Tag: white people

Being an orange guy supporter fan is basically a meme

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On my way to the office, there’s this house that I’ve noticed.  It was an obvious tear-down and flip, because it’s a home that sticks out that it looks absolutely nothing like the aesthetic of all the other properties in the vicinity.  It’s hard to describe it, but it almost seems fortress-like, because there’s almost no landscaping other than fresh sod, there are high fences that flank the sides of the property, and the only vehicles in the driveway have been two giant fuck-you trucks.  The trucks are black and white respectively, and for the matter so is the house, with it being primarily white with black shutters, doors and accents.

I don’t really know why, but I had this hunch that the people that lived there were probably the types of people who supported the orange guy that tanked ruled ‘Murica.  But recently, on my latest commute in, I noticed that they had two signs in their yard, in support of Bubba Kemp, the orange-guy worshipping incumbent governor who is up for reelection in November, and it basically validated everything I theorized about the residents of this property.

But then it got me thinking, how easy it’s become to pick out orange guy supporters, even if they’re not so flagrantly broadcasting their fealty.  And that they’ve basically become living breathing memes of human beings with their brainless worship of a clown.

Sure, there are the very obvious sheep out there who have Make America Great Again hats, bumper stickers, and other orange guy paraphernalia, and those guys are sad and disappointing in their own right, but at least they’re honest and straightforward with their allegiance.  But it’s the people that want you to know without making it obvious that I’m more fascinated in and frankly, these are the people out there that I think are worse, because it’s like they want to enjoy the luxuries of America, while being in support of ‘Murica.

Not to mention, that a lot of these types have unfortunately co-opted all sorts of brands, IPs and other forms of symbolism, and ruined it for everyone else by claiming that they’re symbols of their hatred of modern society.

So anyway, here’s what I’ve observed as being signs of more subtle orange guy fanaticism:

  • Don’t Tread On Me stickers, flags or decals
  • The Punisher logo decals
  • Salt Life stickers
  • Really loves firearms
  • Very large trucks with lift kits, usually black
  • American flags hanging off of said trucks
  • Properties that look like they are somewhat defensible in an apocalyptic scenario

I’m sure there are lots of other things that could be on this list, but these are the things that come immediately to mind when I think about things I see that instantly make me very confident that a person is an obvious patriot.  And the more bullets they check off, the more I’m curious what they were doing or where they were on January 6th.

The point is, people don’t really need to be brandishing the very obvious stuff to make it obvious where their general allegiances and temperaments lie.  Whether they care to realize it or not, there’s plenty of other things that have manifested and been nurtured throughout the last few years that make it pretty obvious to what type of person a random stranger on the street is, just by their behaviors and preferences, which to me, is what makes something meme-worthy. 

What’s sad, aside from the people who are brainwashed by all this bullshit, are the poor identities and IPs that have been bastardized by their being co-opted by the extreme right.  I feel bad for any intelligent Marines who have to see the Gadsden flag being used by idiots who have never even thought about serving the country, flying it without knowing any bit of its history.  I feel bad for Marvel Comics and any writer who ever was involved with The Punisher, seeing all these morons using the skull emblem and claiming it to be “for them.” 

And worst off, I feel saddest for the American flag, which is so often being flown with almost a malicious intent, by people who want to throw their extreme patriotism in the faces of normal, regular Americans who might not feel the need to have to throw the flag up everywhere they go to represent the country we live in.

The behavior of the mindless and ignorant have taken a lot of historic elements and respectable  symbols and turned them into memes by how flagrantly misused they’ve been, but at least in doing so, they’re making it very easy to identify people that I really have no interest in associating with, because ain’t nobody need this kind of stupidity anchoring down my little world.

Lol Alabama: who do you think you’re fooling?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Uh sure, my bad – Lawrence County, Alabama Old White Guys’ Club Republican group “mistakenly” uses GOP elephant logo featuring hooded Klansmen in it

East Side Elementary in Marietta, Georgia must breathe a sigh of relief every time some other group out there “accidentally” co-opts racist shit and puts it out there and expects to get away with it and never does.  Since their own stint using the Nazi eagle, it didn’t take long before Hanover County, Virginia basically used a swastika for some team within the government, which probably took the immediate heat off of them. 

And now to distance themselves even further, we’ve got some Republican club out in Alabama using artwork from an extreme left-wing news source to represent their right-wing bullshit, that had pretty obvious KKK imagery in it, and then saying “whoops, my bad” when they got caught.  Make no mistake, this is pretty obviously one of those instances where there would be no apology had they not gotten caught, but it’s hard to imagine that in this day where people are actively looking for racism that anyone would think they’d get away with it.

It’s funny, because I googled Lawrence County, Alabama, to see where on the map it was, so that I could then go onto the Southern Poverty Law site, and search where in Alabama where there was reported KKK activity, and see just how accurate it checked out.  But hilariously (ironically), when you click on Alabama, it says that not only is there KKK activity in Alabama, unlike most of the other hate groups in the state, there’s no specific dots to signify where, but it just says statewide.  So obviously Lawrence County falls into that category.

I mean, it’s no surprise how much of a layup such is, seeing as how Alabama is well, Alabama.  A state that other than college football isn’t really known for anything else other than Forrest Gump and racism.  It’s about as surprising as the NFL slapping Deshaun Watson on the wrist for sexual harassment while suspending indefinitely Calvin Ridley for gambling that Alabama has KKK on the brain, and it manifests itself in their Republican clubs.

Sometimes, I proclaim that one of the biggest flaws of the political field is the Democrats’ complete lack of respect for the collective intelligence of the Republican party; that it’s their liberal arrogance that thinks technology, creativity and solidarity amongst minority groups can actually overcome sheer force of numbers and mindless hero worship of a bunch of old white folks.  That this shit didn’t just manifest out of nowhere in 2016, but was the result of an extremely lengthy and tactical long game that is bearing tremendous fruit in advantage and a seemingly endlessly stacked deck against all opposition to this very day.  Tactics like this don’t come from idiots and brainless followers that so many people love to associate your stereotypical Republicans to be.  Somewhere in the party are some really, really intelligent and cunning minds, and this is why America is ‘Murica, and why it never seems like it will ever end.

But then we do actually have idiots and brainless sheep of ‘Muricans who make up other parts of the Republican party, who think they can flagrantly use graphics featuring Klansmen in them and actually think they’ll get away with it, and it’s like well shit, why the fuck are these dipshits’ votes actually counting?

Either way, I don’t think anyone with a brain will actually believe Lawrence County, Alabama, is actually apologetic for using their KKK artwork, and that the only thing they’re really sorry about, is that they got caught.

Why it’s hard to take AEW seriously sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was watching some highlights from the latest Dynamite, because I was interested to see who won the match between Bryan Danielson and Daniel Garcia.  But during the match I couldn’t help but notice that the turnbuckle pads had something other than an AEW logo on it, and at one point, I had to scrunch my brow when I realized that it was literally the crest for House Targaryen.

Why was the House Targaryen crest on turnbuckles of an AEW wrestling show?

Well, the answer wasn’t hard to determine, because outside of any shot that wasn’t zoomed in to where you could see the turnbuckles, pretty much everywhere else in the West Virginia arena was like an explosion of Game of Thrones branding.  Since TBS is a Turner Network and Turner bought HBO and HBO owns the rights to Game of Thrones, naturally it was decided that AEW Dynamite would be the perfect venue to cross-promote the impending premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon prequel series.

So instead of continually pushing awareness for AEW, or their shop’s website, or perhaps promoting any upcoming pay-per-views, all through the entire night was Game of Thrones shit, all over the place.

If I didn’t know what AEW was, and I was flipping channels and landed on Dynamite, I probably would’ve thought that some mega nerds* had created a wrestling promotion based on Game of Thrones, and I was watching some LARP of some Dothraki slave pit fighting instead of professional wrestling.

*I realize this is kind of an oxymoronic descriptor to describe Tony Khan, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks

But this is a good example of why it’s hard for me to take AEW seriously sometimes.  No matter how genuinely good their wrestling product is capable of being, they just do so much shit on the business side or over social media or their performers, that just pumps the brakes on the progress they are totally capable of making, if they just didn’t get in their own way so much.

AEW’s entire show was completely hijacked by Game of Thrones this week.  A few weeks ago when I went, the entire show was completely hijacked by Discovery/Animal Planet plugging the ever-living fuck out of Shark Week, to where they had a match where Jericho’s cronies were suspended in a diver’s cage.  And a little while back, just about every AEW show was paintbombed by Draft Kings logos all over the place.

I’m not sure if it’s Tony Khan’s choice, or if he’s being strong-armed by Turner Ben Afflecks, but AEW is basically this cheap vehicle to promote other things, completely sacrificing their own brand identity and integrity whenever they do.  They’re like a Tesla Model S, with a vinyl wrap for Juan’s Paint and Windows, and they’re required to drive it around in prominent communities and log a substantial amount of miles to justify the ad space. 

If it’s TK’s choice to allow his pet promotion to be pimped out to plug shit that isn’t his, then shame on him.  If it’s Turner being Turner and fifteen old white guys with VP titles are all jabbing their fingers into the AEW pie to try and make their mark, then that’s really nothing out of the ordinary for Turner’s modus operandi, and we can continuously count the days before AEW copies WCW in another manner; being managed to death by Turner.

But the bottom line is that it’s really hard for me to take AEW seriously when they participate in shit like this, and it’s got to be hard for even them to continuously try to declare themselves the alternative to the WWE, when they’re constantly being handcuffed by shit that makes it hard for people to take them seriously.  As much as the WWE is so often seen as this corporate soulless entity, they take their brand seriously, and they almost never cross-promote with anyone or anything, not without at least some substantial benefit to them. 

There’s absolutely zero benefit for AEW when they help plug Shark Week, House of the Dragon or Draft Kings, and until the company can grow a backbone and push back on bullshit orders to cross-promote, they’ll never be taken as serious as they should be capable of commanding respect.

A new metric for the vernacular: A WCW

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of my friends in a group chat turned me onto this keen observation, and I found that I liked it so much, I believe it’s worth integrating into my general lexicon, to casually drop into conversation and low-key hope to have the opportunity to mansplain it to anyone who risks questioning what I mean by it when I use it.

In 2001, Vince McMahon bought the crumbling remains of World Championship Wrestling for an estimated $4.2 million dollars; a tremendously far cry of a bargain, considering the company was about $30 million in the green just two years prior.  Fairly recently, in spite of my own general ambivalence towards the subject, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo over a WWE scandal in which it was revealed and continues to unearth, that Vince McMahon has shelled out over $20 million dollars over the years in hush money to hide his and his inner circle’s general sexual deviancy.

Frankly, it’s no shock or surprise that it turns out that Vince McMahon and his cronies did any of the things they’re being accused for at a rapid pace these days, because they’re rich, they’re white, they’re old money, and they’re in an industry where there are literal Playboy-caliber women that come and go.  As much as I respect Vince McMahon’s business acumen, I’m not the least bit surprised that he’s an asshole who wields his money and power for sex, because an endless parade of men in similar circumstances have been doing the same for eons now.  But when the day is over, there’s a whole lot of murky water in the sense that the money was accepted by their recipients, and in my legally uneducated opinion, I have to ask, what crimes actually occurred?

Regardless, the silver lining to it all is that the HeAT has forced Vince McMahon into the retirement that wrestling fans have been calling for, for years now, to actually occur, and in the aftermath of it, same with all of his cronies and stooges who were all implied to be complicit to his bad behavior, if they weren’t accomplices to begin with.  And with it, ushers in a new era of WWE, helmed by his more progressive daughter Stephanie McMahon and with her, Triple H is back into the fold, creating optimism and hope, considering his popularly lauded work with NXT over the last decade.

Obviously, most wrestling fans know that we’ve not seen the last of Vince McMahon, but as long as this scandal is continuing to unfold, we know there’s plenty of time for the company to move and evolve without him so frequently aboard the main cabin.

But anyway, back to the point of this post, the takeaway of it all is that the analogy was made that to date, Vince McMahon has paid out the valuation of 4.7 WCWs, in hush money for his sexual indiscretions.  WCW has become a noun, which is definable as an analogy for approximately $4.2 million dollars, and is applicable as metric in dannyhong speak moving forward.

  • Lionel Messi’s salary for 2022 is approximately 9.76 WCWs
  • Tiger Woods reportedly turned down anywhere from 166-190 WCWs from the Saudi-run LIV golf organization
  • Juan Soto rejected a 15-year/107.14 WCW contract from the Washington Nationals before they traded him to the San Diego Padres

Yep, metric checks out. Once the greatest threat to the WWE, now a unit of measurement to ironically measure stupid amounts of money to something more humorously.

I am all in for Gus Fring as Professor X

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Giancarlo Esposito reveals that he has had meetings with Marvel people for a future role, expresses desire to be Professor X

My knee-jerk reaction to the idea of Gus Fring being Professor X, was absolutely all aboard the train.  I get that aside from Captain Picard, the role of Charles Xavier was basically designed to be for Patrick Stewart, but in the age and in light of pursuing change and pursuing the future, I’m hard pressed to imagine anyone more succinctly qualified for the role of Professor X than Giancarlo Esposito.

Like many, my first real exposure to Esposito was him playing Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, and as far as characters go, he’s easily up there as some of my all-time favorites, because I love characters that are cerebral, command respect, and play the long game like a chess grandmaster.  I get that throughout his career since, he’s basically been bad guy after bad guy after bad guy, but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that he wouldn’t be capable of playing the cerebral, respect commanding, long game-player like Professor X, plus it’s not like Xavier didn’t make some fucked up choices in his life either.

Esposito is polished, annunciates intelligently and in the manner you’d expect to hear from Professor X, and has been entrenched in sci-fi/comics long enough to where it probably wouldn’t feel inorganic or phony on his part when playing the role.  There is absolutely zero reason why he wouldn’t make an excellent Professor X.

Unfortunately, to no surprise, there are plenty of people out there that don’t agree with my enthusiasm for the idea of Gus Fring as Professor X.  And the funny-not-really-funny thing about the internet and social media and how we’re spoon-fed occasional comments, is when you see the remarks from people you know, and you’re reading words that don’t really sound that intelligent or, in the case of what I saw, were good examples of peoples’ white privilege soaking through the sponge.

Because in spite of many peoples’ best attempts to try not to be racist but not doing a very good job of doing it, the seemingly number one reason for any sort of opposition of the idea of Giancarlo Esposito as Professor X, really boils down to the fact that he’s not white.  I understand that there’s an expectation set by decades of seeing a lily-white Caucasian Professor X in comics and FOX properties, but we live in a world where change is inevitable and is happening very rapidly.  But you could go back to 1963 and change the skin tone of Professor X to absolutely any color at all, and it wouldn’t have altered the course of history one bit.

He’d still have has had his legs crushed by the Shadow King.  He still would have gone toe-to-toe with Phoenix on the psychic plane.  He still would’ve gotten shot by Stryfe and been the first guy to have the Legacy Virus.  He still would’ve mind-fucked hundreds of people and become Onslaught.  And so forth and so forth.  A black Xavier, Hispanic Xavier, Asian Xavier wouldn’t have changed the course of the character’s history one bit.  Just because he was white in six decades worth of comic books doesn’t mean he couldn’t be presented as non-white in what would be at the very most, a series of films.

But seeing people take shots at his polish, his acting ability and other reasons to criticize the guy when they’re really just objecting to the fact that his skin tone doesn’t match Ben Affleck’s, is insulting and is bullshit.  When the day is over, the right performer should be the one to get the role, regardless of the color of their skin.  I mean, look at the shitty 2003 Daredevil speaking of Ben Affleck.  The film was horrendous, but one of the few things they did get right was casting a very black Michael Clarke Duncan as the role of the historically very white Kingpin.  Regardless of skin color, Duncan is a tank of a man who commands a room, has swag and is convincingly physically invincible, much like the character he portrayed.  Naturally, there was much complaints about that as well, but to its credit it still came to fruition.

Plus, Patrick Stewart isn’t getting any younger.  Y’all remember seeing his cameo in [spoiler redaction]?  Eyes all sinking in with age, not entirely sure the wheelchair was just a prop.  When he was a layup for the role of Professor X, those Bryan Singer X-Men flicks were literally two decades ago.  Stewart is 82 years old.  Eighty-two years old.  At the very most, Professor X was probably in his early fifties in the comics, in “present” canon.  Absolutely no disrespect to Picard.  He is the living embodiment of how Professor X was originally portrayed.  But my man is getting old.  He is old.  He doesn’t need to be continued to be trotted out, and then get the digital Luke Skywalker treatment.  Let the change happen.  Change.  Is.  Needed.

Hopefully the stiffs at Disney/Marvel/ESPN/FOX will be capable of not caving into their white racist brethren when it comes time to eventually start casting for the introduction of mutants into the MCU, and make the right fucking call: Giancarlo Esposito as Professor X.

Oh, Georgia #354

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

/stevecarrellwinceface.gif – Cobb County elementary school unveils new logos, immediately likened to Nazi symbolism, results predictable

Seeing as how mythical wife is an educator, I’ve become more familiar and cognizant of many schools in the Metro Atlanta area by osmosis, and I actually know of this particular school in question.  East Side Elementary is right off of GA-120 which is a pretty major thoroughfare, and I pass by it regularly, despite not knowing what the name of said school was until I read about where it was located.

But man, talk about a major, major, major fuck-up from this rebranding.  Whatever designer(s) they utilized to come up with this inflammatory design really needs to be scrutinized from a character standpoint, because either they’re some deep-repressed bigots, bigots that think they can pull the wool over the public, trolls who thought it would be a real gas to sneak in Nazi symbolism, or a little bit of all of the above.  However, seeing as how it was still government work, it can probably be safely assumed that the degree of creativity wasn’t particularly high.

When mythical wife showed me these logos, I immediately recognized the red flag, because when I was a wee lad, I played a lot of Wolfenstein on my 486, because it was about the only game it could handle, and Nazi eagles were all over the place.  Imagine my mortified and amused surprise to see something so close to Nazi symbolism, being used to represent an elementary school.

The best part about the trio of logos that they moved forward with, the only element that remained consistent between them all, was the Nazi eagle in the middle of it.  Complete with a monogram that replaces one of the S’s in SS with an E, to suddenly stand for East Side.  Like they were very insistent that of all the elements to be concrete, it had to be the Nazi eagle.  Font, shape, dynamic, all flexible, but nah dog, we GOT to keep that Nazi eagle intact.

To add insult to this embarrassingly ironic design faux pas is the fact that East Side elementary is literally next door to a synagogue.  Like very literally; not down the street literally, or catty corner literally; the school parking lot, if you go straight out of it, you will run right into a synagogue literally. 

Furthermore, this is about one of the whitest parts of East Cobb there is, and that’s saying something considering just how white East Cobb already is.  The neighborhood has “country club” in the name and is flanked by a golf course, and I’ve driven through and picked up cheap/free shit that rich white people were peddling on Facebook marketplace, so I’ve seen first-hand how elevated white it is compared to the rest of the town.

None of it helps feed the narrative of a lily-white community being so dense and ignorant as to not notice their neighborhood elementary school adopting Nazi imagery to be a part of their logo.  In the end, I don’t think the school or community is really that Nazi, so much as the person(s) who developed these logos, probably have some explaining to do.  But what’s done is done, and the internet never forgets, so it’ll be etched in stone that there was a school in Cobb County that was almost branded with Nazi eagles.  hashtagGeorgia hashtag’Murica

Dad Brog (#092): Fuck parents who send sick kids to school

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

#1 has gone to but just three days of camp, and she’s already picked up some sort of sickness.  Croup or RSV, most likely, although it would probably be in my best interests to run a COVID test to make sure, but the point remains is that all it took was three (half) days being exposed to other kids before my kid has picked up some sickness.

And because we’re active parents who aren’t content to let our children suffer in isolation, we do what we can to care for them when they’re waking up because they can’t breathe, and I woke up this morning with a slight fever after going to bed with massive chills, and it’s evident that such a bug has afflicted me as well.  I’m mostly fine, but my digestive system is telling me that I’m most definitely not 100%.

The point is, I’m livid and frustrated because the impression I get is that some parent(s) somewhere of kids that go to my kid’s school, knowingly let their sick kid go to school, where they have exposed everyone else to their plague, and in the case of my daughter, she’s brought it into my home where now I’m also affected by it too.

Basically, the overarching feeling I feel is what the subject of this post says: fuck parents who send sick kids to school.  I wish grave misfortune onto those of you who knowingly do it, like some gnarly and violent diarrhea that ruins your day, and maybe some clothes along the way.

I get it, it’s frustrating as hell raising kids sometimes, and when they’re sick and whiny and inconsolable, I’d want to jettison them out of the house for a few hours too.  But that’s a dick move and irresponsible and reckless, and I wish terrible things onto parents who knowingly do it.  Today, we kept #1 home from school, because it’s the right thing to do, and this is how responsible people conduct themselves, and look out for others.

Ironically, my own mother sent me to school with very obvious evidence that I had chicken pox.  But this was when I was in kindergarten, and I didn’t know the severity of the situation, until my teacher took one look at me and shipped my ass off to the office where I had to wait for my mom to come get me.  I still give my mom shit about that story to this day, even more so now that I’m a parent as well.

And I understand that sometimes it’s hard to tell if a kid is sick or not.  In those instances, there’s a little more leniency from my judgment, but if your kid is showing obvious signs of hoarse coughing, snotty noses or any sort of physical addling, then fucking keep your kids home for god’s sake.

I have no idea if the parents of whatever plague rats that have spread their disease onto my kid’s school knew or not that they were harboring a patient zero.  But in my cynical view of society, I assume they did, and so fuck them.  I hope they get a case of the shits while stuck in traffic, because knowingly sending sick kids to school is exactly why coronavirus will never, ever end, and I’ll go homicidal if some shithead passes it onto my kids.  Sure, I know this whole rant sets me up for some future hypocrisy if I’m ever in a position where it’s borderline, and I send my kids to school, but we’ll cross that bridge if and when it ever happens.  But for now, crazy shits for those who do.