DemoLition

@SouthernMB82 An old saying... White southerners: hate the race, love the man White northerners: love the race, hate the man

While driving to Walmart, I was lectured about racism by my husband’s extremely liberal cousin who lives in the circled area. (She was down here at our family lake house for a reunion. As is proper, I had volunteered to chauffeur her.) At one point, she told me that I should work harder to uplift black people, especially since I’m from the Birmingham area. I kept my mouth shut the entire time. As I pulled into a parking space, another car pulled up two spaces over. As she was opening her door, three black men in their early 20s got out of that car. She immediately closed her door and locked it. I smiled, opened my door to get out of the car, looked back and said, “I thought I was supposed to be the racist one in this equation.” She didn’t say nary a word the rest of the weekend. That happened like 15 years ago, and it still makes me chuckle.

@wil_da_beast630 But that would raze the farm. No more crops.

Just enforce the fucking law. No more to say.

@wil_da_beast630 Who funds these barking hyenas, like Candy-O and Fozzie the Bear here? Are they self-sufficient, or quietly propped up by some obscure think tank?

The idea that designing the financial system - or creating jazz and hip-hop, breeding all traditional species of corn and potatoes, etc - is not "innovation" is a curious one.

@AiPinfu2003 @ToxinMortalis Of course, we have flat earth supporters across the globe.

@ToxinMortalis 地球平面説を信じているの？？

アジアの未来はもっと明るい。 だから我々は目を細めてるんだ。

@News3LV Call me crazy, but I reckon lack of discipline, lack of work ethic, lack of focus, lack of willpower, lack of dignity, and lack of impulse control are bigger factors.

For many people experiencing homelessness in the Las Vegas area, a simple photo ID can be the difference between staying on the streets and getting access to housing, health care, or a job. bit.ly/4m3dzNX

@wil_da_beast630 I call the leftist wing of my FB feed Les Misérables.

*Of leftism generally

@MsMelChen @MattWelch @kmele @wethefifth Funnily enough, I just watched CRUISING for the first time.

@MattWelch @kmele @wethefifth Fistings should always be scheduled

Ten years ago today, ⁦@kmele⁩ analogized the first episode of ⁦@wethefifth⁩ to a “surprise fisting.” It’s been all downhill from there…. wethefifth.com/p/001-terroris…

@wil_da_beast630 Captain Frost, he fought Spider-Man and Lard Lad in Marvel Team-Up #86, a "key" issue.

He can turn any organic substance into crack.

@wil_da_beast630 '70s kid here. Afterschool fights were a weekly event. Full-blown scraps, fists flying, kicks, body slams, blood, bruises, limping. Often a handshake at the end.

@illnevercallitx "Literal"

That's it. That's the best picture from Saturday's No Kings protests in the USA. The literal Statue of Liberty being detained by police. It doesn't get much more poetic than this.

@LundoCalrossian @BrianJNBA And she's autistic and quirky-cute and can solve crimes in her head. But is also a girlboss.

@BrianJNBA Starring Mark Harmon, as the father of a hooker with a heart of gold who moonlights as an FBI agent

Every CBS show is called something like "POLICECOP," it stars an actor you haven't thought of in 15 years and it gets 75 million viewers per episode.

@VanguardofProls @jnorris441 @BrianJNBA POLICECOP, you've gone too far, your gun and your badge NOW! "I haven't gone far enough..." [cue The Who, "Don't Let Go the Coat"]

@jnorris441 @BrianJNBA 😂🤣😂

Upstate native & former state worker here: problem is NYC controls state legislation. No one wins state office w/out kissing rings of corrupt NYC powers. In SW for 12 yrs & it's lovely but beware culture shock. Really is Wild West & frankly less civilized than NE. Miss Adirondacks & towns w/out hordes of vagrants but not much else. During COVID & remote reset hipsters broke past Hudson, NY barrier & swarmed northern valley, jacking up low housing prices.

I think some clarification is in order here: 1. I grew up in rural Upstate NY 2. I left for over a decade 3. Every time I came back home, it broke my heart to see how this place is declining -- yet the land is so beautiful and the houses are cheap. 4. I came back, not with any illusions about the culture here. I figured that maybe I could help make it better, and if nothing else, I could live cheap for a while after I got out of the military. 5. Within 6 months of leaving the military, I blew up online and wound up accidentally launching into a successful online writing career. It was totally unexpected. 6. On the fly, I tried to use my newfound online reach to attract people here, to promote this place, to try to publicly reflect on ways to improve not just Upstate NY but all of rural America. Some of my ideas were controversial, but the thrust was always oriented towards making my pocket of rural America thrive again. 7. Three years or so into that, we had a baby, and I had to start weighing the feasibility of my ambitions here more seriously out of a duty to our daughter. Does she deserve to grow up in a place that is collapsing? What is her future like here? Some of the more cynical commentators say that any negative experience I have here is me "reaping what I sowed." Some even revel in it as a form of "punishment" for my unspeakable crime: reminding American youth that rural America exists, and that maybe they could make a life for themselves here very cheaply, if they liked. But what I was actually trying to "sow" was a rebirth of my own homeland. It just didn't sit well with me that the place I grew up was just supposed to die and be abandoned, so I thought I'd try making it better. Why not try? I genuinely figured that since so many people are mad about high housing costs, and since remote work exists, maybe we could leverage the ultra-cheap housing here in deep rural Upstate NY to start up a kind of Renaissance. Seemed like maybe it could've worked out for everybody! Cheap housing for folks from unaffordable places, new life in towns that are literally about to become ghost towns, locals get to see their towns avoid total collapse, Churches filling pews again, etc. But I learned it's not quite that simple. Many of the problems here appear to be totally intractable. I found that the property tax situation is worse than I'd thought. And the locals may complain about decline here, but they also don't really want to see a Renaissance either. Meanwhile, though the general public may complain about housing, but they don't want cheap housing badly enough to move to a place like this. To be fair, Albany makes all of this worse than it has to be. But even if the NYS capital started making genuinely good legislation, you can't use policy to force a stagnant, parochial culture into being anything else. And you can't force the wider public to brave long winters, ceaseless overcast, and to take a risk on trying out a place on the far margins of the American mainstream just for cheap housing. So it goes. At this point, I'm simply glad to have tried it out. I did exactly what the "localist" types say to do: I came home. I tried to make it better. I sang the song of my homeland. I did this for about three years, and at the end of it, I've got enough equity to recoup 100% of my housing costs from while I was here. If I walk away, I can do so knowing I tried. I'm not one of those who left with his nose upturned at where he came from. From here, who knows. Maybe I do strick around, albeit without any pretensions of "solving the problem" here. Or maybe we head out to the Southwest, which has always felt more like home to me anyway. Hard to say. Big thanks to those of you who see this and have come along for the ride.

Rock Power #2 (Bochum, West Germany, 1985). Def Leppard, Keel, Malice, Manowar, Living Death, Gary Moore, Legs Diamond.

@wil_da_beast630 Downstream of "WAP" makin' it as NPR's song of the year.

She's getting roasted for this, and the fruit thing is...eh. But, it just obviously is the case that a lot of tween brands - "Hard Candy," "Juicy," "Love Pink," "Pink Cookie," "Slippery When Wet" as a t-shirt slogan - really do lean into porno-style sexuality pretty hard. You feel creepy noticing, but - I mean - I went to buy something for a friend's horse-girl daughter a year or two back and the #1 brand was "Horze." Come on.

@MsMelChen Fecal Matters©, my latest column for the Times.

The thing that really bothers me about smelling a fart is that whatever molecules that were in somebody else’s ass are now literally inside your nose

@wil_da_beast630 I get the point, but allow for context. Older guy at the job, man on the street advising youngin to watch his elbows, and Gramps can reasonably call Joe 20-Something "kid."

Correct. I was a varsity athlete with a girlfriend/partner and a job at 16, deciding between the Army and college. This is normal.

@grayhoodie @DudespostingWs Yep, used to see this all the time. Used to.

@DudespostingWs This used to be a normal thing. All the dudes would get out of their cars and push the disabled one out of the way. Sad that we’ve gotten to the point where this is dare.

This woman’s car broke down at a light and was holding up traffic. A guy runs over from across the street, tells her to put it in neutral, and pushes it into a parking lot to clear the road. Hero

@wil_da_beast630 "Catamite" would have worked in this context.

"Tattooed Texas (fellow)." By now, they're just having fun with this. Of course, they're never going to condemn "Black guy," "poor man/bum," or just "male" as a category. Why NOT play the poet?

@MsMelChen @CoreyWriting Awesome

@DemoLitionBook @CoreyWriting My sister adopted one of those!!!! He’s a brown poodle type dog who was rescued from Korea

This is like the premise of a 90s Disney film.