what did liberals get out of it in the end? Scooter Libby and Judith Miller.
I can understand the delight at the thought that a bunch of absolute remoras, charlatans, and failsons like Jared Kushner and Michael Cohen are going to get sent down because they did The Producers but with an American presidential election, because hey it's objectively hilarious, but... you guys have been here before. Pushing for a legal solution against the class of people who are above the law is a hard nut to crack for such dry and shrivelled nutmeat.
-- Chuck Finley, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
A modern and truly secular society could, and would, reach reasonably pragmatic decisions about abortion, gun laws, discrimination, etc., and move on to addressing actual existential threats posed by the endless raping of the planet. Strategic capitalists -- people like the Koch Bros -- understand the cynical brilliance of making sure we never, ever, ever move on from the culture wars, because a society looking at the big picture rationally would strictly regulate the actual, real-life impacts of capitalism on the environment.
-- catbirdman, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"Fake news" is pretty much defined at this point as "True information that it would be helpful for my allies to deny".
-- Alex Saltzburg, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Republicans apply the principle of "Rube Goldberg's Razor".
-- njorl, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A]ny discussion of how the library actually functions in 2018 America would need to account for their role as de facto daytime homeless shelters, which is one of the hottest topics of discussion and debate among actual library professionals.
-- Winston2209, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Remember, fellow citizens, you can't spell 'communist terrorist patsy' without 'basic amenities'!
-- Amadan, Lawyers, Guns, and Mohey, comments
My late aunt had an ectopic pregnancy long ago, and survived, as there were no laws restricting surgery to save a woman's life at that time.
-- JR in WV, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Compromising with an inflexible ideologue to get a new norm just means that the next compromise is somewhere between the inflexible ideologue and the new norm. Repeat until the compromise position and the inflexible ideologue position are indistinguishable.
-- Lurks, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There can be no more symbolically perfect use for Bud Light than waterboarding nazis with it.
-- tsam100, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
They looked from Post to Onion, from Onion to Post, and already it was impossible to tell which was which.
-- Lurking Canadian, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Ever since he announced as a candidate, I have noted that Trump embodies in his person every trait I loathe. If he announced tomorrow that he was adopting every plank in Hillary Clinton’s platform plus abolishing ICE, free college, and sending everyone in the country a dozen chocolate doughnuts on the 15th of each month, I would still find him disgusting. He has the language fluency of chairs, the taste in everything of a rather dimwitted plumber, and, in addition, has an irritating voice and looks gross. Add in the narcissism, the ignorance, the bigotry, what is there to like??!?!
-- Karen, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I am very tired of the popular genre known as "Democrats, Save Moderate Republicans From The Horrible Monster We Created, But Only on Our Terms."
-- Nobdy, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Growing up in a small mostly white town, the issue of race just never comes up, and where there is only one school district, segregation isn't really possible. I lived in DC for awhile after college, and I was shocked all the time about how thoroughly race corrupted everything and everyone. For example, I didn't know that even liberal city neighborhoods are divided by race and people straight up say "black" to mean "bad", or I didn't know that there are restaurants where all the patrons are white, but all the staff are people of color.
I think the reason that racism reared up so strongly in the reason over the past several years are first off that immigrants mean that once extremely homogeneous areas now have small immigrant populations, which causes people to lose their shit (and if you live in Denison or Storm Lake in IA, there aren't exactly suburbs you can move to like the coastal, front-row kid racists). Second, a lot of rural northern whites are deeply invested in the lies we learn in school about the country's racial history, ie that racism was a bad thing that happened in the South, but MLK Jr. stopped it, so now everything is pretty much fair, and people of color who deny this story, whether by stating that some of the attacks on Obama are racially motivated, or by getting themselves unfairly shot by police, are personally attacking the good character of these rural whites.
-- The Kids Aren't Alt-Right, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
You don't elect Tailgunner Joe without a lot of people walking around discussing about how Hitler wasn't all wrong.
-- wengler, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"Instinct" is just pattern recognition. It's when you've been doing something for long enough that you recognize some things even before your conscious mind can articulate what they are. It does you no good when you know nothing about the topic,
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[This] makes me want to reach for my Smith & Wesson, my Smith Corona, and my Jack Daniels, simultaneously.
-- Princetonlawyer, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
'These were not very bright guys and things got out of hand' is going to make a lovely epitaph for our species.
-- sibusisodan, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
America's economy depends on monetizing everything that doesn't need, nor should really ever be monetized.
-- Toby Farquarson III, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Anybody who talks about the Great Society as “60s-style socialism” needs to be ignored.
-- Paul Campos, "Fear of a Socialist Nation," Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
When people say "the religious right," I always mentally translate it as "the segregationists." Never been let down by that translation.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm still shocked that there are actually people who have the gall to claim it's wrong to call a man who fucking murdered a black child just because he was black racist.
-- JMP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There's no real difference between talking about the coming martyrdom of US Christians and going to horror movies.
-- Lori, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The thing I've discovered over the years about misogynists is that most of them hate men almost as much as they hate women. (I'm not talking here about the men who are unthinkingly moving along with cultural norms - I'm talking about the hardcore haters of women.)
They are balls of hate.
-- NonyNony, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
In former Soviet Union, collusion colludes you!
-- royko, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
One of the reverse cheat codes for reality is the inability to distinguish between fact and opinion. The increasingly common occurence of the phenomenon is possibly and indicator of an inablilty to even define each of the two concepts as well as being unable to distinguish between them.
-- Toby Farquarson III, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
My therapist told me that a constant stream of white-hot profanity is a healthy response to the world as it is, so go right ahead.
-- rm, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Recall that just 30 days ago or so, one of the immigration judges tried to stop up the works because ICE was bringing 1- and 2-year-old children into the courtroom for proceedings in which these children had to represent themselves. The judge refused to move the cases forward because there was no way a pre-verbal infant or toddler could be made to understand what was going on.
The Trump administration over-ruled the judge.
-- Derelict, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The Confederacy was an attempt by traitors to the cause of the United States to create a nation whose economic engine was fueled by treating a certain segment of humans as cattle. This is what people are honoring with their Confederate toy soldiers: the failed creation of an enemy slave nation.
Depending on how seriously you take things like the Ostend Manifesto, the filibuster movement (and support thereof), and Confederate attempts to destabilize Mexico during the war, what they're actually honoring is the failed creation of a enemy slave empire.
-- CV Danes and Sly, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I think a lot of them just see empathy and basic human decency as a dangerous thing to encourage. I mean, they don't really care if you want to stop war crimes in Uganda. But if people start giving a damn about bad stuff and then see that government action could do something to stop that stuff, then that might catch on, and next thing you know....Caring and empathy always and everywhere for whatever reason must always must be mocked lest people begin to think that it's acceptable... and then the next thing you know, you are doing stuff they disagree with.
-- fearandloathing, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
There is a species of "hardheaded realist" whose head is so hard that no reality can penetrate it.
-- aardvarkcheeselog, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I need our racists to understand this: You fucking lost. You lost at Appomattox, you lost at Berlin, you lost in Washington DC when the courts ordered desegregation and the government passed civil rights protections for minorities.
You are losers. Your heroes are losers. Your philosophy is the philosophy of losers. And despite all of your bitter whining and all of your twitter rants and your helping elect the racist moron in chief, you will lose this fight too. Your America will lose again. Because decent Americans will always be there to fight Nazis.
Now, you can either repent or you can go fuck yourself and stay a loser.
-- Old Man Shadow, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
[A]he slippery slope argument would be more persuasive if we weren't already at the bottom of the slope. We're only days removed from an Asian woman nearly losing her media job because of some rude but ultimately anodyne tweets. People like Talia Lavin already have lost their jobs. Facebook and twitter routinely shut down accounts and groups on the left, or even for things like mocking Elon Musk. By virtue of being a famous white man on the right wing, Alex Jones was uniquely protected on these platforms while less famous, less privileged users on the left routinely got shut down or shut out - which you can tell because people have been clamoring for him to be banned for years, at least since he started his unconscionable persecution of the Sandy Hook parents, and it only happened now. Suddenly remembering that it's a problem that social media companies have this kind of power is extremely unconvincing.
-- Abigail Nussbaum, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
I'm not fighting to the death for every dumb thing someone wants to say. I only have one life, I'm going to be a little more picky than that.
-- SatanicPanic, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Sometimes you think you gotta take a wikileak, then you find you gotta take a Dump too...
-- so-in-so, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
i strongly object to the implication that Ted Cruz was ever young
my understanding is that he sprang, in full oleaginous flower, from the skull of a Calgary tar sands brokerage tout
-- Nick never Nick, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
"What is your date of birth?" is the oldest hearsay exception
-- Bill Altreuter, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Conservative intellectual -
noun
A bigot who can write complete sentences.
-- njorl, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Some years ago, I saw a clip of Christopher Cox (I think then he was still a congressman from California) talking to a group of young conservatives and he said that when talking about capitalism vs. socialism, conservatives should say "free enterprise" instead of "capitalism" because it sounded better. Saying "capitalism", according to Cox, made it sound like conservatives valued "capital", e.g., money, over people (given the root of the term "socialism"). In other words, conservatives would be speaking the truth.
-- Linnaeus, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
How the fuck does one bully a multi-billion dollar corporation?
Drone strikes.
Intrigued, newsletter, subscribe.
-- corporatecake, Snarki, child of Loki, and Steve LaBonne, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
If the right defines anything to the left of Pinochet as socialism people are like “OK I’m a Socialist”
-- EricK, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments