I say we don't wait for finding out the identity of the bomber or bombers. We should bomb Tennessee right away. It's the only thing Southerners understand.
The Weather Underground managed not to kill a single person in their entire bombing spree (not counting the accidental deaths of three of their own members), so I'm a tad skeptical.
Before this gets buried in the comments: Jim Treacher trying to use Patton Oswalt's upcoming appearance on Parks and Recreation to score a political point ( http://www.avclub.com/articles/patton-oswalts-improvised-parks-and-recreation-fil,96610/#comment-866281401 ). Because of the way Disqus works, there are 200 comments per page, so you may have to click on the numbers at the bottom of the page and search for "JimTreacher".
I can't even joke about this asshole anymore. He celebrated the death of the gun bill by bitchily accusing Gabrielle Giffords of "emotionally bullying" the gun owners. May he grow, like a radish, with his head underground.
For those who dont want to go Treacher hunting, here's the story:
The upcoming episode of Parks and Rec features a scene where Patton Oswalt filibusters something Leslie's doing. Rather than write something for him, the told him to improvise on any subject he wanted to talk about, which leads to a 7 minute free-association where he explains his idea for Star Wars Episode VII as a crossover with the Marvel Universe. (It's awesome, go watch it.) At the end he says "I literally have no fluid in my mouth, I gotta do a Marco Rubio." Jim Treacher is pretending he thinks this is racist.
I know: it's just embarrassing, isn't it? If Sean Medlock is putting in the time to convince us that making fun of conservatives is mean-spirited because they're so dumb and rhetorically defenseless, well, it's working.
The FBI released a 'please STFU' statement to conspiracy-mongers and self-appointed Sherlocks today: https://twitter.com/BrettLoGiurato/status/324596768711004161/photo/1
They didn't say, "And that goes double for smug asshole lawyers from Tennessee who claim to be the most important right-wing bloggers on the internet, as if that were something to be proud of", but, y'know, they were thinking it.
Oh, snap! What goes up the chimney? Smoke. You owe me a Coke. Or at least that's the way my mother and her best friend did it when they posted the same thing simultaneously on their blogs in the 1930's.
Whence the disconnect on the right between ideology and lived experience? I was going to say something semi-snarky about it, but I really do wonder. They have these very vocal ideas about government, and about unions, affirmative action, etc. Name it, really. Sometimes they can point to something that happened to them or to someone they know that "proves" the conservative dogma to be correct. Often, not. But if you dissent from what they're saying, it doesn't matter what line of reasoning or what turn of events brought you there. Everything you say from then on is invalid.
Instaputz's tweetsnipe at Gabby Giffords is a perfect example. She was shot and severely injured, and several individuals nearby were killed. After that she went through a massive struggle literally to get back on her feet. She also reexamined her previous pro-NRA positions and started advocating what I'd say are eminently reasonable reforms. But Reynolds won't engage with any of that. She's on the other side of the issue from Reynolds, raising questions he's not prepared to answer, so ipso facto she's a bully. It's beyond blinkered.
I suppose one could claim that it's not fair to present an emotional experience in an argument, because it's difficult to argue against. You know, like a Current Affairs show panning over crying children in between every sentence of "these children will be taxed for every dollar of their inheritance (over one million)". Because we're not Vulcans, and emotional displays do affect our reasoning.
But on the other hand, we're not Vulcans, and no one's ever going to present an argument free of emotion. Besides,Gabrielle Giffords has a very applicable point, in that "I believe too-easy access to legally purchased handguns makes violent crime more common" can be bolstered by "and here's a woman who suffered violent crime from a man who legally purchased his handgun". It has emotional side-effects. This is because violent crime is horrific. That's a part of my argument for gun control, personally. Violent crime is horrific. Things that don't affect people strongly one way or another, I have less interest in seeing regulated.
Of course, it's a different story when you bring up people who can't help but weep as they discuss a possible 37% top tax rate and how they just want their country back.
(Two medium-length comments, neither of which are on topic to the post. You go, Warthog.)
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Is there anything worse than a wetneck? What I want to know, though, is why can't African-Americans use the word "refudiators" to describe white people? I mean, if Caucasians can call each other that, why can't other people?! It's just not fair.
Hey, don't laugh: if it weren't for Li'l Sean and his "OBAMA EATS DOGS!!!11" coprolalia, we probably wouldn't have to deal with President Romney right now.
I thought it was an onion, but reasonable people may disagree. I want to say that this whole event is a bridge too far for the Reynolds and the Harry Reids of the world, but I can't. O's speech today was on point, however.
< a href="http://realitystudio.org/texts/naked-lunch/talking-asshole/"did i ever tell you about the blogger who taught his asshole to talk?
his whole blog would move up and down you dig farting out the words. it was unlike anything i ever saw.
this ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. it hit you right down there like you gotta go. you know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? well this blogging hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant post, a post you could smell.
At eighteen or so I tried to deliver that routine driving some dopes back from a heavy metal concert. My memory was good -- I got at least as far as "undifferentiated tissue" -- but the performance was poorly received. An awkward silence ensued, but by that time I was fairly inured to embarrassment (though much less so than now). What was I thinking? You gotta consider your audience.
Glenn must exemplify that "Southern culture of honour" that I hear about.
The "emotional" is to remind readers that Gifford has ladyparts and is therefore incapable of rationality. When losing arguments with guys, you accuse them of being intellectual bullies.
I don't think that she's making an emotional argument. I think she's making a factual argument -- guns kill -- and presenting herself as an example of the costs of gun violence. Sure, she's emotionally sympathetic, but dismissing her argument as emotional is dismissive of her. Though of course Reynolds is doing exactly what so many men do when they can't answer a woman's arguments -- say she's being emotional.
Remember, this is a guy who claimed he was against torture but that the terrible incivility of torture opponents was making him reconsider (as covered here on Alicublog). This level of self-absorbed spite mixed with the assertion of intellectual superiority is a hallmark of libertarian assholes (but I repeat myself).
Umm, actually, they came from Tennessee's even poorer cousin, Mississippi.
I'm still wondering how anyone subjected to the educational system of Mississippi managed to make ricin, let alone do it without poisoning themselves first. M'self, I think the tests picked up traces of old DOT 1 brake fluid. That seems more Mississippi's speed.
Worse--a bully is someone who makes Glenn feel sad, feel pity, feel ashamed, feel that good people expect him to change a publicly held belief. When you get right down to it that's the link between all the cases where they accuse us of "using" children or victims as "props" or Michael j fix of " using" his illnesss or Obama of " using his race" to deflect racist criticism. It's the creepiest thing I know about the right wing moral imagination. They are, truly, paralyzed with horror that someone might force them to reject an ugly mean spirited ideology because of its horrible real world consequences. That's what they mean by being bullied by Gabrielle Giffords. They mean "it hurts me to even be asked to feel empathy."
Shorter Instacracker: "Why should Gabby Giffords be in this debate? She doesn't even have a dick, let alone one needing external emotional augmentation!"
I was actually thinking of the entire section in "Born to Kvetch"http://www.amazon.com/Born-Kvetch-Yiddish-Language-Culture/dp/B0028N72YOabout negative or backwards compliments and invocations such as this one:
"May you have many children and wonderful friends and an oldest son who is talented, brilliant, handsome and learned; may he have many choices and choose a beautiful bride, and may you be invited to his wedding and ushered to the front of the room and given the place of honor to see him married and then look up and realize its a Catholic Church."
Only being a wingnut would allow the handsomely compensated, well-armed white man without a traumatic brain injury to observe that he's the real victim.
Why, yes. Since it is an alien concept that they think "liberals" made up, the typical Conservatoid's idea of not being racist is to pretend that everyone is white--just to be safe.
Mentioning someone who has a non-white background immediately brings on racist thoughts to a conservatoid, ergo noticing non-white people is racist.
Too late, West Texas--the home of the congressman who refused to vote for Sandy Relief, just bombed itself thanks to lax regulations that allowed them to put a school, houses and a senior citizens home next to a huge fertilizer plant and have a volunteer fire fighter corps which apparently thought they'd be able to put out the fire. My heart goes out to the people trapped in Texas but up until the recent disaster they have been perfectly satisfied with their low government/high corporate anti EPA system of local governance so who am I to offer them apparently unwanted sympathy?
Exactly. Conservatoid "thought" is so delicately cobbled together from bits and scraps of reflexive primal fears that any small part called into question jeopardizes their entire worldview--and possessing no internal moral skeleton, they rely on their authoritarian, tribal structure to make all decisions, from which tv program they can enjoy to what flavor of soda to drink.
If that were to fail them, they fear it would destroy them body and soul.
That was very wrong of me. I'll leave it standing as a reminder to myself to be more charitable or rather, to express even here, in snarkland, the kind of person I'd like to be. I have tremendous sympathy for the families and the community that have been destroyed by this explosion in Texas and especially for people who really were given no choice because their class position and their economic reality gave them no choice. Like the poor kid in the car whose father was so stupid as to stop and try to film the fire who begins screaming in terror when the big explosion happens "Daddy, I can't hear, get out of here!" Most people are sitting in the backseat of life just minding their own business while the "grown ups" and the Koch brothers and the corporations are in the front seat masturbating to the destruction they are causing and imagining that they are too far away from the scene to be caught in the bomb blast.
This. That's what they mean but they don't know it. It's tempting, if glib, to suppose that at the root of it there's a childhood of hurt, injury, and fear--not "abuse," but garden variety bad treatment many or most kids receive, especially at the hands of equally unself-aware parents. Talk about *resentment.*
"Why should I care about others' suffering," goes the unconscious script. "I suffered first! And no one did (or is doing) anything about it."
As I say: glib. But it feels like it fits. It connects the dots of their self-congratulatory "individualism," their indifference to the experience of others, their moral obtuseness, and their eternal, eternal victimhood.
I actually was one of the upvotes on the original because, well, I've never made a secret of the fact that I'm a horrible, horrible person, and because you pointed out some very salient facts pertaining to how amplified the awfulness of the event is thanks to willful human blindness and stupidity. Let's just say that this situation is ripe for a Louis C.K. "Of course....but maybe" joke.
Not to blogwhore or anything but I decided to resurrect my own blog today and write a long thing about Glenn Reynolds tweet and Proust's character, Francoise. Its here: http://aimaiameye.blogspot.com/
Well the whole thing is a massive conservative wet dream of a clusterfuck. I just watched the footage of the police officer begging people to stop leaping in their cars and rushing to help. They've got more than enough first responders and everyone else is just clogging up the roads and driving people crazy, putting people at risk and generally fucking up. Those people legitimately want to help and perhaps most, or many, of them actually know what to do--are EMTs or first responders or trained or something--but disorganized private charity on the fly is the opposite of what people need in a crisis of this magnitude. Its nice if there's nothing else available but it can be detrimental to actually succoring the afflicted--this was exactly the same problem with Mitt Romney's fake "ship some supplies to New Jersey" form of non government action.
Here in Boston people opened their houses to the marathoners and continued a tradition of rushing out and cheering/supporting them in a decentralized and effective way. But ultimately the work of organizing and managing a huge event has to be professional.
Southern Honour culture is the exact opposite of what northerners or non southerners think of honour--honour isn't shown through probity, deference, or protecting or succoring the weak. Honour is something that is possessed by older white males (senior to people they control) or by touchy and angry younger white males. Honour gets taken away from you when you allow younger, non white, or female persons to diminish your autonomy or limit your "freedom." Honour is restored when you strike or kill a person who limits your freedom. Its literally impossible to discuss a woman's honour in other than sexual terms (she has it when she is a virgin, modest, or a married woman who is not touched by scandal or public appearances). By definition in a true southern cultural universe Gabby Giffords relinquished her claims to having honor when she "thrust" herself on the public stage in a masculine and "bullying" fashion and when she illegitimately used women's wiles (emotion) to attempt to win a rational debate among men. [By the way this is not at all unlike the battle between the female abolitionists and slave owners limned in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Women were thought of as the purer and more honorable sex, untainted by the worldly greed of male politicians. Their arguments against slavery were considered legitimately emotional and also principled in a way that monetary rationality could never be.]
Aaaaaand Mark Begich (D. AK) gets in on the "its icky and emotional" bandwagon and tells us that scary things that invole women, and children, and death can't be legislated right because....why again? Just because something creates strong emotions in the populace doesn't mean legislators can't do their fucking jobs calmly and reasonably? The function of legislation and of government is to identify a problem and seek to find a good solution. The impulse behind identifying the problem doesn't matter. There is something absolutely beyond nuts about these assholes and their fear of women, children, birth, death and everything else that creates "emotions"--something which seems so foreign to their self image that you can almost hear the air quotes around it.
There you go being kind again. I'd say it's not that it made him feel bad, but that it made him look bad. It hurts him to be asked to feel empathy because he doesn't feel it, and his deficiency is so glaringly visible that the loathing it inspires in others interferes with his self-complacency. It also suggests that his abandonment of things like shame and pity, along with the rest of his self-awareness, might not yield the returns he expects. It's very hard to sell to people who despise you. People like him want us to believe that they are just as nice, just as good, as everybody else. And when they reveal that they would walk over corpses to cheat you out of the equivalent, in human moral capital, of 25 cents, we are not to shove our awareness of this down their throats (i.e., let them know that we notice) because that would be bullying and unseemly. As Marvin Mudrick once said to me describing a colleague, "He's the slime that grows on slime."
"Try reading some John Donne and find out why the deaths of other people matter more than place holding, grudge monitoring, or pointlessly masturbating like a mentally deficient monkey accidentally brought to a funeral." -aimai
I have never understood the objection to making an emotional argument. I seem to be able to distinguish bullshit emotional appeals from authentic ones. I am not simply the passive object of someone else's manipulations in that way, even if I do cry at that one Budweiser ad where the horse runs back to see his old owner. I'm aware that I'm being played, but tears or no tears I'm still not buying that awful beer. Love, the desire for justice, compassion, are all emotions and without them we cannot have a morality worth a damn. How we negotiate emotions is not just some side thing over in the weeds while we go on with our perfectly rational deliberations. I maybe do two purely rational things a week if I'm lucky and offhand I can't even think what they are. They are probably related to punctuation. We live through our emotions, by judging their justness, their proportionality to whatever evokes them, their honesty, their relevance, their beauty, the amount of understanding they reveal about what is observed. It's a skill one learns. It's everything. It's why the arts mean anything at all. From the way the wingnuts are feeling gut-punched by Giffords' "emotional arguments" I infer that the emotional arguments hit a sore spot. Hit it again, I say. Hit it and make them holler some more.
That example of the burrowing wasp was just perfect. Coincidentally, I watched The Queen of Versailles last night; Jackie Siegal was nicer, generally, than Francoise, but her and her husband's fortune was built on selling people time-shares that they really couldn't afford.
Yeah, Halloween, lurking for that big chance was I, must've hit the refresh button a thousand times here in the last week since she said that. Who knew her hypocrisy would be revealed just a week after she wagged her finger at me for the same thing?
It was wrong when you did it and it was wrong when I did it. Doesn't mean I'm hypocritical, just means I'm fallible. But am I to understand that you now acknowledge that your repeated postings a week or so ago were wrong and disgusting? Because that would be pretty much the best news we could recieve in a week of terrible news.
Dennis doesn't take responsibility for being a mean-spirited conservative asshole, it's the fault of libruls because we're all part of a hive-mind because we don't like dissent, so it's not his fault, aimai.
This is beautifully said. Thanks for a bit of grace in the midst of the snark. Don't get me wrong, I come here for the snark, I love the snark, but this was even better.
I say we don't wait for finding out the identity of the bomber or bombers. We should bomb Tennessee right away. It's the only thing Southerners understand.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to bullshit, never say Hehindeedy doesn't deliver.
ReplyDeletePoor Professor. What a terrible case of lynchus interruptus.
ReplyDeleteThe Weather Underground managed not to kill a single person in their entire bombing spree (not counting the accidental deaths of three of their own members), so I'm a tad skeptical.
ReplyDeleteNever mind whether there was an arrest or not, just tell us what colour the suspect is so we can finally jump to conclusions all by ourselves.
ReplyDeleteHoly shit! I can see what he's going for.
ReplyDelete"Obama pal Ayers: Guilty? Or guilty as hell?!"
I clicked on the link, God help me, and I have to ask: What is the purpose of his "blog"? Is this television for people who don't own televisions?
ReplyDeleteBefore this gets buried in the comments: Jim Treacher trying to use Patton Oswalt's upcoming appearance on Parks and Recreation to score a political point ( http://www.avclub.com/articles/patton-oswalts-improvised-parks-and-recreation-fil,96610/#comment-866281401 ). Because of the way Disqus works, there are 200 comments per page, so you may have to click on the numbers at the bottom of the page and search for "JimTreacher".
ReplyDeleteIf only we could download his brain and rocket into outer space...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sadlyno.com/archives/5761.html
~
I can't even joke about this asshole anymore. He celebrated the death of the gun bill by bitchily accusing Gabrielle Giffords of "emotionally bullying" the gun owners. May he grow, like a radish, with his head underground.
ReplyDeleteAH HAH! Here is the link I was looking for (although the above is pretty good):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sadlyno.com/archives/5301.html
~
Glenn had other priorities today, like telling someone who got shot in the head to be less of a bully. Sorry, emotional bully.
ReplyDeleteYou'll pry my emotions from my cold dead hands, Instacracker.
Aw, they're so cute when they're covering their asses.
ReplyDeleteI was just coming back here to bitch about that. Holy shit, he's really one of the worst people on earth. What a shitstain.
ReplyDeleteFor those who dont want to go Treacher hunting, here's the story:
ReplyDeleteThe upcoming episode of Parks and Rec features a scene where Patton Oswalt filibusters something Leslie's doing. Rather than write something for him, the told him to improvise on any subject he wanted to talk about, which leads to a 7 minute free-association where he explains his idea for Star Wars Episode VII as a crossover with the Marvel Universe. (It's awesome, go watch it.) At the end he says "I literally have no fluid in my mouth, I gotta do a Marco Rubio." Jim Treacher is pretending he thinks this is racist.
I'm so old I can remember when he was a "reasonable centrist."
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry I hurt your feelings.
ReplyDeleteMobilize!
ReplyDeleteHow are you this bad at being passive-aggressive? That is like the easiest thing in the world to be.
ReplyDeleteHe's an incompetent, emotional pirate.
ReplyDelete~
Is it? That's really interesting.
ReplyDeleteMore like gather around and laugh at the dullard, but sure, I guess you could call that mobilization.
ReplyDeleteYou're doing just fine, dear.
ReplyDeleteJim, try to brush the Cheetos stains off your hands before replying to people here.
ReplyDeleteI know: it's just embarrassing, isn't it? If Sean Medlock is putting in the time to convince us that making fun of conservatives is mean-spirited because they're so dumb and rhetorically defenseless, well, it's working.
ReplyDeleteWhat he lacks in chops and charm, he makes up for in willful ignorance. He's like a mime that talks.
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you for the spectacles, sweetie.
ReplyDeleteThe FBI released a 'please STFU' statement to conspiracy-mongers and self-appointed Sherlocks today: https://twitter.com/BrettLoGiurato/status/324596768711004161/photo/1
ReplyDeleteThey didn't say, "And that goes double for smug asshole lawyers from Tennessee who claim to be the most important right-wing bloggers on the internet, as if that were something to be proud of", but, y'know, they were thinking it.
You're welcome.
ReplyDeleteHe's like a mime that talks and sits still.
ReplyDeleteOh, snap! What goes up the chimney? Smoke. You owe me a Coke. Or at least that's the way my mother and her best friend did it when they posted the same thing simultaneously on their blogs in the 1930's.
ReplyDeleteI'd just like to point out the ricin letters came from Tennessee. Coincidence? Or is insty just trying to divert suspicion by spewing extra crazy?
ReplyDeleteWhence the disconnect on the right between ideology and lived experience? I was going to say something semi-snarky about it, but I really do wonder. They have these very vocal ideas about government, and about unions, affirmative action, etc. Name it, really. Sometimes they can point to something that happened to them or to someone they know that "proves" the conservative dogma to be correct. Often, not. But if you dissent from what they're saying, it doesn't matter what line of reasoning or what turn of events brought you there. Everything you say from then on is invalid.
ReplyDeleteInstaputz's tweetsnipe at Gabby Giffords is a perfect example. She was shot and severely injured, and several individuals nearby were killed. After that she went through a massive struggle literally to get back on her feet. She also reexamined her previous pro-NRA positions and started advocating what I'd say are eminently reasonable reforms. But Reynolds won't engage with any of that. She's on the other side of the issue from Reynolds, raising questions he's not prepared to answer, so ipso facto she's a bully. It's beyond blinkered.
Eh, I'll pass. It might turn out that stupid literally does burn sometimes.
ReplyDelete"AMEN"! (spits)
ReplyDeleteAll victims of violence are bullies, didn't you know? They all made the abuser do whatever he did.
ReplyDeleteI suppose one could claim that it's not fair to present an emotional experience in an argument, because it's difficult to argue against. You know, like a Current Affairs show panning over crying children in between every sentence of "these children will be taxed for every dollar of their inheritance (over one million)". Because we're not Vulcans, and emotional displays do affect our reasoning.
ReplyDeleteBut on the other hand, we're not Vulcans, and no one's ever going to present an argument free of emotion. Besides,Gabrielle Giffords has a very applicable point, in that "I believe too-easy access to legally purchased handguns makes violent crime more common" can be bolstered by "and here's a woman who suffered violent crime from a man who legally purchased his handgun". It has emotional side-effects. This is because violent crime is horrific. That's a part of my argument for gun control, personally. Violent crime is horrific. Things that don't affect people strongly one way or another, I have less interest in seeing regulated.
Of course, it's a different story when you bring up people who can't help but weep as they discuss a possible 37% top tax rate and how they just want their country back.
(Two medium-length comments, neither of which are on topic to the post. You go, Warthog.)
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Except for rape victims, who merely ask for it.
ReplyDeleteIs there anything worse than a wetneck? What I want to know, though, is why can't African-Americans use the word "refudiators" to describe white people? I mean, if Caucasians can call each other that, why can't other people?! It's just not fair.
ReplyDeleteHey, don't laugh: if it weren't for Li'l Sean and his "OBAMA EATS DOGS!!!11" coprolalia, we probably wouldn't have to deal with President Romney right now.
ReplyDeleteNow mentioning the name of someone of a ethnic background is "racism" I guess.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was an onion, but reasonable people may disagree. I want to say that this whole event is a bridge too far for the Reynolds and the Harry Reids of the world, but I can't. O's speech today was on point, however.
ReplyDeleteNugget-sized feigned outrage for those too lazy to find their own.
ReplyDelete< a href="http://realitystudio.org/texts/naked-lunch/talking-asshole/"did i ever tell you about the blogger who taught his asshole to talk?
ReplyDeletehis whole blog would move up and down you dig farting out the words. it was unlike anything i ever saw.
this ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. it hit you right down there like you gotta go. you know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? well this blogging hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant post, a post you could smell.
it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's not all they do. They also possess vaginas, so what do they expect?
ReplyDeleteAt least your dad, or uncle, or grandpa, or whoever it was, made decent fish n chips. All you manage to make is a fool out of yourself.
ReplyDeleteJim! Trolling an off-topic subthread on alicublog. It's genius.
ReplyDeleteAt eighteen or so I tried to deliver that routine driving some dopes back from a heavy metal concert. My memory was good -- I got at least as far as "undifferentiated tissue" -- but the performance was poorly received. An awkward silence ensued, but by that time I was fairly inured to embarrassment (though much less so than now). What was I thinking? You gotta consider your audience.
ReplyDeleteTrolling? I wasn't the one who went off topic. But I'm glad you're keeping your sense of humor, Roy! ;)
ReplyDeleteHey, that's pretty good. Did you come up with that?
ReplyDeleteGlenn must exemplify that "Southern culture of honour" that I hear about.
ReplyDeleteThe "emotional" is to remind readers that Gifford has ladyparts and is therefore incapable of rationality. When losing arguments with guys, you accuse them of being intellectual bullies.
Yeah, in all fairness, I was the one who went off-topic; Jim just responded. If you tell me not to do it again on your blog, I won't.
ReplyDeleteI bet Treacher's an ultra-leftist househusband.
ReplyDeleteIt's a paradox: reading for the illiterate!
ReplyDeleteI don't think that she's making an emotional argument. I think she's making a factual argument -- guns kill -- and presenting herself as an example of the costs of gun violence. Sure, she's emotionally sympathetic, but dismissing her argument as emotional is dismissive of her. Though of course Reynolds is doing exactly what so many men do when they can't answer a woman's arguments -- say she's being emotional.
ReplyDeleteRemember, this is a guy who claimed he was against torture but that the terrible incivility of torture opponents was making him reconsider (as covered here on Alicublog). This level of self-absorbed spite mixed with the assertion of intellectual superiority is a hallmark of libertarian assholes (but I repeat myself).
ReplyDeleteEither way, it's an insult to vegetables.
ReplyDeleteHis assholery and inhumanity isn't just ingrained; it's ingrown.
ReplyDeleteUmm, actually, they came from Tennessee's even poorer cousin, Mississippi.
ReplyDeleteI'm still wondering how anyone subjected to the educational system of Mississippi managed to make ricin, let alone do it without poisoning themselves first. M'self, I think the tests picked up traces of old DOT 1 brake fluid. That seems more Mississippi's speed.
Worse--a bully is someone who makes Glenn feel sad, feel pity, feel ashamed, feel that good people expect him to change a publicly held belief. When you get right down to it that's the link between all the cases where they accuse us of "using" children or victims as "props" or Michael j fix of " using" his illnesss or Obama of " using his race" to deflect racist criticism. It's the creepiest thing I know about the right wing moral imagination. They are, truly, paralyzed with horror that someone might force them to reject an ugly mean spirited ideology because of its horrible real world consequences. That's what they mean by being bullied by Gabrielle Giffords. They mean "it hurts me to even be asked to feel empathy."
ReplyDeleteShorter Instacracker: "Why should Gabby Giffords be in this debate? She doesn't even have a dick, let alone one needing external emotional augmentation!"
ReplyDeleteI was actually thinking of the entire section in "Born to Kvetch"http://www.amazon.com/Born-Kvetch-Yiddish-Language-Culture/dp/B0028N72YOabout negative or backwards compliments and invocations such as this one:
ReplyDelete"May you have many children and wonderful friends and an oldest son who is talented, brilliant, handsome and learned; may he have many choices and choose a beautiful bride, and may you be invited to his wedding and ushered to the front of the room and given the place of honor to see him married and then look up and realize its a Catholic Church."
Only being a wingnut would allow the handsomely compensated, well-armed white man without a traumatic brain injury to observe that he's the real victim.
ReplyDeleteWhy, yes. Since it is an alien concept that they think "liberals" made up, the typical Conservatoid's idea of not being racist is to pretend that everyone is white--just to be safe.
ReplyDeleteMentioning someone who has a non-white background immediately brings on racist thoughts to a conservatoid, ergo noticing non-white people is racist.
duh
Too late, West Texas--the home of the congressman who refused to vote for Sandy Relief, just bombed itself thanks to lax regulations that allowed them to put a school, houses and a senior citizens home next to a huge fertilizer plant and have a volunteer fire fighter corps which apparently thought they'd be able to put out the fire. My heart goes out to the people trapped in Texas but up until the recent disaster they have been perfectly satisfied with their low government/high corporate anti EPA system of local governance so who am I to offer them apparently unwanted sympathy?
ReplyDeleteExactly. Conservatoid "thought" is so delicately cobbled together from bits and scraps of reflexive primal fears that any small part called into question jeopardizes their entire worldview--and possessing no internal moral skeleton, they rely on their authoritarian, tribal structure to make all decisions, from which tv program they can enjoy to what flavor of soda to drink.
ReplyDeleteIf that were to fail them, they fear it would destroy them body and soul.
That was very wrong of me. I'll leave it standing as a reminder to myself to be more charitable or rather, to express even here, in snarkland, the kind of person I'd like to be. I have tremendous sympathy for the families and the community that have been destroyed by this explosion in Texas and especially for people who really were given no choice because their class position and their economic reality gave them no choice. Like the poor kid in the car whose father was so stupid as to stop and try to film the fire who begins screaming in terror when the big explosion happens "Daddy, I can't hear, get out of here!" Most people are sitting in the backseat of life just minding their own business while the "grown ups" and the Koch brothers and the corporations are in the front seat masturbating to the destruction they are causing and imagining that they are too far away from the scene to be caught in the bomb blast.
ReplyDeleteThis. That's what they mean but they don't know it. It's tempting, if glib, to suppose that at the root of it there's a childhood of hurt, injury, and fear--not "abuse," but garden variety bad treatment many or most kids receive, especially at the hands of equally unself-aware parents. Talk about *resentment.*
ReplyDelete"Why should I care about others' suffering," goes the unconscious script. "I suffered first! And no one did (or is doing) anything about it."
As I say: glib. But it feels like it fits. It connects the dots of their self-congratulatory "individualism," their indifference to the experience of others, their moral obtuseness, and their eternal, eternal victimhood.
It WOULD destroy them, such as they are. The sad--or sad-ish--thing is, they'd survive and emerge, not only as better people, but happier for it.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that condition is covered by Obamacare, at least on an outpatient basis? If it is, it's one more reason why the right wing is agin it.
ReplyDeleteI've been to West. It's an old Czech community just off 1-35 and quite charming in a highway stop/Americana way. My heart just breaks.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I don't want anyone blown up, ever, really. It's a regular part of my "no horrible deaths" platform.
I actually was one of the upvotes on the original because, well, I've never made a secret of the fact that I'm a horrible, horrible person, and because you pointed out some very salient facts pertaining to how amplified the awfulness of the event is thanks to willful human blindness and stupidity.
ReplyDeleteLet's just say that this situation is ripe for a Louis C.K. "Of course....but maybe" joke.
Not to blogwhore or anything but I decided to resurrect my own blog today and write a long thing about Glenn Reynolds tweet and Proust's character, Francoise. Its here: http://aimaiameye.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteWell the whole thing is a massive conservative wet dream of a clusterfuck. I just watched the footage of the police officer begging people to stop leaping in their cars and rushing to help. They've got more than enough first responders and everyone else is just clogging up the roads and driving people crazy, putting people at risk and generally fucking up. Those people legitimately want to help and perhaps most, or many, of them actually know what to do--are EMTs or first responders or trained or something--but disorganized private charity on the fly is the opposite of what people need in a crisis of this magnitude. Its nice if there's nothing else available but it can be detrimental to actually succoring the afflicted--this was exactly the same problem with Mitt Romney's fake "ship some supplies to New Jersey" form of non government action.
ReplyDeleteHere in Boston people opened their houses to the marathoners and continued a tradition of rushing out and cheering/supporting them in a decentralized and effective way. But ultimately the work of organizing and managing a huge event has to be professional.
Southern Honour culture is the exact opposite of what northerners or non southerners think of honour--honour isn't shown through probity, deference, or protecting or succoring the weak. Honour is something that is possessed by older white males (senior to people they control) or by touchy and angry younger white males. Honour gets taken away from you when you allow younger, non white, or female persons to diminish your autonomy or limit your "freedom." Honour is restored when you strike or kill a person who limits your freedom. Its literally impossible to discuss a woman's honour in other than sexual terms (she has it when she is a virgin, modest, or a married woman who is not touched by scandal or public appearances). By definition in a true southern cultural universe Gabby Giffords relinquished her claims to having honor when she "thrust" herself on the public stage in a masculine and "bullying" fashion and when she illegitimately used women's wiles (emotion) to attempt to win a rational debate among men. [By the way this is not at all unlike the battle between the female abolitionists and slave owners limned in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Women were thought of as the purer and more honorable sex, untainted by the worldly greed of male politicians. Their arguments against slavery were considered legitimately emotional and also principled in a way that monetary rationality could never be.]
ReplyDeleteI hope one day we as a society move past the derogatory terms "sipper", "gulper", and, worst of all, "hydrator".
ReplyDeleteI hoist my beverage-filled glass to this comment.
I got a prune pastry there that I still can recall from many years ago. It's just sad.
ReplyDeleteAaaaaand Mark Begich (D. AK) gets in on the "its icky and emotional" bandwagon and tells us that scary things that invole women, and children, and death can't be legislated right because....why again? Just because something creates strong emotions in the populace doesn't mean legislators can't do their fucking jobs calmly and reasonably? The function of legislation and of government is to identify a problem and seek to find a good solution. The impulse behind identifying the problem doesn't matter. There is something absolutely beyond nuts about these assholes and their fear of women, children, birth, death and everything else that creates "emotions"--something which seems so foreign to their self image that you can almost hear the air quotes around it.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was an onion
ReplyDeleteOnions are for belts.
Anyway, you say "onion," aimai says "radish," I say "tomato"; in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours, who's to say which one of us flunked botany?
A tomato is a FRUIT. I rest my case.
ReplyDeleteThere you go being kind again. I'd say it's not that it made him feel bad, but that it made him look bad. It hurts him to be asked to feel empathy because he doesn't feel it, and his deficiency is so glaringly visible that the loathing it inspires in others interferes with his self-complacency. It also suggests that his abandonment of things like shame and pity, along with the rest of his self-awareness, might not yield the returns he expects. It's very hard to sell to people who despise you. People like him want us to believe that they are just as nice, just as good, as everybody else. And when they reveal that they would walk over corpses to cheat you out of the equivalent, in human moral capital, of 25 cents, we are not to shove our awareness of this down their throats (i.e., let them know that we notice) because that would be bullying and unseemly. As Marvin Mudrick once said to me describing a colleague, "He's the slime that grows on slime."
ReplyDelete"Try reading some John Donne and find out why the deaths of other people
ReplyDeletematter more than place holding, grudge monitoring, or pointlessly
masturbating like a mentally deficient monkey accidentally brought to a
funeral." -aimai
You're a heartless, hypocritical soul, aimai.
I have never understood the objection to making an emotional argument. I seem to be able to distinguish bullshit emotional appeals from authentic ones. I am not simply the passive object of someone else's manipulations in that way, even if I do cry at that one Budweiser ad where the horse runs back to see his old owner. I'm aware that I'm being played, but tears or no tears I'm still not buying that awful beer. Love, the desire for justice, compassion, are all emotions and without them we cannot have a morality worth a damn. How we negotiate emotions is not just some side thing over in the weeds while we go on with our perfectly rational deliberations. I maybe do two purely rational things a week if I'm lucky and offhand I can't even think what they are. They are probably related to punctuation. We live through our emotions, by judging their justness, their proportionality to whatever evokes them, their honesty, their relevance, their beauty, the amount of understanding they reveal about what is observed. It's a skill one learns. It's everything. It's why the arts mean anything at all. From the way the wingnuts are feeling gut-punched by Giffords' "emotional arguments" I infer that the emotional arguments hit a sore spot. Hit it again, I say. Hit it and make them holler some more.
ReplyDeleteI always thought "The Tomato is a Fruit" would be a good title of a swing song about a naughty gal, like "The Lady is a Tramp." But that's me.
ReplyDeleteThat example of the burrowing wasp was just perfect. Coincidentally, I watched The Queen of Versailles last night; Jackie Siegal was nicer, generally, than Francoise, but her and her husband's fortune was built on selling people time-shares that they really couldn't afford.
ReplyDeleteJust like Candyman.
ReplyDeleteDon't flatter yourself, angel.
ReplyDeleteWell, at least she doesn't lurk on a blog, waiting for that big chance to waggle her finger at another commenter.
ReplyDeleteRacist.
ReplyDeleteDid you change screen names, or are you just assuming?
ReplyDeleteYeah, Halloween, lurking for that big chance was I, must've hit the refresh button a thousand times here in the last week since she said that. Who knew her hypocrisy would be revealed just a week after she wagged her finger at me for the same thing?
ReplyDeleteIt was wrong when you did it and it was wrong when I did it. Doesn't mean I'm hypocritical, just means I'm fallible. But am I to understand that you now acknowledge that your repeated postings a week or so ago were wrong and disgusting? Because that would be pretty much the best news we could recieve in a week of terrible news.
ReplyDeleteGlenn Reynolds should be stripped, scourged, nailed to a cross, and shot a couple of times in the gut.
ReplyDelete... Okay, I thought it was a little funny.
ReplyDeleteAny racist would.
ReplyDeleteDennis doesn't take responsibility for being a mean-spirited conservative asshole, it's the fault of libruls because we're all part of a hive-mind because we don't like dissent, so it's not his fault, aimai.
ReplyDeleteThis is beautifully said. Thanks for a bit of grace in the midst of the snark. Don't get me wrong, I come here for the snark, I love the snark, but this was even better.
ReplyDelete