QotD: the existential dillemma of the modern tory

Carloshasanaxe neatly lays bare the existential dillemma of the modern tory: unhappy but unwilling to change:

A lot of people with addictive behaviors will admit they have a problem. They’ll talk your ear off of about it, and then ask you for a twenty. It’s a step, but it’s not a big step.

Since the modern world is not going to change to accommodate refugee50s — nor should it, since it would mean a radical diminishment of millions of peoples’ lives, and for what? just so he can feel like a real man? — he has to change himself to accommodate to the world. But his resentment forms so much of his self-identity, he has based his entire worldview around it.

It’s not a real change. He doesn’t have the empathy for it; he probably thinks empathy is a dirty word, since that’s become a partisan shibboleth.

Can he learn? Can he change? Can he grow? I would truly like to think so. But as it is, he’s pretty low. And so he’ll probably die unhappy, but blame everyone else first in the process.

Breitbart died too old

Thank you Mark Ames:

For some reason, my fellow Americans are too squeamish, too hooked on false pieties, to openly, honestly gloat about Breitbart’s hilarious death-by-driveway, and stomp joyfully on that rat-fucker’s warm grave. Even the few edgy mavericks willing to admit they’re happy to see Breitbart dead, including my old partner Taibbi, for some reason ruin their gloats by interjecting paragraph after paragraph, tweet after tweet publicly justifying their death-gloat with “He would want it this way” or “He did the same thing”—um, who really gives a fuck about what Breitbart would want? He’s dead. His feelers aren’t hurt. He’s dead and done. And good riddance.

Here’s what I said elsewhere when the news came out yesterday:

I hate it when a douchenozzle like him dies, somebody who did his best to make the world a worse place, to make American politics even more soul destroying and nasty than they already were, a man who saw no bones in bearing false witness (Sherrod) or in helping to end a decades old organisation that was attempting to make life better for the poorest people in the US (Acorn) if that furthered his petty political goals or self promotion.

I hate it, because instead of pissing on his grave as all good and decent people should, the moral scolds will inevitably show up to tell you that you should speak nothing but good about the dead, that he had friends and family who are mourning for him too and you shouldn’t hurt their feelings.

As if it makes up for his actions in public that he had the bare human decency not to be too shitty in his personal life, as if he gave any of this consideration to others, as if you should be sheltered if you chose to be friends with such an asshole.

I’m glad he’s dead, just wish he had never been born, one of those people who left the world a worse place than they found it.

I want to live in her world

Because in NY state senator Suzi Oppenheimer’s world all the world’s worst problems must’ve been solved long ago if she can take time out of her busy schedule to tackle the threat of eating in the street:

You can hear an echo of Victorian finger-wagging nowadays from lawmakers who pit public eating against cleanliness, godliness and that elusive quality we refer to as being “civilized.” State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, a Westchester Democrat who has signed on to Mr. Perkins’s bill, even went so far as to tell New Yorkers that we should eat “at tables or sitting down,” and that eating on the run “doesn’t add anything to our civilized society.”

Imagine that. No world wide depression, terrorist attacks or civil war in Syria, no health care problems or local concerns about rising criminality or high school dropout rates, just genteel concern for other people’s civility.