dei – Martin Simpson

Illnesses Aren’t Usually Funny… But TDS Is (posted 8/25/25)

When you think of illnesses, you don’t usually think “humorous,” because most diseases are obviously the farthest thing from funny. That being said, it’s a very human thing to find humor – usually dark humor – in all contexts, including those involving sickness and even death.

There are holocaust jokes, and ebola jokes. The late great Sam Kinison brought the house down with a bit about a crime wave carried out by gay necrophiliac rapists. (That one’s not for the squeamish.) Two of the Monty Python guys’ funniest bits were about amputation (the knight who loses one limb after another, but is undaunted, calling each horrific wound “just a scratch”) and death (the sketch about the parrot that John Cleese smacks against the pet store counter, pointing out that it’s “gone to join the choir invisible”).

So call me adorable but warped if you must – and I’ll be perfectly happy if I had you at just “adorable” – but I find a few illnesses inherently funny.

One of them is Tourette’s. Don’t get me wrong, I know that must be an agonizing condition to have, and God bless all of those who do.

But from the outside, it can be pretty funny, and so odd. I know that it is largely characterized by tics and nonsense sounds, but when it involves swearing or insulting comments shouted out randomly? That would be a young boy’s dream condition, and I’m surprised that more of them don’t try to get phony diagnoses, just so they can snap at their teachers or peers. “Bite me! Friend off! Schiff for brains!”

Tourette’s must not have been widely publicized in the 1970s, because if it had been, one of my friends or I would definitely have been the first diagnosed case in central Illinois, and junior high legends in our own time!

And what about the odd perversity that in a condition that involves shouting out a rapid string of words, why are those never positive, uplifting words? No sufferer ever snaps, “Have-a-nice-day!” or “God-bless-us-everyone!” It’s always, “Suck-it-Trebek!” or words to that effect.

There’s an even more rare condition in which someone who suffers a head injury suddenly begins to speak with a foreign accent. I’m not making that up. Some British lady gets hit by a cricket bat and suddenly sounds like Ghandi. Or maybe Grandma Squanto Warren falls over that desk during a congressional vote and pops up speaking fluent Apache. #Nda’íí’ nídéé’ nitsí’í’ nídéé’.

(Which is Apache for, “#Youmustneverstopmockingme”) (Because: research!)

Better yet, a Simpson-adjacent hillbilly in Appalachia takes a fastball to the noggin and starts speaking in a BBC/King’s English accent. Which would be hilarious, I don’t care who you are. Picture Henry Higgins doing Richard Burton as Hamlet saying something like, “Y’all’re fixin’ to get your butts whipped if I have to stop this car!”

But by far the most entertaining mental condition in America today is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Sure, it’s a national irritant, and has brought a lot of heat and absolutely no light into our body politic. But Man oh Manischewitz, has it brought some top-shelf comedy onto the national stage!

When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, thousands of red-faced, blue-haired women in female genitalia hats screamed like a chorus of tone-deaf banshees throughout the ceremony, and they’ve been on the TDS Crazy Train ever since. Some have gone on a “sex strike,” vowing not to share their bodily charms with anyone who won’t denounce Trump and all his works.

(By the way, I think I can speak for all of the straight males in Christendom when I say, “Please accept the thanks of a grateful nation, ladies.”)

And the “males” – I use the word loosely – have been as bad as the females. A bunch of D-list celebrity Dem guys came out as “White Dudes for Kamala,” thus unleashing an epidemic of beta-male-induced feminine dryness that troubled gynecologists from coast to coast.

More recently, one sad fellow dressed like a non-binary golfer pictured himself as a brave non-conformist standing in front of a Chicom tank in Tiananmen Square…but he was just a doofus throwing his footlong sandwich at a federal agent.

And the “assault with a deli weapon” jokes wrote themselves. (Apparently the TDS-afflicted sandwich chucker was unaware that all law enforcement officers are equipped with hoagy-proof vests for just such an occasion.)

(Rumors that J(um)-B(o) Pritzker tried to enlist in ICE when he found out that officers routinely have sandwiches tossed at them have not been confirmed.)

When Trump engineered half a dozen cease fires and peace treaties, and tried to stop the war in Ukraine, a bunch of fossilized hippie peaceniks hit the streets behind walkers adorned with such pacifistic sentiments as, “We demand more Ukrainians be fed into the Russian meatgrinder!” and “Give war a chance!” while their tin-eared compatriots warbled, “War! (huh), what is it good for? Absolutely many things! (Say it again.)”

When Trump eliminated taxes on tips, TDS-suffering advocates for blue-collar wage slaves tweeted, “Tax the Working Class!” and “Pay Your Fair Share, Hourly Workers!”

When Trump took out the nuclear facilities of the homophobic weird-beards running Iran, gay leftist activist groups marched around the White House with signs reading, “We support the Mullahs!” and “Throw us off of Roofs!” while wearing t-shirts proclaiming, “Queers for Stoning Gays in Palestine!”

When Trump’s crackdown on crime in DC resulted in the confiscation of dozens of illegal guns, leftist gun-control fanatics marched on the capitol, chanting through bullhorns, “You can have our criminals’ guns when you can pry them from their cold, dead hands!” and “Charlton Heston is our president!”

If Trump gets interest rates down to 2%, they’ll cry, “Savers devastated by low returns on CDs!”

If he cures cancer, they’ll form the NAACT (National Association for the Advancement of Cancer Tumors), and trademark the chant, “What do we want? Metastasis! When do we want it? NOW!”

These people can’t be reasoned with. But they can be opposed. And they can sure as hell be laughed at.

Speaking of being laughed at, I thought that maybe Joy Reid – the most whitey-hating racist east of the Pecos – had disappeared from the earth after even MSNBC said she was too nutty for them. But no. She turned up on the podcast of somebody named Wajahat Ali, just to remind us how nice it is when she’s not here.

(If you’re wondering what Wajahat Ali is known for, other than having a first name that sounds like the cough of a dying man, your guess is as good as mine.)

Reid launched into another of her classic racist rants, this time covering topics such as how white folks “made this country into a slave hell,” and how they “can’t originally invent anything, more than they were ever able to invent good music. We black folks gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, they couldn’t even invent that.”

It’s tough to tell whether those thoughts are more stupid, or more evil.

They are definitely stupid. Because Reid spewed that garbage about whites not inventing anything into a microphone and a camera, and it was viewed on the internet…all 3 of which were invented by whitey. And because all significant social developments – whether bad or good – are inevitably the product of interactions among many ethnic groups and cultures.

Slavery, for example, originated when human society originated, and it was omnipresent in every powerful civilization in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa. The slave trade in the modern era involved Africans enslaving other Africans, and selling some of them to Europeans who took them mostly to the Americas, and more of them to Arabs who took them mostly to the Middle East.

It’s true that most slave owners in America – they were called “Democrats” – were white. But at the outbreak of the Civil War, 10,000 black slaves were owned by black masters, a fact that would curl the culturally-appropriated blonde hair on Joy Reid’s empty head, if she were to learn it. (Ironically for a person named “Reid,” she doesn’t seem to read a lot.)

The same cultural mixing is present in positive cultural phenomena, such as Reid’s example of music, especially when she talks about country music. Yes, the banjo was an African instrument, but the guitar was invented in Spain, the violin in Italy, the harmonica in China, the accordion in Germany. The yodel came from Alpine regions of Europe, and most early country music originated in folk songs in England, Scotland and Ireland, transplanted here by Scots-Irish hillbillies.

But in addition to the lying stupidity of Reid’s argument, her racial cheerleading is evil right down to the bone. Because every group obviously has good and bad in them. If white people want to take racial pride in Shakespeare, Adam Smith, and Ronald Reagan, they also have to be saddled with Hitler, Ted Bundy and Jim Acosta.

Smart black people don’t want to claim Idi Amin or Al Sharpton, but they want to claim Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas. Dumb black people want to claim Sharpton and Obama, but don’t want to claim Sowell or Thomas.

And NOBODY wants to claim Jussie Smollett, Whoopi Goldberg or Joy Reid.

But if I were going to play the ethno-centric cheerleading game – which, again, is stupid – I’d point to something that the Joy-less one somehow forgot in her illiterate screed about music: classical.

Classical is as white as hip hop is black, for example. (It’s not as white as Liz Warren, but almost. #neverstop) So if we were forced to pick teams in a racialist music draft, we’d happily take Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, and Joy could have Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and Lizzo.

Sure, “Baby Got Back” is fun, and “WAP” is a timeless treasure.

But if I’m betting on what’s going to stand the test of time, I’ll take “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “Ode to Joy,” and give her the points.

After all, nobody has ever written – or will ever write – an “Ode to Joy Reid.”

Hamas delenda est!

Lessons from LA in How Leftists Distort Language (posted 1/15/25)

The fire story has brought attention to many issues that conservatives have been warning about for years – the dangers of catering to an extremist environmentalist fringe, incompetent leftist government – as well as some I’d never heard of, such as the “expanding bullseye effect” that CO posted about yesterday.

While there are obviously many contributing factors to the disaster, one that has deservedly gotten a lot of attention in the last several years is getting even more now: the DEI priorities that led to so many incompetent people ending up in crucial positions in the LAFD.

Thankfully, amongst all of the green flags popping up in the late, flailing stage of the Biden/Harris administration that culminated in Trump’s re-election, most people now seem to be decisively rejecting DEI. But it’s a shame that it took this long, or that it’s necessary even now to explain to some people what’s wrong with DEI.

I think it’s hung around so long partly because leftists are experts at using language to obscure painful realities. Sometimes euphemistic language arises out of good intentions, and in limited circumstances, it may even be helpful. If calling someone “retarded” sounds harsh or insulting, then substituting “mentally challenged” and eventually “special needs” is compassionate. Moving from “crippled” to “handicapped” was probably good.

But even in those cases, there’s a tendency to go too far and try to deceive yourself and others by eschewing clearer language in favor of comforting euphemisms. When some advocates tried to move on from “handicapped” to “handi-capable,” it didn’t take, because it was too obviously an absurdly positive spin that edged into deception.

When I was a young miscreant in the 1970s, many schools made a terminology switch from calling underperforming kids “slow learners” or “remedial students” to those who “progress at their own speed.” It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t change the reality.

And because kids are semi-feral a-holes in need of civilizing, six minutes after the new term was rolled out, playgrounds were ringing with taunts of, “Ha ha! Billy progresses at his own speed!”

In politicians’ hands, such euphemisms quickly degenerate from well-intentioned to deceitful. If you can get people to think of illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” and then “undocumented Americans,” you have deceived them.

If you can transform “vagrants” “winos” and “bums” into “the homeless” and then “the unhoused,” you can squeeze billions out of naïve leftist voters for your pet causes.

The same phenomenon happened in the mid-1960s, when a plan for “compensatory” or “remediating” discrimination soon became known as “affirmative action.” “Discrimination” sounds bad, but taking “affirmative action” sounds bold, and forward-thinking. It’s got “affirm” right there in the name!

It was initially sold as a tiny bit of favoritism, used only in the rarest of circumstances, to break what was essentially a tie between two nearly identical candidates for a job or a scholarship. In reality, it pretty quickly became a huge thumb on the scale which required draconian quotas and giving some groups a multiple-standard-deviation boost in test scores or GPAs over the general population.

And the word “quota?” No bueno. Supporters soon were forced into verbal gymnastics, insisting, “We don’t have any quotas. Only goals and targets.”

Fast-forward a few decades, and the detrimental results of affirmative action had become so obvious and the program so unpopular that it could no longer be sustained. So the lefty elite said, “Okay, we had good intentions, and we tried, but our plan is a failure. So we’re learning from our mistakes, admitting error, and dropping it.”

HA! I kid.

They actually flew their private jets to a hidden mountain lair near Davos (Because: climate change, shmimate change.) and engaged in a two-week brainstorming and re-branding retreat.

And then came out with… you knew where this was going… Diversity, Inclusion and Equity!

Then someone pointed out that that spelled “DIE.”

And George Soros said, “Schiff!” And had several subordinates killed, and all of the posters re-printed and the web sites edited.

And DEI was born.

Annnnddddd… the president of Harvard is a dimwitted plagiarist, a dude who dressed like Captain Kangaroo’s homely wife is Assistant Health Secretary, Kamala is VP, and LA is burning to the ground.

Just like affirmative action before it, DEI is a lose-lose-lose proposition. Those being discriminated against obviously lose, but so do the “beneficiaries” of the discrimination, who are stigmatized with the suspicion that they didn’t earn their position, even if they did. Also, when they get artificially boosted into a position for which they are not qualified, they fail.

And the larger society loses, because it ends up with less qualified people in government, academia and some businesses. Sometimes the effects are just aggravating, as when mediocre professors get tenure, or when you get terrible service at the DMV. But sometimes you get petite firefighteresses who can’t carry a Pomeranian puppy out of a burning building, and people die.

For 30 years, my dad worked with twenty guys on street crews for the Northern Illinois Gas Company. Everybody there worked in two-man teams in which partners rotated every 2-3 weeks or so. Everybody was trained and periodically tested on their various tasks, and if job applicants failed welding or equipment operating tests, they didn’t get hired, or else were let go.

Responding to an affirmative-action push, the company hired two women to join the street crews. Both women were stronger and more sturdily built than most women, and both were pleasant people and did their best. One was better at welding and machinery operating than the other, but in those areas, both were roughly equivalent to at least the lower half of the guys. The most physically taxing part of his job was jackhammering.

But neither of them had the body mass or upper body strength to work a jackhammer. The two-man teams would split the jackhammering duties, and generally, the younger or stronger of each pair would do a little more than half. But whenever a guy was paired with one of the women, he knew that for the next 2-3 weeks, he’d do all of the jackhammering. Toward the end of my dad’s career, he’d had a few back injuries, and he dreaded the rotations with a female partner.

He ended up retiring a couple of years before he wanted to – with a lower pension than he would otherwise have had – because he couldn’t get medically cleared to work on a street crew anymore. I can’t say for sure that that was partly due to the company’s affirmative action/DEI hiring policy. But the fact that it’s even a possibility illustrates the problem.

In his documentary with Dennis Prager called “No Safe Spaces,” the great Adam Carolla told a story about his experience as a would-be LA firefighter. (I taught that documentary as part of my “Analyzing Propaganda” course in the last two years of my teaching career, and it was always gratifying to see that most students found the doc persuasive, even though many of them were little libs.)

Right after high school, Carolla applied to be a firefighter, and he was told that there was a long wait for white male applicants to get an appointment to take the required exam. He went to work on construction sites, and SEVEN YEARS later, got a letter inviting him to come in and take the exam. When he was waiting in line, there was a short, petite female of color next to him.

He asked her when she had applied, and she said, “Wednesday.”

Carolla makes the point that he would have been a great firefighter. He was young and strong, and had the kind of physical courage edging into foolhardiness typical of many young men.

Carolla never got the chance to be a firefighter, but he has done very well for himself in the intervening years. But the citizens of LA lost a very qualified firefighter – and many other hundreds or thousands like him – because their political leaders valued identity politics and DEI double standards over the lives and property of Californians.

Hopefully, after these fires are put out, they will have learned their lesson, and will vote accordingly.

If they STILL don’t wise up, they’ll once again get what they’ve been voting for, good and hard. And hot.