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...."

"Obama Trolls Tea Party With Bumper Sticker"/"Scalia's Past Haunts Him On Birth Control."

2 teasers from the top of the front page at Talking Points Memo:



Both go to articles written by Sahil Kapur, whose name I first noticed in connection with the Scalia piece yesterday. I didn't blog about that because the legal stupidity of it annoyed me but also bored me too much to explain. I happened to see Kapur's name again this morning as I clicked on a link at Drudge that read "LIMBAUGH RIPS MEDIA": 'PIG IGNORANT'..." Limbaugh excoriates the media for not understanding that self-employed persons — such as Matt Drudge — have to pay quarterly installments on their taxes, so Drudge was not lying when he said he was already paying the penalty for declining to buy health insurance.

The individual mandate went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, and most people paying their taxes right now are paying taxes for 2013. 'Dude, there's no penalty until next yr,' Sahil Kapur of the left-wing Talking Points Memo tweeted.  Kapur's colleague at TPM Dylan Scott wrote a full story with a headline alleging Drudge was 'probably lying.' 'Americans don't pay a penalty for not having health insurance until they file their 2014 taxes -- in 2015,' Scott wrote.

Now I see Kapur's name on that piece about the bumper sticker, which, at the inside page, is headlined "Obama Co-Opts Tea Party Slogan For Obamacare Bumper Sticker." We talked about that bumper sticker last night. My favorite comment on my post is from Carl Pham, who says:

Love it. An effeminate l'il toothless snake, slim 'n' trim from his regular yoga class, sipping chai latte and curling up with his iPad to do a little Facebooking on the back of a lime-green Prius. I'm guessing the same design team that came up with Pajama Boy?

I also like Dr. Weevil:

Unlike the Gadsden flag snake, this one doesn't seem to be a rattlesnake. The point of the original flag is that the snake-warrior doesn't strike first, doesn't go in search of people to bite, but if you step on him, he will bite back and hurt you worse than you hurt him. The Obamacare snake just bites people.

Yeah, and also, if you tread on a stethoscope, it doesn't attack you. You can quite successfully survive stomping all over a stethoscope. And why would they want to portray that stethoscope as being like a rattlesnake? The message seems to be that Obamacare is threatening you and can kill you.

Anyway, I have no problem with TPM noting that Obama has appropriated the old Gadsden flag, which has of late been strongly associated with the Tea Party. And it's not Kapur who called Obama a troll. I just found all that interesting and was surprised to see Kapur's name again.

It's that Scalia piece that is so irritating. Kapur is not responsible for the photo of Scalia coming out of the darkness with his hands in the "Boo!" position under the word "Haunts." But he is responsible for writing such a nitwit explanation of a legal problem. Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the case that most clearly explains what the Free Exercise Clause means — which is that there's no constitutional right to exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws. The case that's currently before the Supreme Court (Hobby Lobby) is based on the statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — that Congress passed after the Court decided that Free Exercise case, so now there is a statutory right to exemptions. There's nothing haunting about this. There's the Constitution, which needed interpretation, and there are statutes, which can extend more rights than the Constitution provides. These are different texts and they require independent interpretation.

It's dumb (or disingenuous) to portray Scalia as somehow troubled by needing to apply a statute that requires courts to protect religion more than the Constitution requires. In fact, if anything, I could see him being especially deferential to Congress's choice to trump a judicial opinion with a clearly stated statutory entitlement. The problem to be argued before the Court today is about 2 statutes and the way they interact. It's Congress, not Scalia, that is "haunted" by the past. Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a clear text, and it had the power to put text in the Affordable Care Act that would exclude the application of the RFRA. It didn't!

I've explained this before, by the way, back in November when the Supreme Court granted cert. in the Hobby Lobby case:

This is about statutes and the politicos who produce them, not the judges who stand back and let them trip all over themselves pandering to everyone. If the Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act had wanted to exempt it from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it could have done so explicitly. It did not. Why should the Court cut back Congress's absurdly broad RFRA to help it out with what it failed to bother to do with the ACA?

"Can you think of any reason why the neck was severed if that baby was not born alive?"

The prosecutor takes a different perspective on what Kermit Gosnell's lawyer had asked the medical examiner: "Based on the totality of the evidence... you cannot testify to anyone that this fetus was born alive?"

Also: "Former employees testified last week that Dr. Gosnell gave different explanations for why he kept up to 30 specimen jars containing fetal feet." What were the explanations? Some special reason for keeping the feet? Fetus feet... feetus... a sick pun?

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

Serial killers often like to keep "trophies" from their victims.

Ruth Anne Adams said:

You must know that a strong pro-life symbol is the thing called "Precious Feet." I bet Gosnell knew that, too. 

Dr Weevil said:

Yes, a lot of prolifers wear lapel or dress pins depicting the soles of unborn babies' feet. The point is that they are utterly and obviously human even when the baby is only a few months along. The friend of a friend I first saw wearing this said that they're actual size, too, which is part of the point. (I forget what number of weeks they were actual size for: I'm sure anyone interested could find out.)

I'm sure Ruth Anne is right: Gosnell kept the feet of his victims rather than some other body part as a sick sick joke aimed at prolifers.

"RAT is an anagram of ART. Do you think that inspired them, perhaps subconsciously?"

Asks Dr Weevil.

"A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 millimetres... and herbivorous." Sounds delicious!

Dr Weevil. A nice portmanteau pseudonym. Combines Dr. Evil with our theme-of-the-day: pests.

Let's listen to Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland:



10 things I judge to be interesting:

1. The term "portmanteau" originated in "Through the Looking-Glass," as Humpty Dumpty explains "Jabberwocky," within which, for example, "slithy" combines "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" combines "flimsy and miserable." "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." (The word "portmanteau" already meant suitcase.)

2. "Portmanteau" comes from French — combining words for "carry" and "coat" — but the French don't say "portmanteau" to refer to "suitcase words." They say mot-valise — which they came up with by making a literal translation of the English term "suitcase word." That makes "portmanteau" something that's called a "false friend" (a term I did not know).

3. Tex Ritter's real name was Woodward Maurice Ritter. You'd think if he needed a nickname, Woody would have popped up. Think of all the Woodys that that had to stretch to get to "Woody." Woody Allen, for example, was named Allan Stewart Konigsberg. I can't discern how he got to Woody from his Wikipedia entry, which says: "It the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen." That sounds like he was setting up a knock-knock joke: "Heywood who?"

4. Now Woody Guthrie got to Woody quite directly. He was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born in 1912. You might say: Woodrow Wilson! Woodrow Wilson didn't even become President of the United States until 1913. Yes, but he was Governor of New Jersey. No matter that Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. It would be like somebody today living in some state that's not New Jersey naming their new baby Chris Christie Smith or Chris Christie Jones or whatever.

5. Back to Mantan Moreland, the other guy in the Tex Ritter "Boll Weevil" video. Looking at his Wikipedia page, I see he was in a surprising number of movies, including many movies I'd never heard of like "Freckles Comes Home" (1942) and "King of the Zombies" (1941). "He is perhaps best known for his role as chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Monogram's Charlie Chan series. (The lyrics of The Coasters' 1963 song 'Bad Detective' are sung from the first-person perspective of Birmingham Brown, Mantan Moreland's character in the Charlie Chan movie series.)" There's some very heavy racial context here. Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled" appropriates some things about Moreland. And the Beastie Boys sampled something of his about mashed potatoes, and you can listen to the original (NSFW) here.

6. Moreland "was briefly considered as a possible addition to the Three Stooges when Shemp Howard died in 1955." And he was in the 1957 Broadway stage production of "Waiting For Godot." He played Estragon, the role played by Bert Lahr in the original production of the play.



7. In the "Waiting for Godot" with Moreland, Geoffrey Holder played the character Lucky.



8. You may remember Geoffrey Holder from 1970s-era 7-Up commercials.

9. The New York Dolls recorded "Bad Detective" — replete with the opening notes that you may well recognize as the music that was always used in the past to signify: This is Chinese.

10. Mantan Moreland was known for his "Incomplete Sentences" comic routines. They went like this (from some Charlie Chan movies):

"'We need organic feed'?"

"Perhaps some kind person should bring them a couple of big bags of Purina Monkey Chow."

"[W]hen your product is so repulsive that no one wants to buy it in the open market..."

"... you have to somehow find a way to borrow the market for someone else's more attractive product."

"Tread on me, please, I'm a masochist!"

Dr. Weevil adapts Hazy Dave's version of the Gadsden flag.


 

You can collect all the entries in my "Redesign the Gadsden flag" enterprise by clicking here.

Powerline picked up "It's OK to Tread on Me Now/I Have Health Insurance" for a post about Obamacare.

ADDED: I like Dr. Weevil's quip: "Here’s my submission."