The Israel/Palestine situation is, as folks know, an ugly mess. Like so many other American Jews, I'm horrified by the draconian actions of the Netanyahu Administration in Israel. Emotions are high and the rise of both Islamophobia and Antisemitism here in the United States sure as hell doesn't help matters.
Last night I posted something on Twitter which was simultaneously incredibly stupid and potentially harmful to someone's career (it turns out it won't be, but I didn't know that at the time). Then I made things worse by inadvertently blocking the same person (I didn't realize I had done so until someone ripped on me for doing so); I immediately unblocked them and apologized for that...as well as apologizing profusely and repeatedly for the original screwup...but...yeah, too late.
It was one of those things where the more you try to explain/apologize the worse you make things.
I don't know whether the subject of my original tweet has accepted my apology or not as of yet (they haven't responded to it one way or the other as of this writing). I do know that at least a couple of people who I respect quite a bit have either rightly slammed me or, in at least one case, outright blocked me.
As you might imagine, I was also dogpiled by a bunch of people tearing me apart over both the original (since deleted) tweet, the block, and the rest of it.
Anyway, I screwed up royally, then compounded the screwup, and feel like crap at the moment, as I should.
OK, this is totally off-topic, and I know I'm gonna face an earful in the comments over this, but I have to make a few comments on the ongoing "Democratic Superdelegate" brouhaha amongst Bernie Sanders's supporters.
First of all, there are 712 "unpledged" delegates (or "superdelegates") for the Democratic Party this year out of 4,763 total. That's around 15% of all Democratic delegates. The eventual nominee needs at least 2,382 total delegates to win the nomination.
So, it's important to keep in mind that pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses determine around 85% of the total. It's the remaining 15% who people are getting all worked up about.
Normally, of course, this isn't an issue because one candidate or another ends up securing more than half of the grand total via the caucuses/primaries anyway, making the SDs a moot point.
OK, this is not only off topic, it's not even a particularly significant issue, but it bugs me because...well, frankly, because it's about my hometown.
Over on Twitter, several pundits/reporters have made this claim:
Trump dominated Oakland County Michigan, which includes Mitt Romney's hometown. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/wcsBcbFz7h
6/10/16: REPOSTED FROM THE ARCHIVES AS A REMINDER.
Yes, this is off topic. No, I don't care tonight.
Yes, the entire Republican debate was a revolting, disgusting, putrid embarrassment from start to finish (with the odd exception of the moderators from FOX News, who actually did a great job).
However, forget about the discussion of Donald Trump's penis size which opened the evening (no, I'm not making that up, and no, it's not a metaphor).
So here it is...Super Tuesday. Unless the GOP base suddenly decides that they don't want a xenophobic, misogynistic, hate-mongering, con-artist moron to be their standard-bearer, it's looking very likely that by the time midnight rolls around, Donald Drumpf will indeed be almost unstoppable as the Republican Presidential Nominee for 2016.
Which means, aside from the GOP establishment being on collective suicide watch, Mr. Drumpf will have to think about who his running mate will be for the general election.
As a progressive Democrat, I was thrilled when I heard Donald Trump was entering the Presidential race as a Republican, for obvious reasons.
I've been as guilty as anyone of treating Donald Trump like an entertainer, a joke.
For months, I've described Trump as being "Zaphod Beeblebrox with a mean streak". More recently I revised this to "Part Zaphod Beeblebrox, part Andrew Dice Clay".
If you ask most people what the earliest utterly absurd plot point in the original Star Wars movie ("A New Hope", 1977) was, they'd probably say the part about 7 minutes in where Gunnery Captain Bolvan tells Lieutenant Hija (yeah, I looked up their names) to "hold his fire" and not to bother shooting down the escape pod containing R2-D2 and C-3PO, because there were "no life forms onboard" (an odd thing to say in a universe filled with sentient robots...not to mention that Leia could have simply stowed the records on a hard drive or whatever and tossed it into the escape pod by itself for future recovery, but whatever).
