Background Check
For all entertainment and cultural consumption:
I hate to break it to you, but everyone is “problematic.” Human beings are flawed. If they weren’t, literature and art would not exist. You’ve been duped by an ideology that will happily rob you of all joy and complexity in life and art. https://t.co/kLY3CGmnMo
— Joseph Massey (@jmasseypoet) May 3, 2026
Imagine the hours of fun. All that tutting and disapproval.
Update, via the comments:
The urge to achieve purity in such matters is, I think, a little odd. I look at my own bookshelves and I’ve long since become accustomed to reading things by authors whose political opinions – insofar as they’re known to me and insofar as I’d care to find out – may not be entirely congenial. Given the progressive dominance of cultural production, that’s kind of difficult to avoid.
Ditto TV and cinema.
And if madam feels a need to pre-emptively vet authors for ideological congeniality on every issue before investing time in their work, I’m guessing she may extend much the same filtering to friends, of whom similar conformity is presumably expected, and possibly family too. Which doesn’t strike me as a recipe for a happy life. Or one in which new things may be found out.
A lingering aftertaste of tofu perhaps?
A lingering aftertaste of tofu perhaps?
Related
All joking aside, the fact they remain uneaten probably does indicate the animals know who’s who in the human world. Would you want to eat those seething masses of toxicity?
Further rant about anti-capitalists: Consider a little girl who saves her allowance and spends the $10 on lemonade and opens a lemonade stand in front of her house. That is capitalism.
Case 2: 5 guys pool their money to open a burger joint. They write up an agreement about who owns how much of the business. That is a corporation.
Everything else is just scale and details. Even in communism, a business needs capital and businesses have directors and bosses and employees. These twits just want themselves to be in charge without the work of building a company.
If you want to open a business that is owned by the employees, go ahead. Near me there is an employee-owned grocery. SAIC at one time was employee owned (not up to date on it) but was a big contractor in defense.
They have worse than groupies. The groupies and fans have morphed into copycats. They’re calling for total destruction. These killers, the Palisades fire, the warehouse fires, the assassination attempts. These people are deranged but they’re not the traditional lunatic.
Case 3 — nothing new under the sun
Just for fun, some things that have amused me of late:
I wouldn’t. Budgies can’t smell any better than we can. Maybe worse. With some noted exceptions, most birds don’t use smell very much.
Some of the tee-shirts sold in the piazza would never let you forget it.
Did you buy them?
[ Edges towards door. ]
I did not.
I bought a 14″ figurine that still stands on my bookshelf.