In what seems like part of a deliberate attempt to make me hate them less, Huffington Post is reviving the brilliant Get Your War On series in video format. The most recent one pokes fun at Donald Trump, and it reminded me of what seems like a neglected aspect of the Donald’s jackassery.
So it turns out that jerk who went on a shooting spree at a Sikh temple this weekend in Wisconsin was a white supremacist, which means the far right went into their usual hysterics about how he wasn’t really guilty or that he was brainwashed by the gubbamint to do it, or it was all just a dream, or something.
Reddit’s kind of impossible to pin down to one stereotype. It’s just too big. There are a few popular characteristics lots of redditors share (liberal politics and a love of smoking marijuana), but there are also entire subreddits devoted to their polar opposites.
So it’s kind of insincere for someone to say they love or hate Reddit as a whole since the people are all over the map on pretty much every issue out there. There are, however, subreddits that are just devoted to assholery on an epic scale. And that’s what this series is about.
Joseph Ross of Dayton, OH was going to a music festival in Cincinnati. So he booked a room at a nearby Motel 6. He checked in his room and turned on the TV and saw his own personalized message, pictured above. Except there weren’t any asterisks.
Theodore Beale is this blogger at WorldNetDaily. He sometimes goes by Vox Day, probably because his family would disown him if they knew about his racism and misogyny and anti-science extremism. He’s also buddies with John Derbyshire – remember that NRO writer who got fired for writing that racist screed about how he tells his kids to stay away from black kids? And then everyone was like, “Oh, he’s just doing some stupid faux-colorblind tongue-in-cheek thing about how black people are the real racists for telling their kids about racism,” and he was like, “Nah, dude, I’m serious here.” Yeah, they’re tight.
I have a feeling that writing a weekly column about people saying and doing crazy things is going to get a lot easier now that it’s getting warmer. The heat seems to drive normal people nuts and sends the ones who were already a little off into Francis E Dec territory. At least that’s the explanation I gave myself when I tried to narrow down all the weird news stories to summarize this week. And that’s probably a self-serving explanation because the alternative – that this is part of a larger downward spiral into universal lunacy – is just too depressing.
So I’m back to doing a series of short news stories in this space. You should all just get used to there being no real consistent structure here. The best you can hope for is a focus on people doing and saying crazy things. So let’s get to it.
On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed a young black man, by the name of Trayvon Martin, who was walking from a convenience store back to his father’s girlfriend’s house. Martin was unarmed. Zimmerman insists that he was acting in self defense. He has not been arrested or charged with a crime as of this writing. The initial police response did not immediately check if George Zimmerman was drunk or on drugs that night. Nor did they take him to the hospital to seek medical aid for him despite his later claims that Martin assaulted him. In this piece from Anderson Cooper, Anderson lays out some of the other missteps by the police. Mr. Zimmerman, who has not publicly spoken, has had his lawyer, friends and family put out his version of what occurred that evening. Here then is George Zimmerman’s story:
I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.
So there wasn’t much to do in Meadville. One thing to do was drive around delivering pizzas to townies while listening to the Alex Jones radio show. That’s what my friend did. This was in the days before iPods, so unless you wanted to drag around your CD collection and risk it getting stolen by Alex Jones fans for crystal meth money, radio was your only option.
So we would get stoned and laugh at the crazy man yelling about the global “elite” in his documentaries. It’d be fun to pick apart the fact from fiction and to try to identify the point where reasonable concerns about government waste turned into the fever-dream rants of a paranoid lunatic. So yeah, the drug war is bullshit, but it’s not part of a UN plot to end American sovereignty.
0-20:00 This movie is set in a commune of Ron Paul supporters who like to bus in African-American women from the movie Gone With the Wind to show them what it’s like to have liberty and stuff. Aibileen and Minny are two of them. Skeeter is a blogger and has a quota of 15 posts per day, not including LOLcats. This is very difficult to do without any internet, so she gets her white supremacist friends to loan her their slaves to sub-contract out her blogging “work.” We also meet a woman named Celia who is ostracized because she is too naive to be racist, and Hilly the former Nazi prison guard.
Atheist Hobos 