Look who’s back

To everyone’s surprise, Mitch McConnell turns out to be alive after all:

US Republican Mitch McConnell has returned to the Senate for the first time in three months, looking noticeably more frail than before he was hospitalised in June.
Mr McConnell’s lengthy absence from the Senate generated a flood of criticism and online speculation, as he initially remained quiet for weeks about his condition.
The 84-year-old senator eventually disclosed a month later that he had been “briefly unconscious” due to a fall in his home and had also been treated for mild pneumonia.
He briefly addressed reporters from a wheelchair outside the Senate chamber, smiling but speaking slowly and with some difficulty. […]
Reporters and photographers were told by Senate staff not to take video of his remarks in the second-floor hallway, even though video is often permitted in that area. Still images were allowed.

That seems like an odd stipulation, but he seems to be in enough different positions in the photos I’ve seen that he is plausibly alive and mobile in spite of everything. I just don’t understand this determination of his to finish his term, which I don’t think I realised was actually coming to an end in January and he’s not contesting it again; he’s an octogenarian in clearly terrible health, he’s obviously not fit for work, no one would begrudge him not returning to the senate and just finally taking “early” retirement. It would be better for him too. But no, his commitment to doing evil—cos he’s not there to do good, let’s admit it—is apparently just that strong… bah.

Substack still has a Nazi problem

A while ago I posted about Substack’s Nazi problem, and, well, nearly three years later nothing uch has changed from what I’ve seen:

Oof. Now, let it be said that not every creator on Substack, not even the righ-leaning ones, is a Nazi. OBVIOUSLY. There are good and useful people using the service, even if Substack’s algorithm has hitherto been determined to hide them from me in favour of the complete gits. And the latter do seem to come in various flavours. You get the ordinary person who just wishes things were less shit (which I think describes an awful lot of people these days). You get the conservative who’s accepted some amount of progress but not happily. You get the aesthetic nostalgists mooning over what they see as the lack of beauty in the world (these are people I’m wary of, cos I’ve encountered several of them on Tumblr whose outward passion for classical art and so forth concealed some hideous political beliefs). You get the more hardcore capital-T Traditionalist for whom the passage of time itself is evil and why aren’t things more like they were in the far past we wish existed but probably didn’t. You get the “SAVE THE WEST!” reactionaries and racists for whom the problem is “Abdul” and/or Jews, liberals, women, etc.

And, frankly, you get the overt neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

I’ve actually been considering using Substack as a side-project of sorts, now that I’ve taken down the old Important Images series posts (for reasons you may wish to guess at), I’ve lately considered doing that over on Substack. Now I really don’t know if I should or if I even can. It bothers me that some people I actually know use it for their work, but I don’t feel like I can judge them cos I am sure the good users on there outnumber the bad ones. And I do know that, yeah, there’s probably right-wing shitheads being hosted by WordPress just like I am, and I still use WP without that bothering me. (Hypocrisy, moi?) I’ve shared Tumblr with any number of white supremacists (1488 of them, perhaps? Ho ho!), and, well, look at FB and Twatter… I’m almost certainly overthinking all of this, because I am me and that is what I do best, but that doesn’t change that Substack still has a Nazi problem. And as long as the Nazis are making bank from posting on there, and as long as Substack are getting their cut of that, they’re always going to have one. Bah.

Grey Room #15

I think I’m giving up the hosting of the show. I’ve said before that the previous incarnation of the podcast was done radio show style with back announcing, etc, but I eventually got sick of doing that cos it was extra effort that made it less fun… it’s OK if you’re actually doing it live, obviously, but I don’t, so it just feels kind of forced. And there don’t seem to be many people on Mixcloud (he said, as if he’d explored it fully) actually doing their stuff radio-style unless they’re actually doing them as live radio shows (or live on Twitch, as one show I follow does) before posting the recording on Mixcloud. And I’ve never liked the sound of my own voice (why did you spend so many years in radio, then, DICKHEAD?), so I suppose I should save other people from having to listen to it too… Anyway, here’s this week’s setlist:

1. Chelsea – I’m On Fire (1979)
2. Husker Du – The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill (1985)
3. The Church – Electric (1983)
4. Algiers – Hour of the Furnaces (2020)
5. Manic Street Preachers – Love’s Sweet Exile (1992)
6. The Soft Moon – Insides (2012)
7. Nitzer Ebb – Smear Body (1987)
8. The Afghan Whigs – 66 (1998)
9. Adorable – Homeboy (1993)
10. The Jam – Funeral Pyre (1981)
11. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – And I’m Aching (2003)
12. The Prodigy – Climbatize (1997)
13. REM – Finest Worksong (1987)
14. Mogwai – Remurdered (2014)

Obviously

Convicted sex offender offered opening prayer at rally for GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina

A pastor kicked off a recent campaign stop for Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee for Senate, with a prayer that asked God to bestow “integrity and honesty” upon the event and to right wrongs “hammered down on the conservative movement.”
The prayer was hardly unusual by North Carolina political standards. What was surprising was the man who delivered it. Pastor Daimon L. King is a registered sex offender, twice sentenced to prison for convictions involving children, according to state and court records. […]
Whatley’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview. In a statement, campaign spokesman DJ Griffin said Whatley did not know King and the event “was NOT planned nor organized by the Whatley campaign nor did the campaign invite any of the guests.”
He emphasized that King had been “invited by the hosts,” which he identified as the Craven County Republican Party.

OK,  so someone in the local branch of the Republicans is fine with having a convucted sex offender be part of the show. That doesn’t make the situation any better REALLY, does it? And then, because the article has been edited by someone not paying attention to their job in writing and/or editing it, we get this:

King’s prayer and Whatley’s association with the former GOP official Harvey L. West Jr., the other convicted sex offender […]

The WHAT now?

Since March, Whatley has been dogged over his ties to West, who served as a congressional district committee chair in the state GOP when Whatley was chairman.
West, a former small-town police officer, was convicted of five counts of indecent liberties with a child and served six years in prison, corrections records show.
In 2012, news outlets reported on his conviction, forcing West to step down as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention.
At the time, West denied he had committed the offenses and said that he had pleaded guilty to avoid the risk of spending decades behind bars, The Associated Press reported. He is no longer required to register as a sex offender. […]
West also said he was familiar with King’s convictions and warned others in the party about associating with the pastor when he was considered for a GOP position. “I just said, ‘Hey, y’all might want to take a look at this,’” said West.

OH it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it? Michael Whatley, incidentally, is the guy we saw just a couple of days ago getting the date of a certain American national tragedy wrong; I must say I wasn’t expecting him to reappear here so soon, and certainly not in THIS manner. And yet I’m not surprised somehow either…

Tempus fugit?

Yeah. I’ve been thinking lately about how far into this year we are and how it seems to have flown by, and yet… it really is only a year since the Kirkening. Eek. There is that perceptual phenomenon where time seems to go by faster the older we get, and I think there’s various explanations for that, something about, frankly, having less time to live, cos the older you get, the nearer to death and the greater your awareness of how little time you have left compared to the amount of you’ve usd up and all that. But I’ve been really shocked more than usual in the last few months at just how quickly things feel like they’re happening. I mean, all of this has happened this year:

    • Melania
    • The Coalition splitting then reuniting, again
    • Adelaide Writers’ Week debacle
    • Venezuela
    • “Prince” Andrew arrest
    • Old Doctor Who episodes found, new one scrapped
    • Iran war(s)
    • White House “shooting”
    • The Onion finally taking over Infowars
    • 2SER bullshit
    • Hungary shuts down fascism
    • Artemis II going around the Moon
    • “State Fail”
    • The end of the Late Show with Colbert
    • Hantavirus
    • David Attenborough & Mel Brooks turn 100
    • The ongoing Mitch McConnell mystery
    • The Odyssey
    • The World Cup and Commonwealth Games
    • Binface vs Farage
    • The various deaths of Tim Curry, Dolly Parton, Johnny Young, Bill Oddie, Sam Neill, Lindsey Graham, Victor Willis, Chuck Norris, Jesse Jackson, Robert Duvall, Rob Hirst, Scott Adams, Erich von Daniken, and Ace Frehley

And that’s just the stuff I’ve posted about here. I’m astonished and faintly horrified by how many of these things I’ve already kind of forgotten about, and all of them happened in the first two thirds of this year. I know that new things keep happening, new things push older things out of the discourse and out of mind, we do forget things and nine-day wonders do exist, I know that… but I feel like I’m forgetting more and more than ever. I fear I’m not explaining myself well but I’m not exactly sure how to verbalise a feeling I don’t entirely understand. There is, obviously, always the possibility that my perception of how quickly time is passing is a function of, frankly, my brain not working like most people’s. Maybe my memory’s just shitty. Maybe it’s end stage capitalism. Either way, it’s still just one year since Charlie Kirk got shot and it still feels like a lot more than that for whatever reason.