"Erika Righter raises her tattooed forearm to her face, in despair of all of the racism she’s witnessed as a social worker, then laments how a white friend always ends phone calls with 'Love you long time.'"

"'And what is your racism, Erika?' Rao interrupts, refusing to let her off the hook. The mood becomes tense. Another woman adds: 'I don’t know you, Erika. But you strike me as being really in your head. Everything I’m hearing is from the neck up.' Righter, a single mother, retreats before defending herself: 'I haven’t read all the books. I’m new to this.'"

From "Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist" by Poppy Noor in The Guardia).

Poppy Noor at The Guardian says "Trump posted a picture of himself as Rocky. No one knows what to make of it."

Link, collecting Twitter snark about the pic.

But "no one" is a strong statement. Really? Did no one know what to make of it. I could tell you what I made of it, but it's simpler and more impressive to just look at what the Hong Kong protesters are making of it. They're carrying and flaunting big posters of that picture. The link goes to the New York Post, which says that "President Trump is Hong Kong’s sudden hero":

Hours after he signed two bills to support human rights in Hong Kong, angering Chinese government officials, pro-democracy protesters in the beleaguered city held a “Thanksgiving Rally” Thursday night to commend him for taking the action. And front and center at the rally were printouts of the president’s Wednesday tweet showing his head on Rocky Balboa’s chiseled body.

That image is like a MAGA hat, but already fully distributed on the web. Anyone can print it out and have their poster to display, and it's obvious that anyone who sees Trump as a hero can vividly (and with fun good humor) express that emotion. It works especially well in a crowd (as you can see in the photograph of the Hong Kong protesters at the the NY Post link).

The immediate deployment of the photo in such an appealing, effective way makes the Guardian's collection of I-don't-know-what-to-make-of-it snarkers seem obtuse and wet-blanket-y.

Trump is hilarious, but the people who hate him are totally cut off from the fun.

It's kind of sad. I'm reading Poppy Noor in The Guardian, "Trump’s joke about Melania is just one of their many awkward moments/Trump is said to have joked about the state of his marriage – the latest chapter in the strange spectacle of their relationship."

Trump was doing a fundraiser and got to talking about Steve Scalise, the Republican Congressman who got shot.

But then he came out with this gem of a line: “[Scalise’s wife’] cried her eyes out when I met her at the hospital that fateful day … I mean not many wives would react that way to tragedy, I know mine wouldn’t.”

We can only guess that Trump said this in jest, of course. But that line can be read in so many ways that soon, it was an online talking point for people eager to share their views on his and Melania’s relationship.

Maybe he is saying Melania Trump hates him so much she wouldn’t even cry at his funeral. Maybe he’s saying that after all the strain that their marriage has gone through, she has no more tears left to give? Maybe he was genuinely being funny. Who knows?

People who don't hate him know. It's obvious to me. He was paying attention to Scalise and being super-nice to him, then he said that Scalise's wife was crying. Virtually all wives can be expected to cry profusely when their husband gets shot, so he hadn't really said anything special about her yet. He could have spoken realistically and said, "Of course, she's his wife, she's going to cry, all wives would cry." Instead, hilariously, he flipped it into the absurd and said what's plainly untrue, "Not many wives would react that way to tragedy." The "to tragedy" makes it clear he's being silly. It's a tragedy, so you cry. Duh. But he said not many wives would cry. Then, soaring into the stratosphere of absurdity, he said, "I know mine wouldn’t." That's funny because it's daring and it's self-effacing and it's wildly vaunting Scalise's wife for loving him so much (even though she really only did what all wives do).

But to Trump haters it's an occasion to talk about how Melania must hate Trump.

Now, I will give Poppy Noor credit. She's funny in her own way. She's collected videos of Melania avoiding kisses and hand-holding with Trump. There's some nasty fun in looking for evidence that a married couple actually hate each other. I'm not saying Noor has no sense of humor. I'm just saying I feel a little sorry for the people who are missing out on Trump's hilarity. And it's not just that they aren't getting some great and unusual laughs. It's that they're undermining their own capacity to understand the very strange person who is our President. Even if you want to keep hating him, you should try to understand him. Don't dumb yourself down. You won't fight too well if you don't know your enemy.