As is likely of a diary that's definitely not a daily, things will accumulate. What follows is what's left of the year I call hindsight.
On Thursday 5 November, I wondered Am I too late?:
Some time prior to that date, I punned via an imaginary electoral interloper the unavoidable ramifications of The Third Conditional:
The two gentlemen to my right are not gentlemen at all, but I use the word gentlemen because this dog & pony program is under a financial control whose reach can reframe my every utterance to the will of how the interests behind that control would like me to be perceived. If I, for example, had referred to these two gentlemen to my right not as gentlemen, but as, say [redacted], I would have run the risk of having everything I contribute to this debate tonight, which will already have been categorized to my disadvantage, reframed to eliminate my candidacy even sooner than has been projected by you who've just framed the question I am responding to.
The truth is a trap best served expired.
In Turd What Rhymes with Trigger (what I apparently thought was an appropriately provocative title for wondering, virtually aloud, when words matter enough to be expunged from journalistic style guides everywhere and when it's absurd to exclude them from reported speech) I reckoned:
Had he used the n-word during the murder, would sympathies be stronger? I got that wrong. I mean had he literally said "the n-word" as in "Shut up while I subdue you, the n-word!" would it have been solid enough immediate evidence for his colleagues to have turned their weapons on him, shouting "Get your knee off the African American and lay face down next to him on the ground!" Or could they have logically concluded that, well, he didn't use the actual n-word, so it's not like his choice and use of force might be perceived as biased by anything that might be perceived as being beyond standard protocol.
How many articles might we have read over the last few weeks along the headlines of "Why use of 'the n-word' is still use of the n-word and therefore problematic" and how many people who hadn't already understood that fine distinction suddenly and miraculously have understood it in order to justify publishing something so idiotic?
Intersectional in their solidarity, exceptional in their works, of course the Coppers International oppose any order that would force them to put in overtime only to get their boot around your n-word's neck. That your reps would oppose such language once they move from the hood to the house is par for the obstacle course. Even with the word rendered so absurd that it's said not to sting though we know what it means.
In an untitled rando about one of Norm MacDonald's tasteless jokes, I posited how what goes unsaid could be lurking-in-the-background grounds for taking offense:
It's like pride or shame, whereby forgoing the one means you have to take on the other. The comic's joke, even more-so offensive in the context of his routinely returning to this well, highlights that the thing that defines homosexuality is not itself something worthy of pride. Where he misses the mark is that it shouldn't be worthy of shame either, which will remain the long lost point of the concept of gay pride because of the insistence on pride as positive. His greater offense lies in how he won't let go of the hero, used here as an allusion to contrast who he thinks is worthy of it (hint: government issued gun toter).
In Hauntological Incidental Soul Music from the Birth of a Nation I attempted to topple an additional set of sacred cows:
As the fathers' chinks were more broached, so too the comparison between wardens who refused to relent and wardens who promised they'd close their prisons once all was said and done. Not now, not tomorrow, but when they were dead and gone, if immortalized in statues sacrosanct by dubious distinction.
In Life's such a cliché:
That which unites us can but reveal the always deeper rifts — gamed & turfed by tPtB, sure. But still. None of us little people should be shaming, lowkey or otherwise, anybody who is legit afraid of infecting others or, by implication or otherwise, people who are weary of having their every mode of behavior dictated via the mass-destructive manufactured consensus. Just as anybody should be able to see the mask symbolism fraught with contradictions.
Of course, I'm not talking Covid here but about your choosing or not to proceed in processed democracy, satisfying once you've struggled far enough past the decision as to whether to throw it in the cart that you're headed out of the super democracy market with the promise of processed goods to feed an appetite for a subliminally calculated period of time, on the other hand a shame inducing spectacle the substance of which might be damaging to any remaining semblance of a system of health that remains for those of yours and yours-nots at large.
As you shuck and jive your way to your apparent attempt to save the world from one dastard by relegating his team to the scrapheap of hystery, you cannot forget how the last time this happened it merely amounted to delegating a getaway driver for the previous cadre of criminals along with the most massive transfer of wealth in history. Planetary proportions, y'all.
All the while in the observance of the faithful of two tags in question, as with Heinz or Del Monte, except they are so certain of their superior flavor that they insist there's a significant difference in the amount of rat hairs and roach droppings in their product that Heinz can take a victory lap around the world tut-tutting nations who should no longer be blaming them for their region's miseries to the jeers from the Del Monte cohort who had used that same marketing schtick countless times before.
As part of what never became of The shit gets so deep:
A range of expressions with "deep" and "shit" appear to express broadly divergent ideas. "You're in deep shit" means you're in trouble. "That's some deep shit" regards something as profound. One can be "shit deep" in a wide variety of... shit.Unfortunately I never got any deeper than that, and things got too drafty for me to do anything about it.
The expression in the title of this entry is used to demonstrate specifically two possible interpretations in terms that would attribute an accumulation of bullshit to someone, i.e. upon whom one can hang responsibility for a succession of deceptive characterizations, or one blatant misrepresentation of the truth.
I have seen analysis that presents an accurate record of what could be classified as impeachable offenses by US presidents and, as such, of a kind that no doubt garners widespread credibility among many who'd find the content to be an unbiased analysis of US war crimes, among other cases of the deepness of double-dealing. Where it fell short was that it didn't take the extra step of citing what should have been (and should be) the actual impeachable offenses of the current president. The inclusion of these, along with the others listed, would have drawn the final critical distinction that elucidates what is/was disingenuous (maybe even deliberately misleading (in too deep to tell) about the most recent case for impeachment.I have sympathy for the use of such phrases as "I'm not a Trump supporter, but..." — indeed, I am familiar with feeling a need to include such qualifications in my own arguments. But phrases like these can signify a couple of different things respective to a pair of oppositionally bent outlooks. On the one hand it can be used to clarify in advance that just because one is criticizing someone who is on the record opposed to Trump, it does not mean one is not critical of Trump as well. On the other hand, failing further illustration as to how one is not a Trump supporter — a failure I am sure I have been guilty of in my own criticisms — it can lead another to infer that, while the person using the expression is not a Trump supporter, neither has that person anything to criticize him for.
The latter of these two likewise bifurcates to lend the editorialist credibility among Trump supporters because none of the allegations does more than mention his name on the way to accusing others, and also taints the editorialist among Trump's detractors because he never seems to accuse Trump of anything. Generally, from the editorial perspective, the convenient omission leads to both a case of innocence as well as guilt by failure to explicitly disassociate.
If one hundred seven-&-a-half days late, you finally get a whiff of my year end.
