Monday, April 07, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the Mozilla/Brendan Eich thing. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it looks -- especially when you consider most of the guys weeping over this displaced millionaire CEO wouldn't piss on a low-wage at-will worker if he were on fire.

UPDATE. Kevin D. Williamson has addressed the issue but, frankly, his post reads as gibberish to me; can any of you make out what he's trying to say? The best I can figure is, he's vaguely admitting that sometimes he's pleased when market and social punishments fall upon individuals, and sometimes he isn't, but that's irrelevant because liberals are fascists and America is turning into a fascist state in which the U.S. Supreme Court "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian Council." Maybe you can do better.

219 comments:

  1. They named it Mozilla because it stomped on Eich's right to be a homophobe like a kaiju stomps Tokyo.

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  2. AGoodQuestion12:51 AM

    It is indeed terrible when someone loses a job because of their political opinions, even when those politics aren't in favor. Let us all be grateful that conservatives believe in freedom and would never call for such action.

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  3. AGoodQuestion12:53 AM

    Some kaiju movies cater to strange tastes.

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  4. Spaghetti Lee12:55 AM

    I wonder if a lot of the more strategy-oriented ones are worried that the two-headed monster of bitcoin/TED talk libertarians gnawing away at economic liberalism while the Christian conservatives do the same to socialism might not work out. Or maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it's "Gay Illuminati rule the world!!1!" all the way down.

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  5. AGoodQuestion1:11 AM

    'cuz Freeperage don't stop.

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  6. hellslittlestangel1:11 AM

    So according to right-whingers, Eich has been lynched, scalped, bayoneted and forced to fall on his sword. That's really terrible. Perhaps they can take consolation in the fact that he wasn't tied to a fence and left to die.

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  7. JennOfArk1:12 AM

    These are the same guys who applauded when rightwing CEOs issued not-at-all-veiled threats to their employees that voting for Obama might not be conducive to their continued employment.

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  8. Budbear1:21 AM

    Damn, angel. That just sobered me up.

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  9. JennOfArk1:31 AM

    Totally off topic, but I'm reading Doctorow for the first time, and I'm just curious...does he way overuse ellipses in everything?

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  10. petesh1:31 AM

    But but but ich bin ze geeenyus wot wrote coffee-script so of course I know what's best for you. How can these people not see that?

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  11. petesh1:31 AM

    No, that was Herb Caen

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  12. DocAmazing1:52 AM

    Giant Atomic Gay

    Would that be Enola?

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  13. His use of ellipses eclipses his theses?

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  14. Since Roy brought up WorldVision, that actually makes for a great across-the-board comparison. For those of you who haven't heard about it, WorldVision - a charitable organization - recently announced that they would accept employees with same-sex partners. It wasn't a grand change in policy, and WorldVision didn't support gay marriage, either materially or in principle. They just acknowledged that they had gay people working for them already, that some of those gay people were legally married in the states in which they originally lived, and that this wasn't reason enough to kick them out.


    Last we saw WorldVision, they'd reversed that policy and were apologizing to anyone willing to listen to them. This was after they'd been condemned by every major figure and group in the evangelical movement (save a few of those liberal apostates) and lost many, many donors - some of whom may not come back even now. The organization took on a nominally pro-gay position, and the parallel evangelical subculture let them know that this would not be acceptable.


    Now, I'm sure that these two scenarios are different somehow. Of course they're different - I mean, if the wingnutosphere lost its shit over Mozilla but either ignored WorldVision or played it off as no big deal, then that would be hypocrisy, and that clearly doesn't describe these guys (*wink*). But what I think makes for an interesting analysis is how the opposition in each case reacted. The people who supported WorldVision criticized its detractors on the merits of their position - what it said that they put spite ahead of compassion, or how this laser-like focus on queers really proved that evangelism had become a purely political movement. I can't recall seeing anyone suggest that this was proof of some looming wave of oppression.

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  15. I hear that once upon a time, you had to die to become a martyr. Apparently, a metaphorical stoning will suffice these days. Ever since the 90's, we've been much too busy to get the mob together.

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  16. That was different. Those were job-creators. This time, it's a bunch of Phillistine investors.

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  17. montag22:57 AM

    There's very little difference between this matter and the reasons why Paula Deen got the corporate axhandle to the chops, so I'm a bit surprised they didn't bring up her travails. Except that they wouldn't, because that would ruin their case, bigotry being a multi-tasker.

    Nevertheless, it just rankles the shit out of them to believe that a CEO got run out of town on a rail by a bunch of limp-wristers, where it's in fact just business. Someone who's likely to hurt the business doesn't get to stay on (well, unless you're Chainsaw Al Dunlap, and that's probably because his board directors were terrified he'd go off on them).

    Still, makes me sad that Koch Industries is privately held, because Charlie and Dave say and do some really dumb shit almost every day, and it would warm the cockles of my cold heart to see them landing on their asses outside the gates.

    Now, if only Lloyd Blankfein would say some really nasty shit (the truth would do fine) about Ronnie Raygun.

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  18. Wrangler5:00 AM

    Bigotry is a multi-tasker? That's not what the LGBT Mullahs told me.

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  19. Daniel Björkman5:01 AM

    Again I note that right-wingers are really married to the idea of Great Men (and possibly Women, if they are feeling particularly open-minded) who must be treated with reverence and whose misfortunes are tragedies. Ordinary drones don't matter, they should just suffer in silence, but Great Men must get whatever they want and if they don't it's because the world is EVIL! It's like some kind of real-life Protagonist-Centered Morality.

    Funny thing is, though, that unlike most people I don't actually believe that right-wingers feel this way because they think they're ever going to be Great Men themselves. I think at least a lot of them know damn well that they're not going to be. But they are proud to worship at the feet of the Great Men, and when one of them is mistreated, they take it dead personally.

    It'd be sad if it wasn't so infuriating.

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  20. William Miller5:20 AM

    Which book(s)? I've read a couple-three and I don't recall that. By the way, "Homer and Langley" was a sweet, sad little story.

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  21. Smut Clyde5:57 AM

    Gee thanks for the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark earworm, DocAmazing.

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  22. smut clyde5:59 AM

    Is there Mothra slash-fic? I dare not google.

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  23. smut clyde6:02 AM

    The only punctuation mark with its own gym training device.

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  24. Pope Zebbidie XIII6:09 AM

    MILF - Mothra I'd Like to ...

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  25. Pope Zebbidie XIII6:12 AM

    The idea that being a shit-hot programmer means that you are owed the top job has been regrettably common in online commentaries.

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  26. chuckling6:23 AM

    Conservatives should simply stop using web browsers or other technologies from companies that are so gay-o-phobic they fear losing money by appearing to condone discrimination against their customers, families, friends and coworkers. Of course these days it's going to be hard to communicate at all with that kind of boycott. My first thought was parchment and quills, if not the proverbial stone tablets, but it would be hard to find a gay hating company worthy enough to transport them. The USPS would definitely be out. Perhaps they could create their own private networks with strings and paper cups? They could get all the supplies they need from Hobby Lobby. Or maybe it's a good time for them to invest in firms from more simpatico countries like Russia or Uganda in the hope of replacing the decadent Apples and Googles and Mozillas and Microsofts and so on.

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  27. It was t proof of a looming wave of oppression only because the wave has crested and a lot of people have already drowned. We are used to the rights fake charity and their propensity to put an ideology of moral hysteria over saving lives. They aren't used to pushback against the one percent by the plebes so for them there is still a shock factor.

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  28. mortimer20007:32 AM

    Shorter entire right-wing universe: "Dixie who?"

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  29. More like Granola.

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  30. Derelict7:38 AM

    When the invisible hand of the free market gives a homophobe CEO the finger, it's an outrage that must be addressed. When a multi-billion dollar corporation steals the wages of its lowest-paid employees, well, they're always free to go start their own business, aren't they?

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  31. mortimer20007:43 AM

    I dunno. It's heartwarming enough to think that some rightwingers may be suffering through Internet Explorer right now just for the sake of freedom™.

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  32. This phenomenon is likely a convergence of the surge in "reality" tv and celebrity-worship. Just like rooting for a particularly survivor, big brother, or dancing celebrity, common Murkins choose a favor-ite Billionaire as their icon and form a virtual bond stronger than Gorilla Glue.

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  33. satch9:08 AM

    I know it's been said before, but for the true wingnut, it's a good day when when they can go all "Matthew 5:10" on our asses.

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  34. glennisw9:11 AM

    "this was no Jeremiah Wright type of sermon, I want to be clear about that. It wasn't hateful. But it wasn't equivocal either. It was energetic and it was clear."



    I love how Preston has gotten so emotionally caught up in the futuristic fable he's spinning that he actually defends an imaginary sermon that a fictional pastor hasn't yet delivered.

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  35. glennisw9:13 AM

    Parchment and quills fit right in with the tricorn hats!

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  36. does he way overuse ellipses in everything?


    Nah, sometimes he switches conic sections and gets all hyperbolic instead.

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  37. this was no Jeremiah Wright type of sermon, I want to be clear about that. It wasn't hateful.


    Truly, Preston's dedication to free expression and religious freedom is heartfelt and deeply principled.

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  38. William Miller9:50 AM

    Yeah, well, for every Mt 5:10, there's a Mt 25:40, so screw 'em.

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  39. redoubtagain9:52 AM

    The projection here--from people who never heard of Brendan Eich before last week--is IMAX-on-top-of-CinemaScope-worthy.

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  40. William Miller9:54 AM

    That kind of thing goes back at least to 2002, when people who couldn't find Iraq on a map if their life depended on it suddenly started believing that nothing was more important than liberating 25 million Iraqis from the clutches of an evil dictator.

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  41. redoubtagain10:02 AM

    Passenger pigeon. Oh wait. . .

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  42. tigrismus10:04 AM

    Inevitably came the boycott threats (which we guess are still allowed in a democratic society)

    L: Boycott Mozilla!
    R: You guys are fascists!

    *stuff happens*
    R: Boycott Mozilla!


    Also: first-shook? Not fist?

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  43. Halloween_Jack10:08 AM

    There was quite a bit of propaganda about Saddam Hussein's sons, who were genuinely brutal psychopaths and one of whom was a rapist, both of whom were effectively immune from prosecution--but not so much after the rape rate in Iraq started skyrocketing post-invasion.

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  44. Halloween_Jack10:10 AM

    Well, they sure aren't helping their case any with Madison Rising.

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  45. Halloween_Jack10:14 AM

    E.L. or Cory?

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  46. JennOfArk10:17 AM

    E.L. I just read The Waterworks, which I enjoyed aside from the overuse of the ellipses which I found very distracting. You'd think a writer would know when they see they've used them 3 or 4 times on every page that they're overdoing it.

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  47. JennOfArk10:27 AM

    Oh no, there goes CEO,
    Go go Mozilla!


    (borrowed from someone somewhere on the interwebs)

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  48. Halloween_Jack10:28 AM

    Well, of course they don't care about the proles--this is the New Courtier Class, and they're all into nobility-by-osmosis. Sucking up to butthurt billionaires and insufficiently-adored CEOs is a full-time job in and of themselves; those crumbs won't snatch themselves!

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  49. Helmut Monotreme10:30 AM

    Evangelical Christianity isn't a political movement, its a tribal movement. It's a way of saying to people, that they are special and that regardless of how broke or ruined their life is, that they are superior, because they are forgiven and chosen, and better than those sinners. It's a way of telling suckers that they aren't on the bottom of the heap, because someday all of the sinners will pay and when that happens all of the saved get to point and laugh. That's the reason it can suck money out of the wallets of believers with the efficiency of an industrial vacuum cleaner, because it is telling people what they want to hear.

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  50. mgmonklewis10:31 AM

    Emily Dickinson contacted him from the great beyond—
    and told him to knock off—
    the idiosyncratic punctuation—

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  51. I feel just a tiny bit let-down that they didn't perform a "Star-Spangled Banner" / "Christmas Shoes" mash-up.

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  52. Clifford Beall10:54 AM

    One strange thing is that the donation was for $1000, which for a CEO-type doesn't even seem to be serious money.

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  53. chirisdex10:55 AM

    So according to right-whingers, Eich has been lynched, scalped, bayoneted and compelled to drop on his blade. That's really dreadful. Perhaps they can take comfort in the point that he wasn't linked with a barrier and remaining to die.

    NyLotto

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  54. Shakezula11:04 AM

    Of course they wouldn't piss on a burning low wage worker. That worker owes them the heat of their blazing body. It can be used to warm up the evening brandy or something.

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  55. Shakezula11:09 AM

    Hasn't a Right Wing Internet long been one of their pipe dreams?

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  56. Why, it's almost as if, in a thermodynamic sense, value can be extracted from laborers.

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  57. XeckyGilchrist11:22 AM

    I remember those bastards. They were also monsters because they tortured people - at least until torture became the very cornerstone of The American Way.

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  58. XeckyGilchrist11:28 AM

    Cripes, yes. I've seen this attitude all over the place in dorky little companies - that there's a sort of continuum of talent going from IT/QA at the peon end, programming in the middle, and management at the upper end, instead of recognizing that all of these are separate and important skills. Companies run on that model tend to flame out pretty quickly.

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  59. XeckyGilchrist11:30 AM

    Now, let's not go off on a tangent.

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  60. XeckyGilchrist11:31 AM

    Do you even have to ask? Rule 34.

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  61. You got "Maid of Orleans" running through your head too?

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  62. StringOnAStick11:43 AM

    I have lived such an exemplary life that I've managed to avoid ever hearing "The Christmas Shoes" song; praise be to Bal! And praise be to JennOfArk, because thanks to that clip I am forever immune to the craptasticness of said song, because if I ever hear it, all that will come to mind is Buddha jerking off God in a hot tub.

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  63. StringOnAStick11:53 AM

    All tribalists prefer a chief, especially one that kicks the other tribe's ass (or at least sounds like they do or can be interpreted as having done so in their wingnut ragegasm). Celebrity-worship/DuckDudes/etc. = chief, and wow do these losers like being led around with spite-blinders on.

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  64. StringOnAStick11:56 AM

    That got my attention too, so not only is he a homophobe, he's a cheap one at that!

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  65. JennOfArk12:13 PM

    Mothra Molested Me, new monster porn series.

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  66. Mark_B4Zeds12:31 PM

    Yeah, I've seen that happen a lot, where the best programmers are promoted to managers. You lose a good programmer and gain a bad manager. Usually. Sometimes it works out, but not often.

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  67. Mark_B4Zeds12:37 PM

    Don't bother reading the comments. The average intelligence of YouTube commenters is somewhat lower than a garden slug. Obama-hate is pretty much all they can still feel.

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  68. RogerAiles1:08 PM

    I can't wait for the wingnuts the start their viral media campaign "We Are All Eich, Man!"

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  69. XeckyGilchrist1:15 PM

    ...I can't think of any counterexamples right off, but I'm sure it does happen.

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  70. XeckyGilchrist1:16 PM

    Cory commits much larger crimes against writing than that. Though I'll admit I've only read "Little Brother."

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  71. Did you pull that out of your azimuth?

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  72. "I'm beginning to think that the only thing the left found wrong with
    the 1950s blacklists was that they were aimed at... the left," sniffed Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.


    sadly, and ironically, no.

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  73. I dunno. The wingnut hive-mind seems to be a pretty efficient
    mass-communications network. How many days was it before every last one
    of them was screaming "Gaystapo"?

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  74. Cheap, maybe, but it's an actual thing - a concrete action - which is more than can be said of the countless liberals and lefties the right-wing wurlitzer has had run off due to trumped-up outrage.

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  75. Halloween_Jack2:14 PM

    I'd probably like Little Brother better if he hadn't gotten into this thing where he seems to believe that he's saving all teenagers from The Man.

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  76. Halloween_Jack2:36 PM

    That was beautiful, not only for Oswalt's routine but the animation. I've always wanted to jump into that pile of glurge and tell the kid, "Look, if it's one thing your mom definitely won't need, it's shoes--people are buried barefoot."

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  77. DocAmazing2:54 PM

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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  78. Glock H. Palin, Esq.3:00 PM

    So Eich is basically Rasputin?

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  79. ... the U.S. Supreme Court "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian Council."

    Currently controlled by reactionary, misogynist theocrats who hate democracy? Wow, it's true what they say: even a far-right psychopathic dumbshit finds a nut occasionally.

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  80. KatWillow3:11 PM

    More so now that they have health insurance.

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  81. Glock H. Palin, Esq.3:38 PM

    The benefit of being the victim of a high-tech lynching is that you're still around to complain about it when it's over.

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  82. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps4:08 PM

    Williamson's response is pure kettle logic: he simultaneously wants us to pity everybody who dares protest gay marriage because of its inevitability, and also hate Obama as a hypocrite because he didn't support gay marriage 6 years ago. He then follows it up with a flurry of words like "teacup totalitarian" and "twig-crowned oracles" and "sea-to-shining-sea conformity", because the Internet doesn't have a pocket-sand-over-IP protocol yet.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTAXUYLbFYk

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  83. It's not a hive-mind, old chum, it's a hive-ass from which they pull their latest talking points.

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  84. Heh... the Axis of Doctorow...

    Note excessive ellipses...

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  85. smut clyde4:37 PM

    As far as I can tell from the Gazoogle he has not been thrown under a bus, so there's that.

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  86. TGuerrant4:39 PM

    I've long believed that the opposition to gay marriage is primarily a parsimonious fear of wedding gift expenditures rising by at least 20% without adequate compensation via the buffet line.

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  87. TGuerrant4:49 PM

    http://postimg.org/image/rg7ypv7v3/

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  88. M. Krebs4:54 PM

    William Faulkner also chimed in he said dude ur doing it wrong

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  89. TGuerrant4:59 PM

    Paging Joel Hodgson...

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  90. smut clyde5:01 PM

    I vaguely recall a line in Gore Vidal's "Burr" in which one character complains about another character's over-fondness for dashes, comparing his letters to volleys of javelins.

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  91. Smurch5:37 PM

    Not only that, but Doctorow supposes his toeses are roses... but E.L. supposes... erroneously.....

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  92. jim dandy5:46 PM

    NO WAY can I decode that screed of incoherence; closest he came to putting words together in a way that (technically) makes sense was the "Iranian Guardian Council" riff , which in context ( such as it is...) made no sense. What a hack.

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  93. StringOnAStick5:49 PM

    Surf & turf or else no Waterford!

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  94. MikeJ6:08 PM

    Gamera Groped Me

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  95. Immediately followed (ala "Teabaggers") by the dim cartoon lightbulb humming to life over their collective heads.

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  96. Gromet6:17 PM

    The Williamson prose today is a demotivational thicket. Not one sentence is clear, and there seem to be thousands of them. Well, maybe it gains coherence as it goes, the way Faulkner does in Sound & Fury, but I didn't have to read this for a class so I bailed long before I got past the rightwing Benjy part. If there is any past. [insert some kinda GOP past isn't dead, isn't even past joke here]

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  97. randomworker6:25 PM

    I thought this was good. He says "My own view is that such crusades as are organized under the auspices of the National Organization for Marriage are nowhere near to “unconscionable,” but are more accurately considered empty and sentimental gestures."
    So a bunch of (million or so) moms run around funnin' with boycotts and letter-writing campaigns and stuff. That's OK because we ALL know they are just playing like cowboys and Indians. But one CEO decides to escape the heat from some fags and fag hags and resign...that there is...what does he say...unconscionable? Yeah, right.
    Yes, pretty much incoherent.

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  98. Ellen Smith6:30 PM

    In "Room Temperature", Nicholson Baker has a whole chapter on comas. It's hilarious.

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  99. M. Krebs8:34 PM

    And The Left would prefer that our laws be executed by a chief executive who is duly elected by the people, not the Supreme Court.

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  100. Jaime Oria9:09 PM

    'Girlfriend in a comma' by the Smiths is really a rather pretty-sounding song, isn't it? (I'm sure that's a typo, ES, but with Baker I can see him writing a chapter about the punctuation mark or the medical condition.

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  101. montag29:30 PM

    I think M$oft advertising is going to get a lot creepier, if only because they've hired none other than Mark Penn as their Executive VP for Advertising and Strategy.

    That may sound like an exceeding stupid thing to do, but, hey, they're the same people that put Steve Ballmer in charge. Their executive picks are a lot like their OSes--they're always in search of new ways to fuck things up.

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  102. montag29:33 PM

    Next, outdoor plumbing!

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  103. montag29:36 PM

    As I read recently, a band so bad that even Nickelback makes fun of them.

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  104. montag29:55 PM

    It was a little odd, wasn't it, how Abu Ghraib became synonymous with America's brutality instead of Saddam Hussein's in just a little over a year?

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  105. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:37 PM

    the nation's full-time gay-rights professionals...simply will not
    rest until a homogeneous and stultifying monoculture is settled upon the
    land

    "The Editors" (no, not the good ones we haven't seen in several years, and WTF ever became of them anyways?) don't even try to describe this H&S Monoculture of theirs, and I really wish they had, because I'm having no luck at all picturing it. Oh, wait...the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, maybe? Homogeneous and stultifying would be two good words for those fine Puritan folke...

    Also too, if I squint just right, that quote almost reads like a cry for diversity...no, can't be.

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  106. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:09 PM

    Every Xmas...:)

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  107. Tehanu11:12 PM

    Fred Clark at Slacktivist (on patheos) has been on this for quite a while. I know most of the regulars here know about him, but here's a link if you don't:
    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/03/27/what-do-the-bullies-for-christ-hope-to-gain/

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  108. montag211:14 PM

    The syndrome has been particularly common in Silicon Valley (and its Redmond subsidiary). What particular skill did Gates, for example, bring to Microsoft? Marketing, for the most part (and a talent for buying other people's work cheaply). So, why is he now touted as a genius with gifted insights into education?

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  109. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:14 PM

    And Opera still gets no respect...

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  110. Tehanu11:15 PM

    To the dismay of some on the left!

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  111. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:31 PM

    I read that paragraph with the "twig-crowned oracles with heads full of vegetable hallucinogens" bit four times, and once I think I almost had it making sense, but , no. Best I can get from the mess is that he generally approves of boycotts and such, just as long as it's not the Left using them, which would be a year's worth of self-honesty expended in an afternoon, which seems wasteful, if you're the type prone to rationing that stuff....

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  112. Daniel Björkman12:14 AM

    I have very, very mixed feelings about this philosophy. On the one hand, I agree that admitting your own weakness, being honest about your feelings and being capable of asking for help is essential. On the other hand, it so often seems to lead to zero tolerance and compassion for other people's weakness.


    I mean, it's good if you can ask for help. But it's kind of useless if everyone around you is being honest about their feelings of not wanting to help you and admitting their weakness to the point where they have convinced themselves that they're too weak to lift so much as a finger for other people's benefit.

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  113. Daniel Björkman12:20 AM

    He beneficently grants the proles the right to yell and scream to their little hearts' content... unless all that yelling and screaming actually accomplishes anything, in which case it's mob rule.

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  114. davdoodles1:13 AM

    Kevin D Williamson's position seems to boil down to the following two quotes:

    "[B]oth ends and means are relevant considerations, the relative importance of which is not fixed.", and

    "I do not believe that holding traditional views on marriage and supporting like-minded campaigns is the sort of thing for which people ought to be punished."

    In other words, his position is that punishing those with whom he disagrees is sufficiently justified on that basis alone, but it is not ok to punish people whose views he shares, and for that very reason.

    The immaturity and insightlessness of which makes this quote from him seem a little suspect:

    "A competing explanation is that fact that I am not seven years old."
    .

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  115. Spaghetti Lee1:57 AM

    If it is true I think it's more about technological changes than social ones: in most times and places in history, you didn't help harvest the crops solely due to goodwill and community spirit: you did it because otherwise they'd freeze and you might starve. There was a clear motivation, in other words, that even the most selfish assholes couldn't ignore. Now, if someone wants to go through life without helping a single person, they're more able to get away with it than ever. The you-are-special pop-psych stuff is more an effect than a cause, imo: people have subconscious guilt about having not earned what they have and such books soothe it away.

    Obviously, the need for working with others hasn't been eliminated, just handed over from friends and neighbors to people working in service industries or cheap out-of-sight-out-of-mind foreign labor. But from the perspective of someone who looks around at their everyday friends and acquaintances and starts wondering why he needs them, it looks pretty similar. Hence the selfishness. Plus Facebook and whatnot that provide perfect mediums for total self-absorption (yells at cloud, etc.) But on the balance, I don't know if I buy the idea that people are now more selfish and self-absorbed than ever. For starters, the social contract is more inclusive than ever, for women, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc. even if the contract itself is starting to show some strain. I'd still rather live now than almost any year in the past.

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  116. Spaghetti Lee2:11 AM

    I once heard it pointed out that, based on the sheer number of car insurance ads on TV, you'd think it's something people buy (and change brands) twice a day, rather than just once, and they stick with the same place most of the time (same with banks). Weird. I assume it's because insurance companies just have more dough to throw around.

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  117. Dave Empey2:40 AM

    Yes! I thought exactly the same thing. (And obviously I listen to TSO too.)

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  118. William Miller5:40 AM

    Sometimes you get both legislatures and vegetable hallucinogens.

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  119. montag25:58 AM

    Bob Altemeyer's schema divides wingers into two groups--RWAs (right wing authoritarians) and their leaders, those who pine to be social dominators. Those ranking high on the RWA scale have a considerable need to be followers and they're greatly attracted to social dominators, whom they then evaluate as "great men," based not on their desires to lead, but what those self-selected leaders say, so Altemeyer would probably agree with your last paragraph.

    The book is free, here, If you haven't read it, it's recommended. Especially for the part explaining how Altemeyer arranged for groups of high-scoring RWAs to be paired up with high-scoring social dominators in a college experiment resembling the play of "Risk."

    It sort of explains why a Congress full of Looney Louie Gohmerts and a White House full of Ted Cruz would inevitably lead to general disaster (something we might understand intuitively, without an underlying psychological explanation, but...).

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  120. Daniel Björkman6:27 AM

    Heh, it's true that I am not nearly old enough to know what it was like before this justification for selfishness was around. I suspect, cynically, that before that everyone was just as selfish and just had a different justification for it.

    But this is the justification that is in vogue right now, so it's the one that I keep running into, so it's the one that's had the most chance to really get on my nerves. :P

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  121. montag26:31 AM

    Oh, that brings up a lot of dark possibilities. What would they call their browser and still make it catchy enough to attract users?

    Would they cross-market and try to capitalize on the popularity of Angry Birds and call it Greasy Bird? Or try to steal some of Firefox's users by calling it Henhouse Fox? Divert Safari users by calling it Crusade? Opera users by calling it Battle Hymn?

    Or just abandon pretense and call it Teabag? Would it right-justify every page visited? Would the default home page be Free Republic? Would the default search engine be an HTML version of the Bible and the Second Amendment (just the last clause, mind you), with Conservapedia as the first sponsored link?

    And, think of the add-ons! Fox News would hire a dozen new programmers for those. Filters to find out what every right wing nutball is saying about a particular news story. A pre-populated RSS tab with every right-wing winkledick imaginable. An app to make every page look like Geocities. Endless possibilities!

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  122. Use every part of the beast--waste not; want not.

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  123. Ah…Benny Hill syndrome.

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  124. El Manquécito7:24 AM

    mistakes were made, a few bad apples, all cleaned up, nothing to see here

    ReplyDelete
  125. …yet."

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  126. (raises hand) I confess that Cole the Younger had quite a healthy interest in those miniature twins Mothra pimped around.

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  127. El Manquécito7:43 AM

    I'll cosine off on that.

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  128. More like Benny Hinn syndrome!

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  129. Get back to me when these assholes protest the NRA's scalp taking, hostile actions towards private citizens who allow their anti gun sentiments to be revealed, and vicious attacks on the businesses and schools that try to control guns on their premises.

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  130. So how long before there is an "I like Eich" campaign to draft Eich to run for next celbu-vp-candidate?

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  131. Yes, I brought that up on Lawyers Guns and Money during one of their three threads on the topic of Eich yesterday. I really agree with you--Altemeyer's book is one of the most important books I've ever read. And its unputtdownable, especially his description of the experiments and psychological tests he ran on his students to determine just how authoritarianism works in practice. I read the book after reading John Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience" because he cites it, heavily, in trying to understand the dynamics of his own exile and treatment by his former friends. And that experiment you allude to? Jaw.Dropping. It was only after reading his description of that experiment that I finally understood why the world is so fucked up. He described Cheney and a few others in the White House as the dreaded "Double High" Authoritarians which, in the end, is like describing a psychopath.

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  132. And yet if Wright had come out and said all the same things about America but on the basis of our tolerance for the gayz they would have celebrated him and tried to run him for office.


    Falwell: "God Damn America if we don't stop the homos"
    Wright: "God Damn America if we don't right the wrongs of slavery..."

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  133. XeckyGilchrist9:13 AM

    What kind of hallucinogens *aren't* vegetable? Anything other than toad slime? I guess fungi aren't, strictly speaking, vegetable.

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  134. XeckyGilchrist9:16 AM

    Indeed - and I remember the joyous trumpeting just before that - "We're tearing down the notorious Abu Ghraib prison!" ...to build a BIGGER prison!


    There was even a Boondocks strip about it.

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  135. montag29:24 AM

    Well, LSD is synthesized, although its psychedelic effects resemble those of ingesting a Claviceps fungus (rye ergot), without the other unpleasant side effects.such ergotoxicosis (a bitches' brew of harrowing shit).

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  136. Halloween_Jack9:44 AM

    "[B]oth ends and means are relevant considerations, the relative importance of which is not fixed."


    In conclusion, wingnuttery is a land of contrasts.

    ReplyDelete
  137. LittlePig10:02 AM

    The Yeti Taught Me To Yodel

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  138. montag210:13 AM

    Or, alternately, for the wingnut, logic is a moveable feast.

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  139. Jaime Oria10:15 AM

    Don't forget the Gun Klowns' vicious attacks on their own.

    http://wonkette.com/533698/pinko-hippie-fired-from-guns-ammo-magazine-for-suggesting-gun-safety-might-be-a-good-thing

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  140. LittlePig10:16 AM

    a shit-hot programmer


    We aren't talking about Eich anymore, right?

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  141. LittlePig10:20 AM

    "Come try the new Chick Fil-A broaster-browser today!"

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  142. Halloween_Jack10:23 AM

    I'm still of the opinion that Williamson is trying to position himself as a Reasonable Centrist (© and ™ David Brooks), or at least a Paulian doesn't-sound-too-crazy-for-the-first-five-minutes quasi-libertarian. Pity he doesn't realize that, if he has to make a point of explaining that he's not seven, the battle's already half-lost.

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  143. LittlePig10:47 AM

    The Kochoboros!

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  144. LittlePig10:51 AM

    It never occurred to me he might mean marijuana. I was debating whether peyote counts as a vegetable...

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  145. M. Krebs11:10 AM

    I shoulda included the soundtrack.

    http://youtu.be/MK6TXMsvgQg

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  146. BigHank5311:45 AM

    I spent some time talking with a cellphone sales guy down in the Research Triangle who had some horror stories to relate. Management at that point was obsessed with capturing other carriers' customers. A current corporate customer comes to him and says, "The competition wants me to switch so badly they'll give me a thousand Blackberries for free. Can you, our current provider, give me enough of a discount on those Blackberries that I can make the financial argument that it's not worth the hassle of switching?"

    Nope. So a million dollar a year customer walks. Smart.

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  147. BigHank5311:48 AM

    How could the slashfic be more explicit than the original movies? A guy in a giant rubber suit shows up, fucks the hell out of the city all night long, and stomps off into the ocean without so much as a thank-you cuddle or even a note.

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  148. BigHank5311:58 AM

    Most of his writing is pretty heavy-handed, even his short stories. Visit the library before you spend any cash.

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  149. Wm Kiernan11:59 AM

    The John Roberts Supreme Court resembles the Iranian Guardian Council?

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  150. LittlePig12:45 PM

    How heavy-handed, Mr. Peabody?

    http://imgcdn.geocaching.com/cache/large/5271f992-0808-44a7-9c89-1dae8a2b64f0.jpg

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  151. J Neo Marvin1:03 PM

    Mothra may I?

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  152. J Neo Marvin1:09 PM

    And then saying "we never called ourselves that! It was those foul-mouthed liberals making fun of us!"

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  153. Mooser1:59 PM

    "America is
    turning into a fascist state in which the U.S. Supreme Court
    "increasingly" resembles an "American version of the Iranian Guardian
    Council."



    Well, duh! I mean, look at the "Citizens United 2" decision by the Supreme Court. And health care, don't they have that in Iran, too?

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  154. Mooser2:00 PM

    Sorry, should have looked, before I looped.

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  155. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person2:14 PM

    A competing explanation is that fact that I am not seven years old.

    Yet...

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  156. geraldfnord3:00 PM

    Not my dad: the funerarians asked for his shoes. I can't verify they were there, as our funerals are closed-casket, but as they didn't ask that they be 'in resalable condition' I see no reason to believe they weren't on his feet.

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  157. geraldfnord3:04 PM

    Laugh, Kochoboro
    Laugh, Kochoboro
    Brave your life must be

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  158. LittlePig3:05 PM

    Not clicking. No way. Ain't happening. Staying in the boat.

    Sounds like O Henry as interpreted by Jon McNaughton from the descriptions alone.

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  159. LittlePig3:08 PM

    *sniff* *sniff* "Everything but the squeal" *sniff* Poor uncle Babe...

    Cry, My Delicious People!

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  160. geraldfnord3:17 PM

    Gamera Turtled Me
    Gaos Went Batshit Crazy on Me
    Yonggary Did Whatever Gojira Did to Me, but in Korean
    Ghidorah Gave me Triple Head
    Mosurah Employed the 'Butterfly Flick'
    Anguiras Tried to Hedgehog
    Zigra Whaletailed Me
    Gamera: I Caught Viras in a Tumble
    Monster Zero Knocked Me Up

    Barugon...What-the-fuck-is_that_thing_anyway?...Me

    Related: the 'Billionaire' sub-Grey knockoffs, e.g.: http://www.amazon.com/Billionaires-Game-Obsession-~-Kade-ebook/dp/B00H3RP8KA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1396984034&sr=8-3

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  161. geraldfnord3:17 PM

    Ah, but it's not a 'two rubber-suit' case.

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  162. LittlePig3:17 PM

    I know, right? The spirits of John D. Rockefeller,

    J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould stand in the gallery, beaming, and somehow the Court is the Guardian Council? Hell, Fat Tony lives for making the poors suffer and Thomas is a sociopath (for reals). And these delicate flowers think the Court is against THEM?



    Better watch on that one, gravy-train boys and girls, that's getting close to biting the hands that owns your soul feed you.

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  163. geraldfnord3:19 PM

    0.) 'Kiss Up Kick Down' is an old, time-tested, primate hierarchy tactic.
    1.) Dumbed-down Calvinism...just guess who the Elect are.

    ReplyDelete
  164. geraldfnord3:19 PM

    'like'?

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  165. geraldfnord3:22 PM

    Well, it's better than their believing such nonsense on the basis solely of their being white, but just a little, and a lot of the practitioners of the latter were children back when it was still respectable in their circles to be a practitioner of the former...the bridge was the 'segregation academies'.

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  166. geraldfnord3:24 PM

    Better than nothing: if we thought these people understood reality well, we'd agree with them, and allowing for supposedly 'ineffectual' gestures can bite back (see the addition of 'sex' to the Civil Rights Act, intended as mockery).

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  167. redoubtagain3:24 PM

    Someone was "sailing the wine-dark sea." Of Shiraz.

    ReplyDelete
  168. geraldfnord3:25 PM

    And with enough Maxwell demons, we'd be able to extract useful information from Management.

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  169. geraldfnord3:26 PM

    I thought that the premise was that John Galt's membrum virile was made of an amazing new sort of metal....

    ReplyDelete
  170. geraldfnord3:30 PM

    ...including limbs' dropping-off from vasoconstrictogenic necrosis.

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  171. geraldfnord3:36 PM

    He was basically saying that he objected to use of the Free Market as part of a campaign that included non-F.M. activities, and in the service of viewpoints with which he disagrees. I don't think it's quite the same, but the equivalent is our saying that making racist jokes is offensive at all times, but more than just offensive when it's accompanied by the pumping of shotguns.



    ...but he lapses into incoherence when he's trying to hid the obvious: he cares much more about the perceived wrongness of the cause than about the means. (More than one person noted that when Bush talked about lowering taxes on rich people or curing AIDS in Africa or executing criminals or drilling for oil, he was articulate, but when he started to talk about making society work for people unlike him, he made the gaffes for which he's better known.)

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  172. geraldfnord3:37 PM

    I can't improve on Bob Black's 'Libertarianism: all the freedom money can buy.'.

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  173. geraldfnord3:37 PM

    'Swamp Thing!!!!!!' the kids in the boat squealed.

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  174. LittlePig3:43 PM

    There's no ragein'
    Like Freeperagein'
    Like no ragein' I know

    If you like to hear the minions squealing
    Everything that Roger Ailes permits
    And no can forget that certain feeling
    When Erick Erickson gets in a snit

    There's no Freepin'
    Not about keepin'
    All about how whitey is down

    Even though everything they write's a turd
    They still get paid fifty cents a word
    Every day's a journey on the creek du merde

    Let's rage, Freepers rage!
    Let's rage, 'til they open our caaaaaaaaaage

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  175. geraldfnord3:48 PM

    'When you're rich they think you really know.'

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  176. geraldfnord3:50 PM

    My vegetable hallucinogens should grow
    Vaster than empires, and more slow

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  177. LittlePig3:58 PM

    Asymptotal agreement.

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  178. LittlePig3:59 PM

    He's got big enough nadirs to pull it off.

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  179. smut clyde4:10 PM

    I see that Saletan has weighed in now against the Norbizness Left. He constructs a strawman of such size, I worry that he's going to change his name to Lord Summerisle and burn Edward Woodward inside it as a pagan sacrifice.

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  180. JennOfArk4:23 PM

    I thought it was one wetsuit, two dildos.

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  181. JennOfArk4:26 PM

    OT, but I can do a dead-on fabulous impression of Merman singing "Everything's Coming Up Roses."

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  182. smut clyde4:31 PM

    Not that many animal hallucinogens, unless you like licking toads.

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  183. JennOfArk4:33 PM

    Yes. If they spent a tenth of what they spend in "please come back, valued customer" appeals on showing current customers that they do, in fact, value them - via better service, or perhaps lower "loyalty" rates and so forth, they'd save everyone a lot of cost and bother. The way it is now, they dangle sweet rates in front of new subscribers, and screw the customers who've been with them forever for as much as they can.

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  184. MikeJ4:50 PM

    No need to visit the library, he has all of his book available for download in various formats on his site.

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  185. geraldfnord5:41 PM

    Hey, it's got closures and first-class function objects ...not that I can find anything much good to say about it otherwise, beyond it's beling failure easy to port from Java using elisp routines in emacs.....

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  186. geraldfnord5:41 PM

    Beeeeeeeeeees!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  187. geraldfnord5:44 PM

    If it's a monoculture, some kind of rust probably kill it, mutated from a maïze disease that has just wiped-out a few states' worth of agriculture....

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  188. This does strike a chord with me.

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  189. 2nd Stage, if you please.

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  190. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person6:10 PM

    GMTA...

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  191. geraldfnord6:17 PM

    Ready for the Détournement of Champions.

    ReplyDelete
  192. geraldfnord6:18 PM

    Yup...and a half!

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  193. geraldfnord6:19 PM

    Is his girlfriend within the comma, or is she the comma itself...in either case, how do they do it?


    (Punctuatedly, I guess.)

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  194. geraldfnord6:24 PM

    Try his collaborations with Stross, some of it in collections ("Unwirer") and some now out as "The Rapture of the Nerds", a fix-up. Of his stuff written alone, I positively liked "After the Siege", informed by his family history and addressing what might be a very nasty problem very soon (basically, a world in which abundance or at list sufficiency were quickly available to all but with this made impossible by the habits of scarcity willing to fight for their right to poop the party), and "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town", a fantasy not to my taste but different and well-executed.

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  195. geraldfnord6:26 PM

    Wasn't that the plane that squashed the Nigerian resistance out-of-sight under thousands of tonnes of hardback copies of "Naked Lunch"?


    (Yes, it was called the "Enola McLuhan", but that was just a spiteful attempt to keep me from making the joke above.)

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