Politics: The Dismal Baseball

One theme of self-described feminist ally Freddie deBoer’s regrettably ongoing career has been telling other feminists they’re doing it wrong. Back in 2010 Freddie earned a memorable Tiger Beatdown by telling Jude Doyle that he was doing jokes wrong, and then incredibly tried the same thing on Danny Lavery in 2015. Now he has turned his ally’s eye of disapproval on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is doing leftism wrong, i.e. “not the way ol’ Boners would do it.” Please don’t actually read his post—I did and it felt like my brain touched a slug. Freddie always writes like a giant spider who has paralyzed you and is now winding you in sticky threads while sadly explaining that he’s the real victim here. Scott Lemieux adequately excerpted and refuted it in Lawyers, Guns & Money, anyway. “I personally think these questions should be left to the Frank Brunis and Maureen Dowds of the world,” writes Lemieux, presumably because those are writers who at least know how to make a dumb argument short and readable. But it’s tough for a good ally like Freddie to keep quiet when these bitches just can’t do anything right. In conclusion: Boners.

Also Today in Politics: Ron DeSantis fired a campaign aide for being slightly too obviously Nazi, and fired a third of his campaign staff for being slightly too expensive for a distant also-ran campaign that isn’t bringing in any money or enthusiasm. DeSantis has promised to run a more “insurgent” campaign and to… expose himself to voters? Good luck, Puddin’ Fingers! Meanwhile Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports that third place GOP Presidential weirdo Vivek Ramaswamy briefly had an Eminem-inspired libertarian rap career at Harvard, which is canonically the only place you can have an Eminem-inspired libertarian rap career of any length. The included video reveals that he suffers from severe beat deafness. Get well soon, buddy. Chuck Schumer also had a short-lived rap career, but not short-lived enough. And Mitch McConnell just glitched out during a live press conference. With any luck he will never speak again.1

It was UFO Day in the House, which held a hearing about “unidentified aerial phenomena” that David Axe said “was only mostly a clown show.” The main ask from witnesses was that “[a] central UAP reporting system would help immensely,” while the main preoccupation of Republican Congressmen was that Joe Biden is a reptilian intent on harvesting human adrenochrome for his alien overlords. Don’t blame me, this is the government our framers intended. 🇺🇸

Joe Biden’s new dog Commander has taken over the work of Joe Biden’s old dog Major, which is biting Secret Service agents. In Discourse Jack Crosbie asked “Why Can’t the Bidens Adopt a Normal Dog,” but this is the rankest defamation. There is nothing more normal for a dog to do than bite cops.

Speaking of normal, normal Twitter user circa July 2023 @100ItsLevel is “fairly certain 3D printed ‘chicken’ is already on Walmart's shelves.” In fact:

The politics just will not end today. Would you believe that there are still new George Santos scams to discover? The New York Times’ Grace Ashford has the story of Santos trying to run a classic Nigerian prince scam on one of his donors, consulting for a fraudulent pandemic medical supply importer, and operating a campaign fundraising organization that kept 80% of what it raised. Every day George Santos is out there living three full days of grift. You stack that up over years, and by the time he goes to jail he will already have experienced more lifetimes than most humans in history ever get, and used all of them for doing crimes.

Not Politics: New Hudson Yards experience debuts. “Attenzione, pickpocket!” Rest of World visited the last internet cafés. After Dark in CSS.

#Longread: In Bloomberg Courtney Rubin and Priya Anand told the whole story of Daily Harvest and its infamously toxic French Lentil + Leek Crumbles. We still don’t know for sure why “130 [customers] ended up in the hospital, and some 40 of them had to have their gallbladders removed.” Neat.

Today’s Song: Mitski, “Bug Like an Angel”

Music Intern Sam’s radio show VIBE SHIFT returns tomorrow 1-3p (PT) live at KCHUNG Public at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown Los Angeles & streaming live at kchungradio.org. This might be the first time we’ve both managed to promote it correctly.

It’s Wednesday, and statistically you’re the only one still reading this. Hi!