Nordstahl @Nordstahl@social.cleverlibre.org

P.S. Last year, to mark the 5th anniversary of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, I wrote a two part series on Trump's response to it and the lengthy right-wing effort to convince everyone that Trump didn't *actually* defend neo-Nazis. Scott Adams played a huuuge role in that.

Part 1/2: https://www.readtpa.com/p/very-fine-people?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web

To all my friends and followers #PullUp. #blackhistory2023 #naacpimageawards

We haven't even gotten to the intentional erasure of non-white contributions, from 1800s phrenologists justifying slavery, all the way to present day DeSantis.

The lie of white supremacy requires the elevation and celebration of white contributions, and the minimizing of everyone else's.

This is the environment in which we pretend that white Europeans and white Americans contributed the most to society.

It's a lie because everyone has contributed to technology and society. Everyone. ♥️👍🏿

Reminder:

what if we did not take for granted that our news comes from major for-profit entities inextricably networked with private equity and corporations who themselves see our shelter, health, and food as opportunities for supplying additional private jets and mega yachts to a paltry few white men?

what if we envisioned society without the profit motive as our most awesome and powerful deity?

what if we had the courage to imagine a different way and fight for it, together?

ever walk into a bar and walk right out again because it feels like everybody there knows each other already and you're intruding? if Cheers was a real bar, i think it would give me social anxiety.

#dogsofmastodon #dogs #people #afternoon #phoneshot #photography

Just a recurring reminder that distributed energy generation an storage is not just good social policy, it's also the best DEFENSE policy.

Every NATO member (and the US) should be spending DEFENSE money on distributed generation and smarter, more localized grids.

President Zelensky's nightly address to his nation 26/2/23
#Ukraine️ #Zelensky

Joe Biden is disproving the narrative that he is too old to be president.

training for the big fight...

#boxing #plant #cat #training #animatedgif

A secretive organisation accused of collaborating with far-right activists has been operating out of the House of Lords for more than a decade, a cache of leaked documents suggests. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/25/house-of-lords-worked-with-far-right

Not so much cancel culture as consequences culture.

By the way, Rasmussen is and always has been a garbage, biased pollster that solely exists to prop up Republicans during election season and feed the conservative culture war in the off-season. Everything else they've done is intended to just blur the lines and fluff their cred so that they can continue with their scam.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dropped-the-dilbert-comic-strip-after-a-racist-rant-by-its-creat

UKRAINE SOLIDARITY!

Famous landmarks and buildings around the world were lit in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on 24/2/23

Many of you said that buildings were lit in blue and yellow in your cities and towns.
#Ukraine️ #Zelensky

As we move from Caturday into #Sundog Blueberry would like to remind you - if you can see grass…roll in it. Can’t see grass? That’s ok. Roll in what’s available. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Take care of yourself. Also - always question baths. Like why baths? Baths are dumb.
#DogsOfMastodon #Dogs #BeHappy #RollWithIt #FightBathTime

Russia "damaged or ruined completely more than 500 historical and architectural sites during this war," says Ukraine's Minister of Culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko. "This is done by purpose...we probably have the biggest stealing of artifacts since WWII." #velshi http://ow.ly/J0xR50N32s4

@medigoth Well said sir. Loved it in the day, but became increasingly alarmed at his blog posts. Trump, climate change denial (which Dilbert regurgitated) and numerous other warning signs, which I only heard about second hand as I stopped reading all his output after Trump.

A bit late to the party, but this is something I want to say.

One inevitable reaction to #ScottAdams' downfall has been a lot of people saying "#Dilbert was always crap anyway." Maybe some of them are even telling the truth, as they see it. But I bet a lot of them aren't.

My skepticism is based on long experience: it's truly remarkable how *every single time* a celebrity turns out to be a horrible person, suddenly they never had a fan base at all. How they became celebrities in the first place must be one of those great unsolved mysteries. Nobody ever watched Mel Gibson, nobody ever read JK Rowling ... you get the idea.

Dilbert was once a sharp, funny look at office life in a particular time and place and circumstance. If you were a tech worker in the '90s, you instantly recognized the characters and situations. The Pointy-Haired Boss, in particular, crystallized a concept everyone knew but didn't quite have a name for. Adams could have gone the Watterson or Larson route, retired from cartooning and from public life around the turn of the century, and left a sterling legacy.

Voiceover: he did not, in fact, retire.

As his fortune grew and he got further away from the world he was lampooning, the quality of the strip declined. The characters became a collection of tics, the jokes were recycled over and over, and Dilbert himself became a kind of superhero—no longer deflecting corporate inanity in an almost-believable way, but challenging it head-on and *winning*. That's not satire. That's embarrassing auctorial wish-fulfillment. Pure Gary Stu.

This is a common problem with long-running comic strips whose humor depends on the characters being in a particular situation. ("Sitcomics," perhaps?) Beetle Bailey was once a biting lampoon of military life. Andy Capp was once a whistling-past-the-graveyard depiction of poverty in a dying industrial town. Mort Walker and Reg Smythe lived in the same worlds as their characters ... and then they didn't. No one should criticize them for enjoying their success, but it came with a price.

Neither Walker nor Smythe, as far as I know, went completely off the rails as human beings.

Had Adams kept his mouth shut, Dilbert would have kept running forever, becoming even more clichéd and unfunny, the same jokes recycled until they passed even out of catchphrase territory, yet another of those odd ghosts haunting the decaying mansion of newsprint, until the mansion itself crumbled to dust. Goth as fuck, really, when you think about it—a description I suspect Adams would angrily reject, which brings me a certain amount of glee.

Really, there's no excuse for it taking this long. Adams has been running his mouth for years, getting more repulsive all the while. *Even if* his work had maintained its original quality—which I think is flat-out impossible; see above—he should still have been far too radioactive to appear in any paper aimed at a general audience. His sexism and racism and MAGAtry no doubt play very well in certain quarters, but those quarters are home to vermin. No mass media outlet should cater to them, and those that do richly deserve to fail.

Also he drove his stepson to suicide, then tried to turn the tragedy into part of his industry. So there's that.

I do not for a minute believe his current shtick is "dementia," or "satire," or any of the other excuses his die-hard fans are making. (That's almost as common as "I never liked ___ even a little bit," when idols show their feet of clay.) It's all him. This is who he is now, and who he chose to be.

But I do hope it's not who he *always* was, I really do. And if I'm wrong, if he's been a monster his whole life and just used to be better at hiding it ... I'm not going to pretend I knew. That's all.

On Feb 26, 2012: Trayvon Martin Fatally Shot in Sanford, Florida http://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/feb/26

Jack Smith has scored a major legal victory over a House Republican - Palmer Report

Scott Perry is appealing but most likely he will lose.

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/jack-smith-has-scored-a-major-legal-victory-over-a-house-republican/49117/