Saturday, March 24, 2007
SHORTER ACE O. SPADES: Giuliani shows signs of beginning to consider to pretend to almost support my positions. Yessss!
12:53 PM by roy edroso
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RIGHT-WING NUTS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS, #452,885. "Here, morality is not being used as a lens through which to view the facts, but rather as a hammer that can smash the inconvenient ones." -- The American Thinker on (not that it matters) so-called global warming.
(Me, I use morality as a lint-brush to de-pill my bedspread. Hat tip to the deranged housefrau wearing a breastplate made of old brooms and declaiming lines from Saint Joan. The whole thing is insane, but I'm all about the piquancy of clumsy metaphors and the sweet taste of low-hanging fruit. You may have at the "Thinker," and his claim that liberal alchemists are trying to hypnotize us, in comments.)
UPDATE. I'm so lazy today I forgot to check: one post earlier, Jean D'oh writes:So, you know...if the big boys of Global Warming aren’t really taking the issue seriously,,,if they find it so unserious as to allow the issue to be used as a political wedge or a rabble-rousing sound-bite, and that’s all...well, then I don’t have to take it seriously, either. (Original rendered in bold, italic, flaming type with a car horn blaring "ah-OO-ga" in the background.) This is not about global warming so much as about styles of denial. Their reason for denying the credibility of global warming theories, however much its expression changes from post to post, is simply that people they don't like are advocating them. Maybe some GW advocates ought to appeal to them by wearing American flag pins and talking smack about Chavez, and thus save the world from catastrophe.
12:18 PM by roy edroso
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Friday, March 23, 2007
ANOTHER NAME TO CROSS OFF THE MacARTHUR GRANT SHORT-LIST. The Ole Perfesser starts out reasonably enough:WHY CD SALES ARE PLUMMETING: The music industry blames piracy, but other factors -- from the ability to just buy the songs you like, and not a CD full of filler, to competition from other things like games and the Internet, to the fact that releases tend to suck more than they used to -- seem more significant. Then -- who knows? -- maybe a nanobot got stuck in his brain:It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject. The Perfesser, of course, is constantly predicting that the wave of the future is homemade websites that gas about politics.
There's an old notion that genius is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Of course, like other signs associated with genius -- inflated self-esteem, for example -- it is often misattributed.
Still, I must agree that it would be interesting to see "more analysis" of the concept that people are buying fewer Christina Aguilera CDs because of their political content.
10:54 PM by roy edroso
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LONESOME RHODES SPEAKS! National Review maintains its audio soapbox for Presidential candidate Fred "Ah got me a deep voice an' ahm on the TV" Thompson. His latest is about the global warmin', which Ole Fred is agin:Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.
Ask Galileo. I did ask Galileo, and he asked if Jonah Goldberg is still Editor-at-Large of National Review. I said that he was, and Galileo handed me this Goldberg column:The head of the Inquisition was a Galileo supporter, who hoped to get the whole thing over with quickly by just giving him a formal reprimand. Unfortunately, rabble-rousers and opportunists turned the heat up. The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway. He was permitted to correspond with any scientist he wanted and he wrote the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences while under the Man’s thumb.
...The Church had the same problems of any major political institution and other challenges unique to being the Catholic Church. It had to contend with politics and intrigue and in-fighting and cravenness. But it also had legions of people fighting for truth and fairness in a difficult time beset with bizarre politics. Marxists, like Bertold Brecht, and liberals, like all of your (non-Marxist) college professors, seized upon the notion of a monolithic and superstitious Church because the aim was to discredit the Church specifically and religion in general. Religion with its faith in the unprovable and the perfection of the hereafter is, and always has been, the greatest threat to those who believe we can perfect the here and now through “scientific methods.” So they arrested him! They still let him have a pencil and paper, even though people who supported Galileo were like totally Marxist. At least it wasn't like Oz! You remember that show? It was rilly funny. Oh, look, a donut.
Thompson's bizarre citation of Galileo perfectly fits this tween-election period, which is all about denying reality. Gun nuts support the virulently anti-gun Giuliani and the NatRev claims a pro-science mantle for its opposition to scientific consensus. By early 2008 the careerist rat bastard Giuliani will be hoisting rifles over his head at NRA photo ops, and National Review will be loudly declaiming the scientist-homosexual alliance. You read it here first!
1:19 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007
I DON'T NEED NO DOCTOR. Having, in the previous post, treated the famous rightwing psychologists Dr. Krauthammer and Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser, I figured I would go for the trifecta with Dr. Neo-Neocon. Here she talks about the recent anti-war demonstrations, making the time-honored conservative argument that people who don't support the war are all a bunch of smelly old hippies (aka the argumentum ad patchouli):The protesters are nostalgic for the heady days of the 60s, when hundreds of thousands could be mobilized for the street theater of the time. They may forget that, when the draft ended, so did most of the protests. Or perhaps they don’t; maybe that’s what’s behind the call by some of them to resume the draft. Anybody got cellphone pix of the "Resume The Draft" posters from that demo? No? Then what the hell is she talking about? (Charlie Rangel, one assumes; I'm sure he's gratified to be referred to in the plural form, and will ask for each of his votes to count double henceforth.)
It is generous of Dr. Neo to attribute to all these weed-addled hippies sufficient long-term memory to recall the 60s. But the fact is, they wouldn't really need it, having more recently seen this:The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Millions of people protested in approximately 800 cities around the world. According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million. Even the January 27, 2007 demo might have been as much as a half-million strong, per the Wikipedia -- traditional news sources tend to estimate these things very low, as I recall from the 2004 Republican Convention protest, which looked more like 500,000 people to me than the lowball estimates of 100,000. But even 100,000 is still good for a bunch of aged, irrelevant Flower Power types, no?
Also, mightn't the fact that there had just been a large demo a few months earlier, and the sitting of an allegedly anti-war Democratic majority in Congress, have something to do with the relatively low turnout last week?
But there's no point in posing these questions to Dr. Neo, who, like her colleagues, dispenses her judgments of liberal insanity from a dreamland very much like the old Soviet Union, where dissidents could expect a negative diagnosis with or without a proper examination.
Boy, they give out doctorates like bubble-gum cards if you have the money now, don't they?
11:05 PM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
SHORTER DR. MRS. OLE PERFESSER: I diagnose liberals as crazy by their bumper stickers. Top that, Krauthammer!
7:38 PM by roy edroso
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SHORTER ACE O. SPADES: (splurt.) Bitch! [4 hours later] (splurt.)
I've gone from wondering if they ever get laid to wondering if they ever will be.
7:08 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, March 19, 2007
IN RUSSIA, MUSIC PLAYS YOU! Years ago, while the Soviet Union was still kicking, I recall there was a crime wave in Brighton Beach (not the ongoing Russian Mob stuff, I mean muggings and such like). One of the local papers reported on it, and interviewed some old Russian residents of the neighborhood, all of whom noted nostalgically that, back in the old country, they knew how to deal with people like this. Life in a police state, their wistfulness suggested, had its advantages.
I am reminded of this whenever some former inmate of an authoritarian state complains of America's lack of resemblance to the hellhole whence he came. But things have changed a little. Where once these discussions mainly involved street crime, now they involve -- what else? -- culture war.
Witness these ravings from a former resident of the Ukraine who, though he has left the land of Zhdanovism behind, still persists in judging art by the standards of propaganda. Today's double-plus-nogoodniks: John Lennon and Yoko Ono!Have you ever been asked whom you liked better, John or Paul? And have you ever answered “John” on a vague assumption that otherwise people might have less respect for your other views? Wonder why? The question was never about music - it was about your moral philosophy. To answer it correctly - assuming you wanted to fit into the crowd - you had to consider the moral philosophy of the crowd, thus voluntarily submitting your mind to thought policing. In most cases, answering “Paul” constituted a thought crime... How I remember the heart-rending scenes when a high-school buddy, perhaps too stoned to watch his mouth, expressed a fondness for "Rocky Raccoon" and was immediately dragged away by the Secret Police, never to be seen again!
The author, one Oleg Atbashian, states that "the practice of shaping musical tastes based on political correctness comes too close to the practices of the Soviet Politburo" -- but ends by declaring that "At this point the question about my favorite Beatle comes down to whose moonbattery makes me least uncomfortable." He chooses Ringo. I yield to no one in my fondness for his first solo album, but really, what normal human being picks favorite musicians on the grounds of politics? It's rather too much like pre-teen girls in 1964 debating over which of the Fab Four was dreamiest.
It might be fun to contact some Beatlemaniacs and tell them, "Hey, there's a cool Paul vs. John debate over at Pajamas Media!" Imagine their puzzled looks when they get a load of passages like this:In the “progressive” book of virtues, American values are the quintessence of evil. So if you are a “progressive” and you aren’t mad at this country, that just means you’re neither honest nor consistent. But then again, because living by this dead-end moral code is logically impossible, one has to resort to hypocrisy and seek compromises, forever balancing on the edge of madness. Jesus Christ. Can't we do a better job of acclimating these fucking immigrants to our way of life?
Link via the Ole Perfesser, who also directs our attention to culture guff from Fred Thompson, this time on the Right's masturbatory fantasy du jour, 300. "I must say that I’m impressed that Hollywood took on a politically incorrect villain," drawls the old fraud. "Must have run out of neo-Nazis." Haw haw, ole Fred is working that popular right-wing bit about The Sum of All Fears -- which came out in 2002. You'd think they'd find a new hobby horse -- maybe they can say The Hills Have Eyes 2 is P.C. because the inbred killers aren't Muslim.
As for Thompson, he's quickly turning into the reincarnation of Lonesome Rhodes.
8:39 PM by roy edroso
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