"There are pieces of varying length and wallop on sloth, stripping, shoplifting, overspending, suicide and light virtual sex work to raise money for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign."

"'I’d rate fifty penises in an hour, and I’ll admit now that I rated few of them honestly,' she writes of trading nude-photo appraisals for political donations. 'Look, corners were cut.'..."

From a NYT book review, "Sex, Sloth and Shoplifting: Notes From a ‘Sloppy’ Girl/In her second essay collection, 'Sloppy,' the writer and social media personality Rax King embraces the mess of living imperfectly."

"[S]he takes such obvious pleasure in and sustenance from being an author with a capital A, even as she mocks how the profession might be perceived at her physical therapist’s office ('a soft-handed little typer')...."

That's not writing, that's....

"How far Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can go is a hot topic for many Democrats right now."

"With her youth, charisma, social media skills and political savvy, she is being talked about nowadays as not only the obvious heir to Mr. Sanders as leader of the progressive movement, but as a possible presidential contender for 2028. This both recognizes her potential and feels premature at best.... Her mere existence spins up Republicans to a degree reminiscent of their reaction to Nancy Pelosi in her heyday.... The Fighting Oligarchy tour organized by Mr. Sanders and featuring her as a 'special guest' drew fired-up crowds in numbers worthy of a presidential campaign: about 15,000 in Tempe, Ariz.; 11,000 in Greeley, Colo.; 34,000 in Denver.... Democrats freaked out by Mr. Trump are clamoring for leaders who share their sense of urgency. Fighting Oligarchy, with its revolutionary fervor, is working to scratch that itch.... [A]lthough Mr. Sanders is the tour’s headliner... it is Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, serving as his fresh-faced, supportive warm-up act, who has many Trump-traumatized Democrats dreaming of a counterrevolution...."

Writes Michelle Cottle, in "What Ocasio-Cortez Wants for the Democrats" (NYT).

Her mere existence spins up Republicans!

Meanwhile, Democrats are itchy, and AOC is scratchy.

"To me, 'he looks homeless' is loaded with classism. But it's true that Bernie looks like he doesn't care—and that's what makes his outfits great."

"The irony is that the more you chase this quality, the more affected you can look. And certainly, not everyone who 'doesn't care' looks great (Fetterman comes to mind). This is why style writers are so obsessed with this quality. To me, if you constantly chase the idea of middle class respectability, you can end up looking a bit stiff an uninspired. But if you open your mind to wider expressions of style, you'll not only enjoy what you see around you, but you'll be more stylish as a result."

Writes Derek Guy, at X, after writing this Politico article — "Congress Is Falling Apart /But These 5 Guys Look Good Doing It" — which caused Meghan McCain's husband (Ben Domenech) to say that he once saw Bernie Sanders and mistook him for a homeless man.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Tell me about the idea, expressed by fashion writers, that looking like you don't care how you look is actually a great look to pursue."

"Are you supportive of these onesies?"

Bernie Sanders prying damaging admissions from RFK Jr.:

The highlight of the day!!!😂 pic.twitter.com/JtFPOlOD0z

— Patrick Metzgar (@patmetzgar) January 30, 2025

Context (video):

"So what happened in this campaign is Donald Trump said to the American people, you are angry. You're really pissed off."

"And I know that, and you're right. And then he gave his explanation and his explanation, which was obviously nonsense and false and racist, et cetera, was that millions and millions of undocumented people were coming across the border. They were invading. America, we're an occupied country. They were taking your jobs, taking your benefits, eating your cats and your dogs. That is why you are hurting. Now, that is a crazy explanation, but it is an explanation. Now you tell me what the Democratic explanation was.... Well, the Democratic explanation was, hey, we have passed some good things, very important things in the Biden administration, which happens to be true.... There was no appreciation — no appreciation — of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working class people.... You know, you can't fight something with nothing. You gotta have an alternative vision. Trump had his vision. It was incorrect, it was dishonest. It was in many cases racist and sexist. He had a vision, he had an explanation. To my view, Democrats really did not."

Said Bernie Sanders, in the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Bernie Sanders Says Democrats Have Lost Their Way."

"Becoming chief sausage-maker for President Obama.... Plotting a 2016 presidential run, only to be discouraged by Obama.... Running as a moderate, but governing as a progressive.... Signs of slipping concerned allies.... A legacy now tied to his own vice president’s candidacy...."

Those are the "Six Takeaways From the Magazine’s Profile of Joe Biden/His decision to quit the race ended a remarkable chapter in American political history — and started one that may yet define his legacy" (NYT).

The profile itself is, "Joe Biden’s Interrupted Presidency/He sought the office nearly all his life. When he finally got there, it brought out his best — and eventually his worst" (NYT)(free access link).

I'm most interested in the heading "Running as a moderate, but governing as a progressive," at the first link:

"Well, stand your butt up then"/"You stand your butt up."

Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) just tried to fight a witness at a hearing. pic.twitter.com/MeVv61AsWs

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) November 14, 2023

"Class-not-race became code for an increasingly infamous form of racism... 'color-blindness.'"

"Once considered an aspirational positive, a would-be 'color blind' pol like Sanders who focused on 'class-not-race' was understood to be denying the realities of discrimination, probably out of secret racism. As the use of 'working class' on its own began to carry more penalties even for politicians like Sanders whose entire raison d’etre was supposedly class politics, new entrants to the electoral scene were encouraged to refer instead to the 'white working class,' perjoratively. This was soon described as a voting bloc that basically existed to make irrational/moronic demands.... Most importantly, it votes for Donald Trump, which means whatever it thinks about anything can safely be ignored... [A] phrase that was coined to express a specific political idea — that connections between people of a certain economic class are meaningful — once again came to mean more or less the exact opposite, i.e. that the only 'working class' that really exists is fractious and separated by ethinicity. White working class, black working class, Latinx working class (really!), and so on. Workers of the world, split up!"

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of 'Deep State' and 'Working Class'/When left/liberal fixations fall out of establishment favor, they're re-christened as conservative menaces" (Substack).

"For an effective anti-Trump move to take place... the G.O.P. would have to display the sort of coördination that the moderate wing of the Democratic Party showed in 2020..."

"... after Bernie Sanders finished first in the New Hampshire primary. On that occasion, Congressman James Clyburn threw his support behind Joe Biden in South Carolina, and two of the moderate candidates—Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—dropped out and endorsed Biden. Ayres didn’t go so far as to say that a Republican Party still dominated by Trump could engineer a similar feat...."

Writes John Cassidy in "Can Anybody Stop Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary? Even as the former President has a commanding poll lead in a splintered field, one veteran G.O.P. consultant argues that it’s too early to coronate him" (The New Yorker).

Ayres = Whit Ayres, a consultant and pollster who isn't advising anyone at the moment but who has, in the past, has advised Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and Ron DeSantis.

Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"? They just had to stop Bernie.

"The ever-controversial former president's lead hasn't disappeared or even diminished in recent weeks, despite being charged with numerous crimes."

"In the most recent poll reading, Trump stands at 55% support, up from 47% in April and 51% in March. His nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, claims 17% of the GOP's voters, down from 23% in April and 21% in March. Do the math: Trump has extended his lead over the popular Florida governor to 38 percentage points, versus 24 percentage points last month and 28 percentage points in March. No other Republican candidate reaches double-digit support."

From "Even Amid Trump's Legal Troubles, His Lead Widens: I&I/TIPP Trump leads DeSantis 55%-17% in the GOP Primary" (TIPP Insights).

The quote in the post title is grammatically bad — the "former president's lead" was not charged with crimes — but I'm using it anyway.

Biden has only 39% support on the Democratic side, and that's exactly the same as last month and despite his lack of a serious challenger. 9% of Democrats are for Bernie Sanders, but last I looked, Sanders has endorsed Biden. That's his closest competitor.

That puts Biden up by only 30 percentage points compared to Trump's 38 point lead over DeSantis. And Trump is gaining month by month, while Biden is losing ground. He was up by 34 points in March. 

All of us? Or all except you?

Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

I think this is his theory of why we're going to want to pay $8 a month to use Twitter. But maybe not. Maybe he deplores our love of pain and aims to lead us out of our lowly condition. Or is it meaningless chatter — alluringly enigmatic?

ADDED: I created the tag "masochism" for this post, then added it retrospectively to many posts in the archive. I found a few interesting things, and I'll excerpt them here, because it may shed some light on today's Muskism or spark some creative thinking:

November 25, 2008: Christopher Hitchens accused Obama of "foolhardiness and masochism" for selecting Hillary Clinton — "the unscrupulous female" — as Secretary of State.

January 19, 2011: My commenters were redesigning the Gadsden flag and Dr. Weevil — quipping "Here's my submission" — came up with this: 

          

November 1, 2013: I found what I called "a frisson of masochism" in something Ana Marie Cox attributed to Hillary Clinton.

May 28, 2015: I quoted Bernie Sanders, writing in 1972: "Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism." 

February 2, 2018: I quoted William Safire, writing in 1970: "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." 

October 30, 2018 — a study showed that Republicans and Democrats have different sexual fantasies: "The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism...."

"With Trump frequently in the news, Democrats are increasingly accepting — if not enthusiastic — that the president will likely be their 2024 standard-bearer."

So says this Washington Post column by Yasmeen Abutaleb. 

How does she know what "Democrats are increasingly accepting" and that it's a consequence of Trump's frequent presence in the news? Is keeping Trump in the news a way to assist Biden in deterring a primary challenger?

Glenn Greenwald asks why Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying this and AOC, Bernie, and their ilk are not.

Leave aside whatever views you have of MTG. Just put them in a corner for a second. OK, have we done that?

Now: think about the indisputable fact that not AOC, Bernie or a single Squad member could or would say most of what is in this thread, let alone in this tone, and ask why: https://t.co/ZuekWvA3Fw

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 18, 2022

"Left splits over Supreme Court pick pushed by top Biden ally/Rep. Jim Clyburn is stumping for judge Michelle Childs to get the president's nod. While labor interests are skeptical, not every progressive senator is."

 Politico reports. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declined to talk about Childs at all: “I’m not going to comment. Nope.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)... offered a subtle warning.... “You want somebody who is going to be reflective of the needs of working families and understands that we are moving towards an oligarchy in this country"...

"2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want."

Tweeted Bernie Sanders, quoted at Newsweek. 

Who's doing the "allowing"? All 100 Senators were elected in their state and each holds 1/100 of the power. It's not 2 against 48 but 52 against 48. There's no "allowing" going on, just an accumulation of total votes. The 2 are most certainly allowed to vote the way they choose, representing their state, and it's offensive to speak of not allowing them. 

Speaking of Sanders, here's something from Axios: 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend's protests against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) because it also wouldn't include a rebuke of her political views, Axios has learned.....

An email exchange between Senate Democratic leadership aides, obtained by Axios, reveals Sanders withheld his name from a joint statement declaring protesters who followed Sinema into a bathroom — and filmed her while using the restroom — as "plainly inappropriate and unacceptable."

Was Sinema filmed using the toilet? I thought she'd retreated into the space to get away, but find it hard to believe she'd use the toilet under this pressure, unless she had a physical emergency. I realize it is possible in most public bathrooms for someone outside the stall to hold a camera over/under the wall/door of the stall and photograph a person inside. Did that happen to Sinema?

Back to Axios:

Maybe the reason these Bernie memes are so big is that a lot of us feel like that now.

If you're asking What Bernie memes? then go here (The Verge), where you can see the original picture  — Bernie Sanders, scrunched up and bundled up, sitting in a folding chair, with no one around him, waiting for the inauguration ceremony to get going — and you can also see lots of photoshops putting this Bernie image in various amusing settings. 

If you're asking Feel like what now?, you have reached the topic I want to talk about.

"It seems to me pretty clear that progressive views need to be expressed within a Biden administration. It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a 'team of rivals'..."

"... and there's some discussion that that's what he intends to do — which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats — but which ignored the progressive community. I think that would be very, very unfortunate." 

Said Bernie Sanders, quoted at "Bernie Sanders: 'Enormously insulting' if Biden ignores progressives in his administration/Sanders, Elizabeth Warren remain interested in serving in Biden's Cabinet" (Politico).

"Thank you, Seattle, for being one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America."

Just a moment in August 2015 that I wanted to relive this morning because I was thinking about how the highly racialized left-wing rhetoric has washed out the economics-based leftism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

"At this moment, the difference between the candidates is a chasm. There has never been a greater difference...."

"Take Biden's campaign positions. Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in memory on things like climate. It's far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because they're being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders movement and others. The climate program, a $2 trillion commitment to dealing with the extreme threat of environmental catastrophe, was largely written by the Sunrise Movement and strongly endorsed by the leading activists on climate change, the ones who managed to get the Green New Deal on the legislative agenda. That's real politics.... This is not support for Biden. It is support for the activists who have been at work constantly, creating the background within the party in which the shifts took place, and who have followed Sanders in actually entering the campaign and influencing it. Support for them. Support for real politics. The left position is you rarely support anyone. You vote against the worst. You keep the pressure and activism going."

Said Noam Chomsky, quoted in "Noam Chomsky wants you to vote for Joe Biden and then haunt his dreams/The lion of the left on the pandemic, the election, the word Bernie Sanders needs to stop using, the Harper's letter, the 1619 Project, patriotism, and the greatest social movement in U.S. history" (The.Ink).

"Hillary Clinton will deliver a prime-time speech next Wednesday for the Democratic National Convention..."

"Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts will join Mrs. Clinton, the 2016 nominee, on the Wednesday night program if she is not selected as Mr. Biden’s running mate, according to the officials. Former President Bill Clinton will speak as well, one of the officials said. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican who is a harsh critic of President Trump, will deliver addresses Monday night, the officials said. Former President Barack Obama’s time slot has not been announced (or leaked), but he could be included on a crammed Wednesday night program, or possibly introduce Mr. Biden on Thursday — to deliver a nationally televised rendition of the-Joe-I-know speech he has been giving during online Biden fund-raisers and round tables. It is not clear when Michelle Obama, who delivered what was widely regarded as the best speech at the 2012 convention in Charlotte, N.C., will speak. But planners have privately said they believe her address could attract the widest viewership outside of Mr. Biden’s."

From "2020 Election Live Updates: Democratic Convention to Feature Obamas and Clintons" (NYT).

Other than the Obamas, this sounds awful. I can't believe we're going to be stuck watching both of the Clintons. It's all so terribly old. Who wants to hear from Kasich?! And Warren and Sanders are the opposite of Biden. They're the candidates who got elbowed out by the party that didn't want them. But I guess they'll be good and play their part and concentrate on how it's all about getting rid of Trump.