Friday, March 28, 2008
REVIEW: GEERT WILDERS' FITNA. Ugly shit from the Koran, World Trade Center attacks, another bomb, crazy Arabs, dead and bloody people, more ugly shit from the Koran, antique Arab, little Arab girl indoctrinated against Jews, Mogadishu, London bombing, more indoctrination, more ugly shit from the Koran, Theo Van Gogh, some other crazy Arabs, still more crazy Arabs, guy getting his head cut off, more ugly shit from the Koran, still more crazy Arabs, Ahmadinejad saying something rather mild, more crazy Arabs, even more crazy Arabs, "The Netherlands under the spell of Islam," "No ban on the burqa," graph of Muslim population in the Netherlands, graph of Muslim population in Europe, more crazy Arabs, "The Netherlands in the future?" with more crazy Arabs. Page appears to be torn from Koran: "The sound you heard was a page being removed from a phonebook." (Pussy.) Long scroll of stuff ending with "Stop Islamisation, defend our freedom." Danish cartoon with bomb animated to simulate explosion. Credits. Storm/bomb noises.
Uh, so he seems to be against blowing things up and crazy Arabs.
Big whoop. I already did my part, and mine was aesthetically superior. Blow me the fuck up. Better still, just blow me.
Rod Dreher: "I would call this film propaganda, certainly, but it doesn't operate on hate. It operates on fear, which is a different thing." Stop Crunchy Conservatism, defend our sanity.
UPDATE. I've been hard on Spaghetti Happens in comments, and probably misunderstand him. It's not that I think there's no threat, only that this little movie is pretty much the polar opposite of a useful counter-measure. Fitna doesn't overstate the viciousness of our enemies, but it does overstate their power -- disastrously, I think, for its own alleged purposes. It's designed to strike terror in the hearts of Westerners, when it isn't terror that's needed, but confidence.
2:08 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER THEE ANCHORESS: All these irreverent seculars making fun of Our Lord! Attend the healing words of Ace O'Spades! No, not that Ace O'Spades -- no, not that Ace O'Spades -- no, not that Ace O'Spades -- no, not that Ace O' Spades -- no, not that Ace O' Spades -- no, not that Ace O'Spades -- this one! Jesus Fucking Christ, what have I gotten myself into!
1:21 AM by roy edroso
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REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL! One would expect an article entitled "Who Do Iraqis Want to Be U.S. President?" to include some quotes. Yet Omar Fadhil at Pajamas Media provides none, maybe because anyone he might ask is terrified that he or she would be killed for answering him. Nonetheless Fadhil has strong opinions on the matter, hilariously expressed:If I were to try to predict their feelings, I’d start by restating the fact that most Iraqis are concerned first and foremost about their living conditions — economy, security, water, electricity — and they care primarily about coming up with solutions to these problems. Iraqis have also come to realize that their problems are essentially domestic... I wonder how people without running water and electricity came to realize that their problems were essentially domestic? Maybe the same way people who have to "decide between buying a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk" do. Only with more dysentery....I believe there’s wide agreement that Iraq still needs America’s commitment to the democratic project in the country. Perhaps this belief is more prevalent among ordinary people than it is among politicians, particularly those who aren’t sincerely interested in the idea of a unified state. Those politicians, while still more or less silent, view the American presence as a restraint to their ambitions in the long run. Not only the people but also the politicians are silent. It's a wonder Fadhil's editors chose that headline -- oh wait, it's on Pajamas Media. Boy, they have a lively sense of humor.Visits like [McCain's to Baghdad], with the absence of similar visits from Democrats, have two dimensions: first, they push the political process in Iraq in order to achieve stability there, which would help the Republicans in the elections. Second, it makes Iraqi politicians and the public understand that a change in the administration does not necessarily mean abandoning Iraq and the immediate withdrawal of troops from the country. The Iraqi government has to work on these basics instead of standing by idly and wasting precious time. Here's how the Iraqi politicians have been wasting precious time:Iraq's Parliament holds an emergency meeting to discuss how to end violence in Basra and Baghdad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has imposed a three-day curfew in Baghdad, where insurgents have attacked the Green Zone. U.S. diplomats have been ordered to take cover. I don't know how Fadhil's story failed to include an anecdote about children giving flowers to U.S. servicemen. Maybe it was a lapse on the part of Pajamas Media's editors. Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that they have any.
UPDATE. In comments, R. Porrofatto explains Pajamas Media policy: "At PJM, they're all editors, i.e., they've privatized the profits and socialized the ineptitude."
12:48 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, March 27, 2008
PICADOR. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger condemns "the blog-driven media Scream" (aided and abetted by "YouTube, the galaxy-sized video archive") that has caused nervous campaigns to fire operatives whose partisan gibes attract too much unfavorable attention. He worries this has made our political discourse "artificially civil."
Whom is Henninger shitting? In just the past few weeks we've had imputations of racism both for and against Jeremiah Wright's most famous parishoner, and endless variations on "bitch" aimed at Hillary Clinton. Even the relatively invisible John McCain has been accused of senility by Brit Hume. These people are not officially connected with any campaign staffs, but neither was James Callender. If there's a problem with the current election season, civility, artificial or otherwise, ain't it.
The main change would seem to be, in Henninger's reading, that some highly-placed people have lost their jobs over gaffes Henninger thinks would have earned a mere "trip to the woodshed" in the Arcadian past. But why would the defenestration of Geraldine Ferraro and Sam Power trouble him?
Henninger has previously decried the pernicious effects of YouTube, though in that case he was mainly concerned that the viral video vendor was making Republicans George Allen, Conrad Burns, and Rick Santorum look bad. Now he affects some sympathy for Democratic campaigners who are also caught in the great maw of citizen journalism. Knowing Henninger's history, we may be forgiven for wondering if this is a tactical ploy.
Henninger works for the Journal's editorial department, which practices a slightly different kind of advocacy than that practiced by bloggers and video guerrillas. True, they sometimes go in for small-bore character assassination; indeed, they might be considered the forefathers of the method now favored by top political bloggers. But in the main they prefer big-picture essays -- ponderous examinations of (to use Henninger's own contributions as examples) the death of diversity, the impossibility of empathy, the necessity of religious myths, etc. Their approach is not so often specific as miasmic; while they sometimes endorse candidates and policies, they are much more comfortable promoting a world-view that makes their opponents look morally confused, devoid of "guardrails," and philosophically unfit to run the country.
In short, they are culture warriors -- or, more properly, culture picadors, who weaken their prey with many cuts so that the matador of any given electoral season may more safely apply the coup de grace. Theirs is an unglamorous but vital role; they may not get glory, but they make glory possible. And they face limited danger in the arena. Among our pundit class there has always been one thing bigger than politics, and that's job security.
From their perspective, then, there may be something unnerving about the example of other supporting players who have lately taken a sword between the shoulder-blades. Henninger may have noticed that in our new media age, even some journalists have been known to take a fall. The threat remains distant, but why take chances? If Paris was worth a Mass, surely a Journal column is worth the odd profession of interest in civility, however far-fetched.
9:53 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
MEANINGLESS POLL GIVES PERFESSER CHANCE TO PUBLICIZE YET ANOTHER GIBBERING-LUNATIC BLOGGER, MAKING HIMSELF LOOK REASONABLE. I don't really need to say anything else, do I? Maybe I should write them all this way.
8:29 AM by roy edroso
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SHORTER JAMES LILEKS: Flowers disturb me. You goddamn hippies probably LOVE flowers, because you're divorced from my nobler, purer reality. As I said, I love flowers, but only because they are inherently beautiful, not for reasons. Flowers just are. Like skyscrapers! Hippies don't like those either, because they don't have the guts to oppose capitalism. And another... whew, I thought they'd never leave.
8:19 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
WHOOPS! BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERING BOARD! Five years ago the Fourth Estate gave all its respectful attention to people who thought the Iraq War was a great idea, and none to those who thought it a mistake. Now, the mainstream media are willing to consider that the war wasn't the no-brainer they'd assumed it was, but still won't listen to any but the same idiots who bamboozled them in the first place.
As Tbogg has pointed out, Megan McArdle has previously defended her own Iraq wrongness on the grounds that her heart and methodology were in the right place and her opponents are mean, and darned if she isn't doing it again. Give her credit, though: in her follow-up, she has actually found a way to make her argument simultaneously more abstract and more viscerally offensive:My discussion of failure in the context of the Iraq discussion is part of my broader beliefs about innovation...
To succeed quickly, he said, what you want to do is fail. A lot. Failing eliminates wrong answers faster than any possible analysis. I was reminded of the famous Thomas Edison quote: asked how it felt to have failed to invent an electric lightbulb, Edison said "I haven't failed! I've discovered 10,000 filaments that don't work." By this point McArdle has segued to the economy, but those of us who can remember two whole paragraphs back are thinking: did she just defend the death of 4,000+ Americans and countless Iraqis on a "try try again" basis?
Why, yes she did, and I'm sure she doesn't even know what's wrong with that, except that certain mean people may insist on making a big deal of it.
I've changed my mind about the First Amendment. I want to ban Ayn Rand. Let's not lose another generation. Our dorks should be fiddling with computers, not applying their hideously deformed ethics to matters of life and death.
7:52 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, March 24, 2008
CLAWING THEIR WAYS THROUGH THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL. Oh Jesus. Some guy at Pajamas Media:“I charge the the white man.” This incendiary speech, opening the film Malcolm X and culminating with a burning American flag resolving into the letter, encapsulates the anger and fear surrounding Barack Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright...
Obama is unlikely to become president unless he can explain Malcolm X ... I predicted they'd get on Obama for Richard Pryor, but this is almost as ridiculous. So I'll up the ante, and predict that they will next demand Obama answer for Fat Albert, whose self-destructive abuse of carbohydrates for years set a negative example that has done so much to hold black people down.
I can see it now: The Ole Perfesser quotes a citizen journalist who says Obama was observed laughing at a Fat Albert episode. (It'll turn out that it was "Roots," and he was weeping, but there'll be no retraction.) Perfesser notes that Obama himself is quite thin; isn't this, he asks, some sort of a double standard? Then he'll quote some guy who calls Obama an "obesity pimp."
Everyone will go "heh" except the conservative spokesman of the moment, who will gleefully shake the bars of his cage and rasp, "Ah kin calls 'em niggers agin?"
Well, as I also said before, I was only in this thing for the riots anyway.
11:31 PM by roy edroso
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CHANGING SHIFTS. I'm trying to correct my sleep habits, and so can no longer stay up till 3 am waiting for James Lileks to walk the halls in a nightshirt and stocking-cap, holding his arms out in front of him and wailing "Buy War Bonds." So I checked out that buzz.mn thing he does in the daytime.
Here he reports that the film Leatherheads was not made in Minnesota because the state didn't offer the filmmakers a big enough tax break. Lileks seems on the verge of complaining about corporate welfare before recovering himself and targeting instead the Hollyweird non-interlopers: "Why them, and not every other company that wants to set up shop here? Is it just because they’re pretty?" (Answer: What other company that wants to set up shop there? Wastelands R Us?)
Next post, still-steaming Lileks makes fun of Renee Zellweger's face. Fortunately there are hippies onto whom he can offload his rage: Lileks commences a series of photo-posts about some 1970 protest, within which he promises readers will find "a lovely irony." And what is the irony? That hippies smell! Haw haw! And that the stupid hippies were protesting one chain restaurant but not another. Moral: complaining is useless, unless you can get a newspaper to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year for it. Then it's awesome.
Daylight doesn't do much for him or me. Back into the shadows!
UPDATE. Oh, wait; I can read Bleats when I wake up! Here we go: "I’ll gladly hand over six Carnegie libraries for three 60s coffee shops." I'm going back to bed.
11:03 PM by roy edroso
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ALSO: 78% OF AMERICANS PREFER CHAW TO DIP. Rod Dreher says McCain will win the election. How does he know? You may be amazed to hear he did not receive the information directly from Jesus. Actually maybe he did: he's kind of cagey about the source, but he does say his prediction is "based in part on various in-person and e-mail conversations I've had over the long weekend":...there are quite a few whites who are pleased to see Obama, the great liberal hope, suffering because of the same rules of public discussion of race that liberals have used to punish conservatives who deviate from them. I've been hearing a strong "sauce for the gander" sentiment from whites who believe Obama is asking to be held to a lesser standard than whites. These feelings run very deep. Quite a few, eh? And they're all within Dreher's circle of communicants. Using a similar polling method, I can safely tell you that Rose McGowan will be the next President (of my dick) and that the new breed of crystal meth is more powerful than the old but "Tina" is a stupid name for a drug even if gay people thought it up.
I can imagine how Dreher's fact-gathering was conducted:[Music]
DREHER: Have you heard about Reverend Jeremiah Wright?
ZEBULON, a rustic: Whuh?
DREHER: You know, the preacher at Obama's church.
ZEBULON: Obama whuh?
DREHER: Obama. Barack Obama, that black fella who's running for President?
ZEBULON: Whuhhuh nigger Preznit whuh? (laughs, mimes tying a noose)
DREHER: (takes notes) Now, see, when I lived in Cobble Hill, folks were too politically correct to tell me that. Did I ever tell you about the time they gave my job to a minority?
ZEBULON: Groot. He still could be right about McCain, of course, because, as Dreher often reminds his readers, Jesus hates us.
PS If you feel you haven't gotten your money's worth from Dreher, go back one post and hear him accuse the makers of Horton Hears a Who of prejudice against homeschoolers. I swear to fucking God.
UPDATE. Fixd mor speling errers.
8:59 PM by roy edroso
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AHA! At RedState, Pejman Yousefzadeh is displeased that his former Constitutional Law professor, Doug Kmiec, has endorsed Barack Obama. Yousefzadeh has a secret weapon with which he hopes to sink Kmiec's credibility with his fellow conservatives. Kmiec, it seems, had previously endorsed...
(The heart palpitates. Jesse Jackson? Huey Newton? Shirley Chisholm?)
...Harriet Miers.
A former Reagan and Bush I AAG who went to the mat for an unpopular Bush II Supreme Court nominee now supports Obama. This presents an opening! Previously Yousefzadeh counseled, "the best way for McCain to win it is with the same devil-may-care, nothing-left-to-lose attitude that has helped him succeed in ways that pundits and reporters did not think possible as little as nine or ten months ago." So McCain should now present Kmiec's advocacy of Miers as one of George W. Bush's many stupidities that would be avoided by a McCain Administration.
I have already suggested a similar approach, but despaired of the Republicans availing it. I see now that they are warmer toward such a strategy than once they were. Shall we live in hope? All men, I hope, live so.
UPDATE. Fixd speling misteaks.
1:39 AM by roy edroso
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ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM PART 56,440. SLA radical Sara Jane Olson was paroled, then taken back to prison after five days because the board discovered a "clerical error."
Whatever you think of Olson, this sort of take-back makes our criminal justice system look worse than it already did, at least from what we might laughingly call a libertarian perspective.
Surely our friends at Reason are all over this? Let's check:Click below to check out reason.tv's three-minutes-and-change take on last week's anti-war protests. More hippies than Woodstock! More questions about health care than the first two years of the Bill Clinton admin! Oh yeah, anti-war protesters are dumb. Sigh. We ought to devise a political orientation based on maximum freedom under Constitutional law. Any ideas as to what we should call it?
UPDATE. The Powerline/Ole Perfesser take on the Olson case: "This story is almost enough to give you warm feelings about bureaucratic incompetence." But: "A vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is a vote to put these people in charge of your health care." Again, do you folks have a new name? Because "libertarian" really doesn't mean shit.
12:23 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, March 23, 2008
STILL ANOTHER NEW LOW. Obamanation accelerates with a wingnut calling black people niggers. No, he's not being ironic; it's not part of a script in which he imagines someone else using the slur. He's using it like they did in the old days, and still do in some dark warrens, with no fancy-pants intellectual pretensions -- though he does offer plenty of excuses, which we may take as a sign of progress.
P.S. Please note that I have been scrupulous about the link, so this post affords an even flimsier pretext than usual for attacking Obama through third parties. Not that this will stop those so minded.
8:45 PM by roy edroso
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