Shot in the Dark

Category: Snappy Answers to Casual Gaslighting

  • The Case For Home Cooking

    Some restaurants – including one Twin Cities favorite – are instituting “equity charges“. They would appear to be doing it, at least in part, because they believe their customers are idiots: On its website, Broders’ has a notice to customers notifying them of a new 15 percent “benefits and equity” charge they’ve instituted. They justify…

  • The Invisible Man

    SCENE: A suburban family room. MOTHER and FATHER are anxiously looking at their SON, who’s watching…TV. MOTHER: It’s all he’s watching lately. . FATHER: What is it? MOTHER: He’s binging Band of Brothers FATHER: Again? This is like the third time. MOTHER: And before that, it was 13 Hours. And then Taken. FATHER: I caught…

  • “Captain Obvious? Your Promotion To Admiral Came Through”

    Study shows that “racial justice” protests that include “Anti”-Fa are at least 18 times more likely to end up in violence than protests where they didn’t show up. And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups: They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the…

  • While Making Your Afternoon Listening Plans

    Please tune in to AM1280 this afternoon from 4-6PM for a special broadcast about Critical Race Theory in Minnesota, and what you and I can do about it. It’ll feature: Kendall Qualls and Alfrieda Baldwin from “Take Charge Minnesota” Catrin Wigfall from the Center of the American Experiment Rebekah Hagstrom from “Education Nation”. We’ll be…

  • Way Too Good To Fact-Check

    A lot of people are yukking it up over this story – yep, including me the other day. You recall it – Italian “artist” selling an “invisible sculpture” / block of air / “vacuum full of energy” for $18,000. “The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty…

  • Novel Concept

    Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:\ I missed this earlier.  Sarah Johnson has proposed a ‘race offender registry.”  The idea is that people who are racists (actual, accused or suspected) should be prohibited from living near racial minorities.  It’s based on the sex offender registry concept.  Her idea is back in the news because Ms. Johnson…

  • Mission

    After reading this story, I’m overwhelmed with a desire to lead a movement to get conservatives to eschew smashing their own faces into rock or cement walls. No true conservative would ever smash their face into a cement or rock wall. Just a bunch of face smashing sheeple. Who’s with me?

  • Urban Progressive Privilege: In Which I Defend A Cake-Eating Private School

    Around the time of the Chauvin verdict, and in the wake of the Brooklyn Center shooting, a group of students at posh Creti\-Derham Hall – a private Catholic school in Saint Paul – held a walkout. Now, that’s fine. It’s a foreign concept to me, of course – in my day, at my high school,…

  • Bigotry Of Bizarre Expectations

    Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think. A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative. The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can…

  • Planet Of The Humans, Part 0

    I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week: I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide…

  • Your Lyin’ Eyes

    SCENE: Mitch BERG is standing, socially distanced, in line at the Q-Fanatic Barbeque in South Minneapolis. Focused on the smell of the delicious brisket, he’s caught by surprise as Avery LIBRELLE walks in behind him. LIBRELLE: Merg! BERG: Oh, shhh….sure enough, it’s Avery. What’s new… LIBRELLE: You wingnuts are paranoid. [Switches to that condescending coo-ing…

  • Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part V

    “You should be voting in your ‘best interests’” You mean, the “best interests” that gave voters Camden? Stockton? Detroit? Newark? New Orleans? Baltimore? Saint Louis? DC? North Minneapolis? The destruction on Lake Street and University Avenue? The carnage every summer in south Chicago? Those “best interests?” Just wanna be clear, here.

  • Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part IV

    “Check your privilege” OK. Let’s check my privilege. I grew up descended from people from an inhospitable place that nobody wanted to conquer and that nobody managed to enslave (or who managed to kill everyone that tried). My dominant culture has no experience of being enslaved – indeed, it abolished slavery hundreds of years before…

  • Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part III

    “If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You’re Part Of The Problem” People who use this statement always use it incompletely. I’ll do it again, filling in and emphasiing the words that are unstated but that actually define the statement. “If you’re not part of the solution I’m demanding, you’re part of the problem that’s…

  • Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part II

    “If You’re ‘On The Fence’, You’re Complicit”\ No. If I’m “on the fence on an issue”, then neither side has convinced me yet. “Better to be quiet and have people think you might be a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”. And being considered a fool by anyone using a line…

  • Snappy Answers To Casual Gaslighting, Part I

    “Silence is Violence”. No. It’s not. Silence – if you catch me silent at all – is me keeping my mouth shut while I figure out what I think, to say nothing of what I’m going to say. Your freedom of speech doesn’t give you the right to tell me what I’m going to say.…