Weekend Links

“Maybe you guys should ah, get a sense of humor and try it sometime… but, ah, he simply made a joke.”
-Sarah Huckabee Sanders, October 10, 2017

Woof, the news this week again should have lasted us a month, but it’s 2018 and the space time continuum doesn’t make sense anymore. Between Rudy Giuliani, that weird doctor, the ongoing issues with porn stars, another shake up to the president’s legal team, leaks of questions in the Mueller probe, and Kanye West, I JUST CAN’T. I didn’t even reference most of these stories in the links because at time of writing, the news is flying so fast that anything I post will likely be invalid within ten minutes. I will say that unless the plan is to simply declare that Mr. Trump is above the law (and let’s face it, that doesn’t feel beyond the realm of possibility), Mr. Giuliani isn’t striking me as a particularly good lawyer right out of the gate…

It’s Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK and I’m logging off for a good while to celebrate. Share your weekend plans with me in the comments!

The “furor” over the White House Correspondents Dinner exhausted me. Organization hires comedian to roast the media establishment including those in the room, comedian does that job, establishment who offered invitation and knew what the job entailed wrings hands at being roasted. Side helping of virtue signalling from those who have either turned a blind eye to or actively participated in the coarsening of our public discourse by defending the most coarse and crass person in it: the actual man in charge–who coincidentally spent the evening ranting falsehoods about said establishment to his base. Spare me. She did her job and the performance of disappointment over it is annoying.

ETA. Ha, all we had to do was wait a couple of days to be reminded that Ms. Sanders is either badly out of the loop in her own place of work or willfully misleading the press. Either of which makes her badly placed to do her job and probably not deserving of a huge heap of defense.

I was a child bride who got married before the world of Tinder and I routinely joke that if Jeff dies young on me, god forbid, I’m calling it. Done. I’ll buy fourteen cats and be done with the world, because the world of dating just seems cripplingly complicated to me.

Or I could just schedule an appointment with this woman. What a story!

We can’t win.

Everyone has a problematic fave. (ETA: good lord, Kanye, shut up.)

Busy Phillips, meanwhile, is a non-problematic fave who we should enthusiastically support!

Okay, what do we mean when we say toxic masculinity? Believe it or not, there are actual organized “movements” or “tribes” who embody and proselytize for institutionalized misogyny. The “incel” subgroup has been getting some attention (finally) and its online presence is both horrifying and morbidly fascinating to read about because it so ugly and so blatant of its ugliness. There needs to be a lot more attention towards the radicalization of young men online across the world and across ideologies; people are dying from it.

Speaking of, let’s discuss some of the terminology of this movement. Let’s also dwell on its idealized version of femininity and how I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist in nature…

WOW, bad optics.

Someday bad editing from this administration will tweet us right into a war.

WHO ASKED FOR THIS?!

These drawings are incredible.

How does this man still have a job?

The analytics company is dead…long live the analytics company?

Yes, for the love of god, stop doing this.

Also, stop writing pieces like this. Just stop. Everything about this is dreadful and makes me want to scream into the howling void.

The only redemption, and it’s cold comfort, is the twitter jokes.

If we start calling people without money “inpoors” will conservatives write articles about how we should redistribute wealth against the will of rich people, I’m looking for an upside here

— Tim Pratt (@timpratt) May 3, 2018