Oh. My. GAWD. Could my Schadenfreude get any more schadenfreudig? Yup:
And if you’re wondering why I’m so goshdarn schadenfreudig, here, have another video — one that explains the root causes of my Schadenfreude most succinctly.
Yeah. Remember when Crowdy was all loud and proud about how he and his now ex-wife-to-be abstained until they were married, and therefore, they were “doing it right”? Pepperidge Farm remembers!
And now, we find out that his “doing it right” marriage didn’t even last ten years, if the timeline he’s alluding to there is any indication. That he’s been keeping his wife’s decision to dump him a secret for something like two years now. And also, that he’s super salty because it was her idea to divorce him, and he can’t exercise any masculine veto power over it, even in the oh-so-macho and ultra-conservative state of Texas. He can leave a gun sitting out unsecured on his desktop (compensating much, Steve?), but he can’t handle the existence of drag queens, trans people, and other queer folks who are out there just living life and harming nobody. Or, apparently, the uppitiness of women who are understandably sick of his shit. (I guess it must be rough, having gotten all abstemious and sanctimonious for naught.)
Oh yeah, and he’s also getting into a feud with Candace Owens for some odd reason. And even stranger, I find myself agreeing with her, at least the part where she says he’s a bad person and in a spiral. He certainly seems to have come untethered, and not just from his sacred vows of wedlock. I mean, he’s long been pretty unmoored from reality, but whatever’s bugging him now, he seems to feel the need to use his children as human shields against the inevitable accountability that the world will hold him to. Credit where due to her for picking up on that, I guess.
But unlike Candace, I don’t think prayers are what he needs. I think he needs to have his guns and ammo removed from the house before he harms someone (even if it’s only himself), and that he needs to see a counselor. And possibly a psychiatrist, too, since he’s clearly not well. Not just due to conservatism, but just in general. I’ve never seen someone so brittle and prone to inappropriate, excessive reactions. Remember how he flipped the fuck out when Sam Seder ambushed him for a debate? Pepperidge Farm remembers:
Sorry, I can only get so amused on one day. But at the rate things are going, this might finally be the week where Crowdy truly becomes funny, if only by accident.
…and this time, it’s by their own shareholders! Here’s Michael Popok with the story.
FUX Snooze shareholders suing the biggest crapaganda outlet in the US over a breach of fiduciary responsibility? People I don’t feel the least bit sorry for, suing those I feel even LESS sorry for? LET THEM FIGHT!
At this point, I’m swimming in so much Schadenfreude that I feel like I should be adding Epsom salt to it, pouring it into a Jacuzzi, and using it for a muscle soak.
You may not have heard of this yet (I certainly hadn’t, as I’m here in Canada, eh?), but Ben Meiselas has, and he’s got the juicy legal details:
The latest news links on this are from four days ago, so I’m guessing someone was trying to bury something here. And of course, it’s embarrassing! I mean, this is the piece they were trying to suppress, and these last two paragraphs are the particular part that got the Murdochs, père et fils, so hot under the collar that they tried to sue Crikey for defamation:
And Nixon didn’t have the support of the world’s most powerful media company, which continues — even in the face of mountains of evidence of Trump’s treachery and crimes — to peddle the lie of the stolen election and play down the insurrection Trump created.
If Trump ends up in the dock for a variety of crimes committed as president, as he should be, not all his co-conspirators will be there with him. Nixon was famously the “unindicted co-conspirator” in Watergate. The Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis.
The Murdochs may not like it, but truth is absolutely a valid legal defence against defamation charges, even in Australia. And nothing was said here (or in the rest of the article) that was untrue.
I just wonder now how much they’ll have to fork over for giving Crikey such an unwarranted bad time.
Hooboy, it’s been a bumpy past several days — and have things ever been galumphing along since last week, when FUX Snooze suddenly settled a defamation suit, filed against them by Dominion Voting Systems, for half the amount initially demanded. Here’s a quick summary of the situation:
But if FUX Snooze and its audience of useless idiots thought that this would be the end of it, and that they’d get to skate on all the false claims they made, without issuing corrections, they were wrong. And one of their leading liars has paid the price. His head actually rolled last Friday, after his final segment aired, but the news just came out today:
And for those of you wondering what he did that cost him the plummiest job at ol’ Rupee’s noise machine, behold:
Carlson’s abrupt departure came after his former senior booking producer, Abby Grossberg, filed a lawsuit that accused Carlson’s show of being a hostile and misogynistic work environment where she faced sexism and antisemitism. Grossberg also claimed that Fox’s lawyers pushed her to lie in testimony for the Dominion lawsuit.
[…]
Sources told The Los Angeles Times that Carlson’s exit is related to the Grossberg lawsuit. The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s comments about Fox management played a role in his departure.
Carlson reportedly made $10 million a year for Fox, and had increased sway at the network in recent years, with a documentary series and a second show.
He has arguably been the most influential player in right-wing media during the Trump era as well, as evidenced by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision (under pressure from his right-wing members) to give him exclusive access to thousands of hours of previously private police security footage of the Capitol riot. There have even been rumors that he might one day run for president.
Run for president? Ugh. He might run, but I doubt he’d win. Just imagine that by now deeply ingrained dumb-dog expression of his on an official portrait. And if that‘s not enough to dissuade you, remember: He and FUX conspired to rig an election not only for Dubya back in the day, but Donnie in the more recent past. They failed at that, and here’s a representative sampling of Tucky’s text messages that neither he nor they ever wanted the public to see:
On Fox News’ Arizona call:
“We devote our lives to building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert wreck it,” Carlson texted in a group conversation with [Laura] Ingraham and Sean Hannity roughly two weeks after the election. Vittert was a Fox News reporter who was frequently criticized by Trump, and he left the network in April 2021 for NewsNation.On Trump’s destructiveness:
“What he’s good at is destroying things,” Carlson texted producer Alex Pfeiffer on November 5. “He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”On hating Trump:
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson texted Pfeiffer on January 4, days prior to the riot at the U.S. Capitol. He added, of Trump’s presidency, “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”On election denialism
On November 5, in response to his producer Alex Pfeiffer, who had written that “I really think many on ‘our side’ are being reckless demagogues right now,” Carlson wrote, “Of course they are. We’re not going to follow them. The sun will rise tomorrow and we want to wake up intact. I always think that.”On the antics of Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood:
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson texted Ingraham on November 18.In a message from November 4, Carlson texted a colleague that there was “no doubt there was fraud” in the election. “But at this point, Trump and Lin and Powell have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it’s infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.”
In a text on November 9, Carlson referenced Powell’s Dominion claims, commenting, “The software shit is absurd.” (Carlson then said on television that night, “We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don’t know. We ought to find out.”)
In a text on November 22, Carlson also called Powell a “cunt.”
On Trump skipping Biden’s inauguration:
“Hard to believe. So destructive,” he texted Pfeiffer on November 10. “It’s disgusting. I’m trying to look away.”On the prospect of ditching Trump coverage on Fox:
Two days before the Capitol riot, Carlson wrote to a colleague that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” The day after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, he texted his producer that “Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters. He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.”
Welp, I guess Donnie didn’t destroy FUX Snooze, so ol’ Bowtie Boy was kinda-sorta right about that. FUX Snooze destroyed FUX Snooze, and Tucky shot himself in the foot in the process of trying to save Donnie’s ass while simultaneously hating his guts. One almost feels sorry for him; it’s a helluva thing to have to salvage the reputation of a guy who relies on an incompetent lawyer who in turn relies on a “cactus artist” who apparently gets her inspiration from the barrel of a crack pipe.
But then again, it’s hard to feel too sorry for the guy. After all, his mom was the heiress to the Swanson frozen food fortune. He was born with a silver spoon up his nose. And his whole career in journalism was such a mockery that neither he nor his bowtie could survive the onslaught of truth from, of all people, Jon Stewart:
Oops, sorry, here’s that Crossfire video Emma Vigeland talks about above.
Yeah, it’s kind of easy to see why Tuckyducks is still salty. And why he’s desperate to reclaim the manhood that Jon stole from him. So desperate, in fact, that he’d even advocate a quack treatment to his incel male viewers:
“Do not be a sucker to Tucker!”
Listen to the good doctor, guys. Unlike Tucky, she’s actually had extensive medical training and knows whereof she speaks. There are many good reasons why she recommends sunscreen, and they’re related to why you shouldn’t expose to sunlight those parts of you that are known as “where the sun don’t shine”.
I don’t know if Tucky’s undergone such treatments himself, but I’m guessing he’s going to need, um, SOMETHING in light of his recent job loss. And, uh, his total loss of shit over the green M & M mascot, who is no longer wearing her sexy high-heeled go-go boots.
Sorry. I’ll stop now. It’s getting late, and I’m tired. Regularly scheduled Schadenfreude will recommence tomorrow.
Jesse Dollemore has an absolutely delicious (and sickening) bit of poop on one of the biggest turds in the MAGA movement, a guy who was a leading organizer behind the “Stop the Steal” rally that terrorized Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. Turns out that at there are all kinds of skeletons in Ali Alexander’s closet (besides of course the fascist-insurrectionist kind), and this week, one of them tumbled out in spectacular fashion:
Imagine that. Yet another conservative hypocrite, caught with his pants down (so to speak) and his junk (metaphorically) in his hands. And he’s a groomer, too. Trying to pick up teenage boys for “jack-off material”, no less.
Amazingly, though, it’s been an open secret on the far right for YEARS:
Rumors about Alexander’s alleged sexual behavior towards younger men have circulated in conservative online circles since at least 2015. But they reached a new level late last month after Milo Yiannopoulos — the controversial British provocateur and one-time Alexander ally — turned on Alexander after Alexander and [MAGA neo-Nazi Nick] Fuentes pushed him out of a potentially lucrative position in West’s nascent presidential campaign.
Yiannopoulos started releasing video interviews and other evidence meant to prove that Alexander sexually propositioned both adult men in their 20s and at least two teenagers. Yiannopoulos, whose own career as a far-right pundit imploded in 2017 after remarks he had made downplaying the seriousness of pedophilia surfaced, claims he has more damaging videos to release about Alexander and Fuentes.
Yiannopoulos claims he’s releasing the video against Alexander because Alexander dropped Yiannopoulos’ name to entice young men. One screenshot purports to show Alexander dangling the prospect of a meeting with Yiannopoulos to a teenage boy.
“The reason I’m doing this is because he used my name,” Yiannopoulos told The Daily Beast.
Ah yes, good ol’ Milo Yeah-Nope wants to clear his precious name. The same guy who tried to defend child-molesting priests a few years back with the excuse that being molested hadn’t harmed HIM, nosirree! Like a bad penny, he just keeps on turning up everywhere. And since he hasn’t exactly been thriving lately in fascist circles (or in general), no doubt he’d like to drag a few of his former buddies from there down into the muck with him. Funny, though, how he didn’t seem to mind being dangled as an enticement to one of Ali Alexander’s teenage victims until this came out. I mean, he could have come forward at any time to denounce Alexander for a creep, but held his tongue this damn long.
And in the meantime, a teenager’s life was warped:
Duncan, now 21, has since become a relatively high-profile member of Fuentes’s racist “America First” movement, going by the name “Smiley.” On Spencer’s podcast, Duncan said he believed Fuentes knew about the rumors about Alexander’s alleged solicitation of nude photos.
“I think Nick is 100 percent aware,” Duncan said on the podcast.
Last Thursday, Duncan posted a statement on Twitter about his communications with Alexander.
“When I was 15 I was naive and desperate,” Duncan wrote. “I thought I had no choice but to cooperate with inappropriate and humiliating requests if I wanted to make it in politics. I figured that was just the nature of the game.”
Oh yeah, and Nick Fucking Fuentes was in the know, too. Remember him and his date with the catboy hooker he flew all the way up from Australia? Pepperidge Farm remembers!
Funny how so many of these Nazis are gay. And funnier still how they seem to think that the party they’ve chosen to hide behind won’t dispose of them in the same way the OG Nazis did with Ernst Röhm, back in the day. Do they seriously expect that their grooming activities will somehow be exempt from what the Repugs have planned for all the perfectly innocent, non-grooming LGBT+ folks out there? Because what’s NOT fucking funny is how many of them are already suffering as a result of discriminatory policies either already written into law, or in the pipeline.
If Ali, Milo and Nick all think they’re going to somehow skate past THAT, they’ve got a very unpleasant other think coming.
Our bothered brother has some actual facts and figures at hand, and does the math comparing the “refugee crisis” at a certain US-Québec point of entry to the much larger (and legally accepted!) influx of refugees from Ukraine:
Yeah, that’s right. Roxham Rd. border crossers, all Cobden of them, aren’t a “refugee crisis” — unless, of course, you’re a certain very racist pure laine premier of Québec, who just doesn’t want those pesky Haitians browning up his nice, white belle province. This even though they did the lion’s share of the work at the province’s nursing homes when the COVID pandemic was killing vulnerable seniors! There’s gratitude for you.
And if there’s a whole Thunder Bay’s worth of Ukrainians who could be safely welcomed and settled here, then what’s to keep anyone else out? You’d have to be a highly ethnocentric xenophobe not to see the blatant hypocrisy.
There’s been an awful lot of clownery going down over the last three years in the US of Amnesia concerning the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that devastated the world from late 2019 onwards (and is still sickening and killing people to this day). Which is why it’s always good to have a corrective in the form of an actual molecular biologist like Dr. Wilson, above. He takes apart the silliest highlights of the recent kerfuffle on Capitol Hill, and explains what really goes on behind the scenes among researchers, and how they actually go about finding what they found regarding the origins of COVID — and no, a nefarious “lab leak” conspiracy, spearheaded by Dr. Anthony Fauci on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, with big wads of money changing hands in return for false narratives, does NOT figure in it, anywhere.
What has been suspected by actual experts since shortly after the start of the pandemic is proving true so far: the virus made the jump from bats through an intermediary species to humans, not via deliberate or accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located a full 40-minute drive from the Huanan Seafood Market, where the virus actually made the jump to humans. If indeed the virus leaked from the lab, we would expect to see the original cluster of cases around the area of the WIV, not the Huanan Seafood Market on the other side of the Yangtze River (and several city blocks away). But the epicentre of the first outbreak was the market, not the lab. From that alone, the lab-leak theory can be readily disproved.
So, how did SARS-CoV-2 get from bats to humans? Since the first cluster of cases appeared around a market where live wild animals were sold, it seems reasonable to surmise that at least one animal brought there for sale was a carrier. And in fact, several potential carriers were identified early on.
The first candidate for an intermediary species was the pangolin. Snakes and turtles were also suspected, because both figure frequently in Chinese cuisine, but it’s now believed that the most likely one is the raccoon dog, a fox-like East Asian canid species that lives in the same regions where the bats which are SARS-CoV-2’s natural primary reservoir can also be found. All of these species were being sold at that market before any remaining ones were removed and destroyed during the initial lockdown to prevent further outbreaks at the site.
Although the haste with which the market was shut down and the remaining animals in it were disposed of without any specimens being taken for testing is regrettable, it is NOT proof of a conspiracy of any kind. At worst, it’s just a sad example of how the race to contain a viral outbreak can end up tripping up researchers before they can even get started in tracing the epidemic to its root. It certainly doesn’t help that under Xi Jinping, China has become much more secretive and distrustful of outsiders than previously, and that might help to explain why initial reports of COVID outbreaks in China were so heavy-handedly suppressed. It certainly does hamper co-operation between Chinese scientists and their foreign counterparts immensely. But that’s not proof of any lab-leak conspiracy, and shouldn’t be read as such. At worst, it might point to the conclusion that Xi’s government was far more interested in covering up the outbreak than in getting to the bottom of it — or helping foreign experts to do so.
While it’s not unheard of for people to pick up a bat-borne virus directly from the infected bats themselves (for instance, bat rabies is a slight but still prevalent risk for spelunkers), it’s more likely that the first people to fall ill with COVID caught it off another mammal, one much closer to humans on the evolutionary tree. Hence the term intermediary species. And DNA traces of this particular bat coronavirus, along with those of the several likely intermediary species it came in on, have been found at the Huanan Seafood Market which was ground zero for the first COVID outbreak.
Once more, with feeling: The infectious cluster centres not on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the Huanan Seafood Market.
Granted, it might be convenient for scientific purposes that a prominent virology lab is located in the same city as the initial outbreak, but this is just a coincidence. An unfortunate one for the institute’s virologists, no matter what government they work under, since conspiracy kooks can and do latch onto such coincidences as “proof positive” that someone in that lab was cooking something nefarious up. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was instrumental in identifying and genetically sequencing the bat coronavirus linked to the first SARS outbreaks of the early 2000s. That, to some uninformed spinners, makes it look like a virus-manipulating culprit in the current pandemic, which is in fact not related to the virus that caused the original SARS, much less by way of human manipulation.
It doesn’t help, either, that exactly what the virology lab is currently doing is a mystery to the average lay person, thanks to the secrecy imposed by the Chinese government. Scientists both within and outside China are unable to collaborate openly (as they did during SARS and MERS) just when open collaboration is needed the most. And that, in turn, saps trust in public health authorities right at the time when it is most sorely needed.
And in just such a climate, conspiracy loonery tends to flourish, like the mental equivalent to the disease-causing virus.
Public transparency and greater openness on the part of China’s government would do much to take the wind out of the loons’ sails. But at the rate things are currently going (and COVID is still running very rampant), don’t look for that to happen anytime soon. Xi Jinping is going nowhere, Anthony Fauci has been honorably retired as of December, and the Q-Anon rumor mills are still churning wildly as Donnie Drumpf is on his way to a criminal indictment (or several). Unless the COVID pandemic ends as suddenly as it began, and medical science can be definitively shown as the victor in that battle, we’re staring down years, or maybe even decades, of inane bullshit. And that bullshit is going to end up killing untold numbers of people, too.
I know it’s a little late for my Sunday music entry, or a little early for the next one, but please enjoy this parody of “Whiter Shade of Pale”:
…and with it, all the video from the Capitol sedition that Bowtie Boy Carlson would rather you just forgot.
Yes, folks, it really has come down to this. JordyPete has finally reached the level of complete and utter brain-rot:
And yes, he really did retweet that, although it has since been deleted:
Dr Jordan Peterson has been roasted online for sharing a “male milking” BDSM fetish porn video falsely portrayed as being from a Chinese Communist Party “sperm bank”.
“Such fun in unbelievable techno-nightmare CCP hell,” the Canadian psychologist wrote on Twitter on Saturday in the since-deleted post.
The extremely graphic video, shared by an account purporting to document human rights abuses in China, showed three naked men lying in hospital beds attached to “male milking machines”.
“What’s going on in China? Three children policy?” the account captioned the post.
Dr Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila Peterson replied, “DAD you can’t retweet this on Twitter. My eyes will never recover.”
Twitter users quickly pointed out that the video was from a UK-based fetish porn studio.
“So just to be 100 per cent clear — Jordan Peterson just unironically retweeted a video of a BDSM ‘male milking’ dungeon in the UK claimed to be footage of human rights abuses in China,” wrote journalist Anna Slatz.
“One man’s techno-nightmare hell is another man’s techno-nightmare heaven.”
The original account later apologised, writing, “Sorry. My mistake. I found this video on WeChat and they said this is China’s collection room for sperm bank. Turns out that this video is from UK.”
The original account apologized for spreading anti-China crapaganda. But did Jordy? Nope. He was in the midst of a retweeting frenzy, in which he made a fool of himself multiple times, although never quite as hilariously as with this particular one:
(I love Lance’s laugh, BTW. If I weren’t already in kinks over Jordy’s commie-crazed wankery, that guffaw would have sent me.)
Several tweeters noted that Jordy’s in hot water with his own regulatory body (yes, he is still under the official governance of one, much to his chagrin). And wondered how this will affect him there, too:
I suspect that he’s going to lose his psych licence regardless of his tweeting habits (although they’re sure not helping him in that department), since he hasn’t practiced clinically in years, or kept his training up to date in order to do so. And also, since he’s simply terrible as a psychologist, especially when it comes to his work with women:
As another Redditor pointed out on that same thread, it’s also pretty rich that JordyPete makes a big stink about how we all need to “follow the rules” for proper workplace conduct, but when he himself is told the rules, he immediately freaks out and tries to lay down another set, one that happens to coincide with the stereotypes that feminists have been struggling for several decades to abolish.
And he’s very touchy (and litigious) when called on it, too. One gets the distinct impression that he thinks the only rules he should be subject to (and all the rest of us, as well) are the ones he makes for himself — and makes obscene amounts of money peddling to wankers even dumber than himself. He fancies himself as the current era’s Ward Cleaver, but he comes off as a petulant, pedantic Mussolini Piccolomini. He actually floated the idea once of launching a website that would be aimed at “knock[ing] enrolment in the postmodern disciplines down by 75 per cent over the next five years” because such disciplines “inflict upon students, who don’t know any better, corrupt ideology.” Pretty censorious, that; in fact, it’s the very epitome of “corrupt ideology”, which he claims to oppose. And then he has the nerve to whine (very nasally) about oh, how could we all think he’s fascist when he’s the biggest advocate of Freeze Peach in the history of Ever?
Well, as the old saying goes: if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably IS a duck. And it’s high time that this elaborately stupid quack got sent to the big ol’ pond of irrelevance, to join all the other silly geese. When you can’t even tell the difference between your froth-brained notions of “post-modern neo-Marxism” and, uh, milking-machine fetish porn, you don’t belong in the same room with serious people anymore.
Not that JordyPete ever did. I mean, he did see fit to include this in his own doctoral thesis:
And why that didn’t automatically disqualify him from receiving that doctorate and wreaking havoc on our collective sanity, I’ll never know.
