The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint.("At gunpoint" is apparently Williamson's term for something lawful he doesn't approve of -- e.g. "people who object to abortion will be forced at gunpoint to pay for them" -- you know, kind of like when you were mad at your Mom and called her Hitler.)
Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy.
In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness. American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.
Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”
The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.”
Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”...You'll notice I haven't been inserting comments on this as I usually do. That's because I don't know what to say. I've just been sitting here slack-jawed, marveling at the insanity of the thing. To suggest that liberals champion social-welfare ideas from Scandinavia because they don't want to be associated with unpopular South and Central American dictatorships is just a more advanced version of their usual slurs -- but to add that this makes liberals white supremacists is so crazy that I'm convinced I was right about these guys and they've lost their collective minds.
And I haven't even got to the really hot parts:
When Barack Obama wants some solar-energy subsidies to pay off his crony-capitalist backers, he doesn’t rebuke the Canadians, but those damned dirty brown people in the Middle East. (Middle Eastern people seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity: It used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.)Who is this written for? Whom is it meant to convince? It's impossible to imagine anyone who isn't already infected reading it and saying, "He's right -- universal health care is racist!"
UPDATE. Comments are a joy. I appreciate the contributors who sought to characterize Williamson's very-fabric-of-space-and-time-rupturing stupid ("the HyperDerp" -- derelict; "a fragmentation grenade of stupid" -- Al Swearingen), but I must give a special No-Prize to LookWhosInTheFreezer for this:
Shorter Williamson: You liberals all wanna turn America into Denmark, we conservatives want to turn it into Somalia. Now who's the real racist?!!
now it’s the nefarious awful
ReplyDeleteArabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.Yeah, I'm really ashamed when all those liberals use this argument to demand the approval of the Keystone pipeline.
Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe
ReplyDeleteWhile Republicans are still throwing their lot in with the old Blut and Boden of Central Europe.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/republican-paul-ryan-says-germans-have-to-be-tough-on-greece/
"In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites..." Yeah, yeah, Hitler was a socialist. Do you have any points that Jonah Goldberg hasn't made?
ReplyDeleteknuckle dragging anti-semites
ReplyDeleteSee folks. This is why the Republicans done got that Jew vote all locked up.
WHAT THE I DON'T EVEN
ReplyDeletewe might even count Benito Mussolini
Oh, no, you don't, Kevin. No you fucking don't. You're not tarring us with that, when in The Real World it was your capitalist/corporatist buddies who you give such *favor* to that were seeing starbursts over his supposed economic success. (What, you couldn't do the old "National SOCIALISTS hah!" routine?)
But he was smart and had a really good work ethic.
ReplyDelete-Mitt Romney.
What is it about the "elections" part of the Scandinavian social democracies he doesn't get as a difference?
ReplyDeleteCould it be that he doesn't really believe in elections as adding value? Or legitimacy (since nothing other than hard-boiled conservatism has legitimacy)?
Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”
ReplyDeleteokee doke
When Barack Obama wants some solar-energy subsidies to pay off his
ReplyDeletecrony-capitalist backers, he doesn’t rebuke the Canadians, but those
damned dirty brown people in the Middle East. (Middle Eastern people
seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity:
It used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful
Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.)
I seem to recall an awful lot of conservatives demonizing Third World petro-states the same way when making their case for expanded domestic oil & gas production and less environmental regulations.
I'm beginning to believe that Williamson suffered a traumatic brain injury that causes him to write hundreds of words that make no sense together.
ReplyDeleteThat's the breathtaking part, for me. It's not just that it's stupid, because c'mon it's the National Review. It's that he's re-iterating Goldberg's arguments and manages to be **worse at it than Goldberg**.
ReplyDeleteThe Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism-
ReplyDeleteUnlike Republicans, who not once ever fancied a casting couch donut as their greatest President, or that Andover douche with pom poms.
I can see why you're slack-jawed at this, Roy. The essential "reasoning" is 1.) Nordic nations tend to have overwhelmingly White populations, 2.) Liberals admire many aspects of the economic systems of Nordic nations, therefore 3.) RACISM!!!!
ReplyDeleteIt's roughly equivalent to claiming that someone really hates trees because they use toilet paper
Saying liberals are the real racists because they uphold a few social democracies in northern Europe as decent economic models is a new and creative one. I gotta give him credit for originality.
ReplyDeleteAnd swedish meatballs! What the fuck?
ReplyDeleteActually, the Right indulges in romantic eroticism over their favorites--from Peggy Noonan having orgasms over Reagan's foot to everyone on the Right swooning and reaching for the K-Y and tissues over Bush's codpiece during his carrier-landing stunt.
ReplyDeleteThe Right occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its
ReplyDeletepin-ups have included Augusto Pinochet and Roberto D'Aubuisson, Ian Smith and a billion other examples too plentiful to name.
Day-um... how the HAIL did them Jews miss cornerin' the market in awl production?
ReplyDeletesomeone really hates trees because they use toilet paper
ReplyDeleteThis is actually true of my dad. And you should see him with the paper towels!
~
Alternate reading: Welfare-state programs that work beautifully in Scandinavia don't work here because there's an element in the U.S. that believes that "the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race," or that "Leadership in the South, then quite properly rests in White hands. Upon
ReplyDeletethe White population this fact imposes moral obligations of
paternalism, patience, protection, devotion, and sacrifice."
P.S.: Note that suddenly, when it comes to Scandinavia, "overwhelmingly white" automatically equals "racist," when if you point out all-white voter rolls or all-white juries, they blink at you.
They really are remarkably stupid, aren't they?
The solar-panel thing is a reference to Solyndra, which went bankrupt after receiving huge federal loans and guarantees. Some of us remember how Daryl Issa launched a big Congressional investigation into the entire affair. Some of us also remember how Issa shut the entire investigation down two weeks later when it a letter bearing his signature was turned in as evidence--a letter demanding that Obama approve the loans and guarantees.
ReplyDeleteWandered into the wrong part of the neighborhood 5,000 years ago.
ReplyDeleteEwww.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention their man-crush on Putin.
ReplyDeleteAnd which one of them got the "tingly-sparklies" when they saw Palin on TV? Wasn't it Rich Lowry?
ReplyDeleteYeah. There's an entire division of social science research trying to figure out if generous welfare states are only politically possible in ethnically homogenous countries because the white backlash against "those people" getting benefits always sabotages it in other countries.
ReplyDeleteOld joke:
ReplyDeleteBackwoods Bubba goes to the county fair and wins a toilet brush for throwing a penny into a goldfish bowl. A couple weeks later, Bubba's friend Cletus asks him, "Bubba, how you like that toilet brush you won?"
"Well," says Bubba, "It's okay, I guess. But I still prefer paper."
He cut his writing chops at the "Brooks-Friedman School of Lucrative Punditry".
ReplyDeleteWilliamson pens a screed insisting that liberals are the real racists because they admire social democracies with largely white populations....because they just don't understand that the only reason those societies work is white people.
ReplyDelete(Not to mention it's not true. The last time I was in Denmark was 1987, and they had a pretty healthy minority population then, almost 30 years ago. How long exactly is it supposed to take for the brown hordes to destroy a society?)
And he manages to call progressives the real racists while simultaneously implying that the only reason the Nordic economies are relatively successful is that they don't have to deal with--wink wink--the kind of people who live in LA.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was Rich. His "sparks flew around the room" and he "sat up a little straighter" when she winked. I'm going to guess that an entire bottle of Febreze wasn't enough to clean his Barcalounger.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't get to the part where he has to have it surgically removed.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can't picture is how we can simultaneously hold people at gunpoint while we are shoving our nasty progressivism down their throats. I'm not that coordinated, and if we tried to do it as a group, you know we'd just waste time analyzing the implications first. Maybe we are only doing gunpoint now, and have stopped with the throat-shoving-down?
ReplyDeleteIn a certain way, Williamson and many other Rightwing nitwits are correct about the homogenous nature of Nordic societies--those countries manage to treat all their citizens as equals regardless of skin color, religion, or national origin.
ReplyDeleteGeez, you'd think Williamson might be a little more grateful to the people who are gonna save him from the dread scourge of fictional nine-year-olds calling him a cracker.
ReplyDeleteBack when I gave weather-radar seminars to pilots, I'd use this joke as an opener. When they stopped laughing, I'd add that "the moral of the story is that any tool can be a pain in the ass if used improperly."
ReplyDelete*Ahem*... Oh, Kevin:
ReplyDelete"When Franklin D. Roosevelt
became President of the United States in March 1933, he expressly
adopted a variety of measures to see which would work, including several
which their proponents felt would be inconsistent with each other. One
of these programs was the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which, with its codes and industry organizations, was said by some critics to have a certain resemblance, as an economic institution, to Mussolini's corporatism.[1][2][3][4][5][6] This comparison was made at the time, and it was not always a critical one; even Winston Churchill had praised Mussolini. Churchill controversially claimed that the Fascism of Benito Mussolini
had "rendered a service to the whole world," showing, as it had, "a way
to combat subversive forces" — that is, he considered the regime to be a
bulwark against the perceived threat of Communist revolution. At one
point, Churchill went as far as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius ...
the greatest lawgiver among men." (I know, it's Wikipedia, but still...)
Is there some other Churchill, other than the one Wingnuts so love, that is, who might have said that?
Also too: let's take a minute to remember that Wiliamson's immediate response to the Baltimore riots was to scramble onto twitter to haw haw all those liberals who thought they could live in a city unburdened by constant terror of people of color.
ReplyDeleteAnd then you have the NRO, a bunch of tools who are a pain in the ass especially when used properly.
ReplyDeleteAnd have no way to be surgically removed.
ReplyDeleteSome writers have figured out that it doesn't matter how poorly they construct their arguments. Their commenters will have predictable knee-jerk reactions to certain words (welfare, global warming, socialism). So as long as the writers put something out there that contains those words and the piece is more or less grammatical, it doesn't matter for the most part if the whole article makes sense; people will write what they want to in the comments, usually the same thing they've written in response to other articles.
ReplyDeleteWait, wasn't Denmark where the whiteys were so hopped up about THOSE ICKY MOOSLIMS coming across their designer borders?
ReplyDeleteThese people have all the memory power of an oxygen-starved goldfish.
Good book about Denmark during WWII: "Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark's Jews Escaped The Nazis" by Bo Lidegaard. The whole thing is based on how Denmark's government refused to turn over lists of Jewish residents, insisting that they did not know who was Jewish because Danes are Danes, period. It's an amazing book.
ReplyDeleteI'm confused. Am I supposed to put up a Che Guevara poster or take it down?
ReplyDeleteWhich was exactly what Orwell meant in 1984 by "duckspeak" - the words come out, totally unburdened by thought.
ReplyDeleteYou're supposed to put it up, but feel guilty about it.
ReplyDeleteSee, that's why there's assault rifles - you shove THOSE down their throats, and kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
ReplyDeleteAs tough on Greece as they were 75 years ago?
ReplyDelete"You got the confederate flag flying in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"
ReplyDelete...now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.
ReplyDeleteSo now, Arabs are simply market traders and not Islamicist world beaters who want to convert us to Sharia and then murder us in our sleep? Fuck it, he's on a roll.
Well, now you know why he works at National Review. "Sense" is not high on their list of requirements.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to put up a Max von Sydow poster, just to be safe.
ReplyDeleteOh, it gets better: if you follow the link in Williamson's essay, it goes straight to CBS News, where you can read a quote from Barack Obama himself pointing out that spending $144.17 per barrel of oil meant that a lot of money was winding up in the hands of people who had a noted track record of funding extremists like, oh, I don't know, Osama bin fuckin' Ladin. Which is, you know, a fact. It was even a fact back in 2008 when the story was filed. I'll bet good money that Williamson has had that bookmark carefully filed away for seven years, just waiting for the chance to accuse Obama of being anti-semitic.
ReplyDeletePro travel tip here: when someone calling themselves "Jehova" offers to guide you through the desert, rent the fucking GPS instead.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet good money that Williamson has had that bookmark carefully
ReplyDeletefiled away for seven years, just waiting for the chance to accuse Obama
of being anti-semitic.I'll take that bet. There's no way Williamson has waited this long to accuse Obama of being anti-semitic.
*looks at flaming bush* "I TOLD you we should have gone with Tom-Tom."
ReplyDeleteIt's actually been a gambit for a while to refute using Scandanavia as an exemplar by pointing out how "homogeneous" they are. I will agree that Kevvy makes it fresh by listing off overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy. as if they were bad things. Which US primary electorate does he think fits that description?
ReplyDelete...the topic of immigrants’ — non-Nordic people’s — relatively high
ReplyDeleterates of unemployment and welfare dependency is politically charged.
Unlike here in the USA, where nobody complains about immigrants, either legal or illegal. Also, Kevin: I'd like to see you move to a country where your ethnicity makes you unique and you don't speak the language, and we'll see how long it takes you to find a decent job.
Oxygen-starved alcoholic glue-sniffing goldfish.
ReplyDeleteSolyndrrraaaaa!!!!
ReplyDeleteIn this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally
ReplyDeletehave been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging
anti-SemitesOf course, in the case of so-called Norwegian progressives, "joined" means "gunned down by." Or did investigators miss that Anders Breivik had hastily covered over his Che poster with a Pam Geller one?
I'd skip their live album; the real magic was in Butch Vig's studio production.
ReplyDeleteSo precise ethnic/racial stats on Denmark are tough to pin down. However, I can say that as of FY2014, there were 600,000 immigrants or descendants of immigrants living in the country. About two-thirds of those are from (or descended from people who are from) non-Western countries. Divide that by the overall population of 5.6 million and it gives you 7% - obviously not as diverse as the US, but also not the unbroken sea of whiteness that Williamson envisions.
ReplyDeleteThat you eat those and not Congolese meatballs says everything we need to know about your moral periscope.
ReplyDeleteRemember when Hillary demanded that all the guards at the Benghazi compound be redeployed to do landscaping work for Solyndra? Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Solar that day, I can tell you!
ReplyDeleteCongolese meatballs
ReplyDeleteMade with 100% real long pork!
Someone must have told Kevindy his birth parents had a drop of Neee-gro blood. He's not taking it well.
ReplyDeleteIn this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging
ReplyDeleteanti-Semites
Yeah, Dylann Roof even attended a Bible study with so-called progressives.
If the nation is an organism, it’s no surprise to find Donald Trump describing foreigners as an infection. Thus the by-now-familiar xenophobia prevalent in Democratic rhetoric (and the Trumpkin anti-capitalist Right’s rhetoric) about Asians and Latin Americans “stealing our jobs.”
ReplyDeleteHoly shit. How much glue-huffing does it take to think that all the "stealing our jobs" rhetoric out there is from Democrats? Not to mention you need a lobotomy to call Donald Fucking Trump an "anti-capitalist."
He should have written this in character: "Me think Democrats am real racists. Donald Trump am commie. Me not crazy."
>>Think about that the next time a progressive tells you that Chicago ought to do things the way Helsinki does.
ReplyDeleteFor all their complaints about the race card, conservative writing on race is pretty much just focused on stumping some smarty-pants librul at your next party. Here, Williamson cares so little about the actual treatment of Middle Easterners in America that he puts their defense in a parenthetical, as if to say "this step is optional".
I just wish several of those writers weren't sitting on the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteI thought I was collecting Catherine Holm but I was really supporting the Nazi party.
ReplyDeleteI think the electro-magnetic effects given off by the Ark of the Covenant is what threw off Jehovah's compass. Since it was built to his specs, he couldn't very well tell them to re-do it.
ReplyDeleteI more incline
ReplyDeleteTo leaders feline
Middle Eastern people seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity
ReplyDeleteThat's an awfully roundabout way to say "Operation Iraqi Freedom"
McArdle says they make it work by freeloading off of American poverty and inequality, which is the driver of innovation and therefore the economy.
ReplyDeleteI shit you not. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-08/u-s-can-t-import-the-scandinavian-model
Doritofarts is a senior "editor"; he doesn't make this argument this column winds up spiked.
ReplyDeleteLike ants under a giant magnifying glass.
ReplyDeleteAll hail Great Leader Chairman Meow! Obey the kitteh!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was more like 20%, but I was in Copehagen most of the time I was there, and wouldn't be surprised if the immigrant population was concentrated there.
ReplyDeleteTranslation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”...
ReplyDeleteWhat he calls brown socialism is invariably a reaction to white colonialism- it's hard to make a well-functioning society after centuries of divide-and-conquer and strip-mining being inflicted on you.
It was probably Ward Churchill. Let's assume he said it.
ReplyDeleteMarcus Samuelsson would like a word.
ReplyDeleteThat and the ongoing interference of the US.
ReplyDeleteAh, but he's 'Murkan now... check and mate, loony libs!!!!
ReplyDeleteOh God. That's so stupid. It's not even wrong. Scandinavia's population is "too small to innovate"? Nokia? Ericsson? Nokian tires*? Novo Nordisk? H&M? Sandvik? SKF? Novozymes?
ReplyDeleteI don't know how you read that fucking moron's output without gouging your eyes out, Susan.
*Best snow tires in the world, folks.
American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines
ReplyDeletere-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish
people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical
tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.
As a resident of Los Angeles, allow me to state that at no point has a proposal to recreate this city in the image of "Danish society" come before our city council. I know this because I listen to NPR every day. (In fact, the big items currently before our council are A, how to most expeditiously fuck the homeless with tent clearings, and B, how to most expeditiously fuck the homed with soulless building projects far too massive for existing infrastructure.)
If anyone has an idea what "mystical tendencies" he imagines I believe in, clue me in. I must be drawing the pentagrams wrong because they don't seem to be warding off the bad mojo.
You gotta go to war with the muse you have, not the muse you want to have.
ReplyDeleteIt's the knowledge that she gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to expose herself in public that keeps me coming back.
This is obviously what yoga is for, Comerade. And now you know why you should have turned up at the mandatory Downward Facing Running Dog sessions.
ReplyDeleteStop remembering already. That shit'll kill ya.
ReplyDeleteHer plinth is that Norway's oil and gas production is slowing down, so all of Scandinavia is in economic trouble. Seriously. Because Sozialist.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait to see how she reacts to the same thing happening to, say, Alaska.
ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical
ReplyDeletetendencies that render them universal in their applicability
So WE'RE the racists because we think any racial mix can achieve what he thinks only majority white countries can do? Wow. Shame on us.
Oh Jesus. I spoke too soon. Eye-gouging is definitely called for.
ReplyDelete"The remaining question is, of course, whether we should be rooting for profit-seeking global corporations to take manufacturing jobs to Africa if they will pay such pitifully low wages. You'll probably not be surprised to hear that my unequivocal answer is "yes." Just consider what the alternatives must be if people are willing to slave in a factory for $21 a month. So moving jobs to Ethiopia, or elsewhere in Africa, does good for dreadfully impoverished people."
Souless monster.
I never realized that Google Deep Dream could be applied to political essays. Look at all the creepy faces!
ReplyDeleteAnd the more advanced have figured out that they need not construct an argument at all. Kevin makes none, merely a string of dubious--at best--bald faced statements, sprinkled with a selection of Leftist Names Which Must be Named, "racist" (on another day it would have been "fascist"), toss in "Jewish Bankers" for a sweetener, and it's lunch time. --30!--
ReplyDeleteIt's impossible to imagine anyone who isn't already infected reading it and saying, "He's right -- universal health care is racist!"It's also difficult to imagine anyone who is already infected reading it and saying, "He's right -- immigrants and Muslims are awesome!"
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah, but so do the Real Housewives...
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those correlation isn't causation things though. Its trivially obvious, for example looking at Finland's approach to its health crisis and education, that having a homogenous, small, population that shares common values enables people to pursue common goals without the same infighting as a multi-cultural society in a post civil war state which is still debating whether citizenship fully extends to people of disfavored groups. That's a problem for us, not for the Finns. Now that they have their welfare state and their extensive social spending they aren't denying its benefits to their own citizens, even if those citizens are from other countries or other races, are they? We can't say the same.
ReplyDeleteI was reading "Capital Men" which is the story of the first AA (ex slave in some cases) men in the reconstruction congress. And some other big book about the south. Both books point out that public funding for education in the South was pretty much zero during the antebellum period (because why should wealthy planters pay for poor white trash to be educated) and that the very idea of public schooling, publicly paid for, was first introduced by the freed slaves. The fact that the white south took the money and ran, and then ran even farther away after Brown v. the Board of education, is the result of our racism and our divisiveness.
No congolese meatballs because no one has hands to shape them since the god damned belgians cut them off.
ReplyDeleteShould have read down before answering basically the same thing upthread. Well stated.
ReplyDeleteThey are truly outside my understanding.
ReplyDeleteOh come on, the logic is straightforward.
ReplyDelete1. Liberals like socialists.
2. Socialists are white, therefore
3. Liberals are racists.
QED. Or perhaps, QEDerp.
I know this is a small drop in the ocean of idiocy that is this essay but I just want to highlight this:
ReplyDeleteIt used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.
OPEC is a cartel, Kevin literally doesn't know what 'market prices' means.
"The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro..."
ReplyDeleteAs opposed to the Right's hero-worship of pin-ups whose connections with death squads, torture, and rape flaunts enough strong-man/Daddy worship to fill an appendix in the DSM.
(And this, the day after Efrain Rios-Montt, St. Ronnie's exemplar of democracy, is ruled too meshugeh to stand trial for the ethnic genocides people have known for decades he ordered.)
This is very true. Its like people who are reading just have kind of a pavlovian response and begin salivating and barking as soon as they see certain words like Obama or Black.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this "democrats are the real racists" thing is getting to be some kind of recursive loop of confused arguments. Weren't we just being told that being racist was a) natural and b) rightful?
ReplyDeleteThis (like so much else) reminds me of how Milton Berle used to say that, in the Catskills, he could tell the set-up of a joke, and deliver a punch line that literally made no sense, or was in dog-Yiddish, and the audience would howl.
ReplyDeletePerhaps he assumes that only Democrats have jobs?
ReplyDeleteFunny how their oil dividends that most of them don't do any work for is NOT SOCALOISM
ReplyDeleteI gotcher gunpoint right here, you fucking rear bagger.
ReplyDeleteWe in California will get back to you. Last week Hispanics officially became the majority ethnic group.
ReplyDeleteI probably should have qualified "gambit" as "bullshit gambit." As if Scandanavia and Finland became egalitarian by already being egalitarian, which would be a pretty neat trick. Just because they didn't have a bunch of black ex-slaves in their populace didn't mean they didn't have ethnic, geographic, and class divides in their culture, either. Heck, Norwegian conservatives routinely criticize the slackerdom encouraged by the generosity of welfare benefit, without having to bring race into it at all. (The xenophobic right-wing bring race into it anyway, but the major centrist and center-right parties are usually EU-curious at the very least, which is harder to reconcile with attacks on dirty foreigners.)
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget how OMFG HAWT Sarah Failin is and lib bitchez all jealous because ugly lezbos.
ReplyDeletewe might even count Benito Mussolini
ReplyDeleteThat's EASY! ONE!
Brown socialism? Is that where we all share a single, state owned toilet?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if he went as far as a couple of my FORMER Facebook friends in pasting a picture of a shop full of work boots with a caption "untouched in the riots".
ReplyDeleteI say former friends because they're all dead now.
(There's a dish detergent joke in there somewhere..."Golden Dawn! It's...TOUGH ON GREECE.")
ReplyDeleteAnd part two of his thesis proceeds from the idea that there's no difference between democratic socialism and communist dictatorship. As much as he wants that to be true, he basically reviews the evidence that they function and deliver very differently in practice.
ReplyDeleteFascism? You're soaking in it!
ReplyDeleteHer entire output could be replaced, at much lower cost, by a Markov chain generator running on some server "in the cloud". I trust she'd be OK with that.
ReplyDeleteI realize that investors like to make the most of each little slice of paradise in their portfolio, but after a certain point I gotta wonder if the point is just to dress the set for the most awe inspiring earthquake footage ever filmed.
ReplyDeleteIt really deserves to be quoted in full:
ReplyDelete"I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America."
Could it be that they have a wager among themselves to see what utterly bug fuck crazy theory they can concoct and still be taken seriously in polite society or are they truly stark raving mad? I can't decide.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure McMegan will happily explain that American workers simply cannot compete in the global economy until we're willing to work for 35 cents a day.
ReplyDeleteI await with bated breath the happy day when corporate shareholders realize that they can replace American CEOs, economists, pundits, and prosperity gospel preachers with foreign ones for pennies on the dollar.
ReplyDeleteWhy can't it be both? Consider that, if you actually had a political movement, you would want whatever its precepts might be to be widely understood, accepted, and even successful. But what you have instead is people who really are putting forward bug-fuck crazy theories with underlying logic structures that amount to "because reasons"--and they're being praised to the rafters by their core constituency.
ReplyDeleteSo, while there may not be am actual wager involved, there certainly is a competition to see who can put forth the craziest shit and have the true believers lap it up and repeat it.
Long pig is the most dangerous pig.
ReplyDelete... the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc.
ReplyDeleteNo, Kev. The welfare state we dream about is one where people are all manner of different colors, religions, sexual orientations, whatever. In the USA, in other words.
Jesus, these assholes are the reason we can never have nice things.
Funny you say this. Have you heard of the Millennium Project? They want to build two 40-story towers in my hood, where everything is 1-12 stories tall. State geologists say a faultline runs directly under the proposed site... so the developers hired their own geologists who say Truuuuue, but it's really old and therefore safe. The city has decided to accept the builder's assessment. "What would they do in Denmark?" my able city officials must have asked themselves before voting. Here's a photo of the beautiful proposal -- and by the way, if the short one falls left, it crushes my apartment: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-city-oks-millennium-earthquake-report-20150706-story.html#page=1 That will look epic in the movie they make of my unnecessary death at the hands of mindless greed. I suggest seeing it in Imax 3D to replicate my experience.
ReplyDeletePlaying the Trump card.
ReplyDeleteShe did. It's our own fault that wages are down because we buy cheap imported goods. So of course wages go down but there's nothing we can do about that. Or automation, which is a good thing because those factory jobs were terrible anyway.
ReplyDeleteSo are the days of our lives.
ReplyDeleteDeGreeceing II: Hey, this time we're just taking the money.
ReplyDeleteand by the way, if the short one falls left, it crushes my apartment:
ReplyDeleteHey, it could fall to the right. Look on the bright side!
It's really cool how they overshadow one of LA's best known landmarks like that. What's up next, covering the Hollywood sign with condos?
ReplyDeleteYears ago, I imagined an SNL skit called "Liars Club" which would feature Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, & Powell betting on whether or not they can get the public to accept various crazy claims about the "threat" posed by Iraq. "Tell them Saddam is going to fly remote-controlled model airplanes over their homes to spray them with anthrax," suggests Rove, as the rest of the group bursts into laughter. "Yer on!," says Bush, laughing.
ReplyDeleteThe rest, as they say, is history....
Four out of five Hauptmann agree, nothing takes out Greece like Golden Dawn! Now with extra Blitzkrieg action to wash those Greeks right out of our Lebensraum in no time!
ReplyDeleteHold on a moment....*blam*....
Yes, four out of four Hauptmann agree...
Volvo? self-melting highways? advanced weather sensors (Vaisala)? etc etc
ReplyDeleteHah!! See? Liberals don't understand real people.
ReplyDelete...we buy cheap imported goods.
ReplyDeletePerhaps she could point us in the direction of an alternative? No?
And correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't the American consumer who made the decision to send all production overseas, was it? Because I don't recall going over to China to check out production facilities or anything. I also don't remember the price of cars going down after GM moved much of its production down to Mexico in the 1980s, so I'm wondering, if it wasn't the American consumer who made the decision to move production, and if in a lot of cases moving production didn't make goods any cheaper, who decided to move it? Let see....who could it be....who could it be....
It's a fragmentation grenade of stupid. It strikes out at everything in the general area.
ReplyDeleteRoy, I hope you wore thick rubber gloves (2 on each hand) before reading this. And goggles. The foam & spittle can be highly contagious, and who knows what the infection is? You're safer playing with a rabid alligator.
ReplyDeleteYep. Took Moses 40 years to find the one place in the neighborhood that didn't have oil.
ReplyDeletePedant note: alligators are cold-blooded reptiles. Rabies can only infect warm-blooded mammals.
ReplyDeleteI can barely stand to read your excerpts, except for the snark. Our billionaire wannabe owners have elevated the very stupidest and most repugnant people to be high-status opinion makers. So long as they can hedge every statement and paw through a thesaurus they'll have a good paying job.
ReplyDeleteExpect a proposition on the 2016 ballot to secede from the United Snakes & rejoin Mexico.
ReplyDeleteReconquista, baby!!
Yes! Yes! YES!
ReplyDeleteEverything is about sex to conservatives.
ReplyDeleteAn explosion of strawdust.
ReplyDeleteThere actually was a proposal to do just that. The city allowed developers to buy the mountain from the Howard Hughes estate for $1.7 million in 2002; these jerks then planned to put luxury homes right atop the sign. "Live behind the H, just $40 million!" When there was a public outcry, the developers said fine, we'll sell it to the city -- for $12.5 million. The city balked as that was about 8 times what they'd refused to pay for it in 2002. Finally in 2009 it was an assortment of citizens groups and stars that put together the money -- notably Hugh Hefner, who came through with the last cool million right before some crucial filing deadline. JUST LIKE DENMARK.
ReplyDeleteWhen you put it that way, it almost has a glimmering of meaning. To racists, at least.
ReplyDeleteWHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR CHINEE?
ReplyDelete...I give up. The shortsighted greed of property developers is beyond my ability to parody.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I think God played the Israelites for a joke. After all, it sure seems like Moses got mooned by Yahweh:
ReplyDelete20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.
21 And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:
22 And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:
23 And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.
Brought to you by . . .
ReplyDeleteI lived in the bldg.on the bottom left in the block at the upper right in the map at the Times link for 10 yrs. until I was evicted for gentrification in 2002.
ReplyDeleteAll the new Hollywood construction is just begging for a karmic earthquake.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't the American consumer who made the decision to send all production overseas, was it?
ReplyDeleteSadly, it was the American consumer who decided, some 35 years ago, that we wanted inexpensive goods at any cost. One of the things the stagflation of the '70s did for us was make everyone extremely price conscious. Thus, competing on price alone became the key to many business strategies. This is when Wal*Mart began to boom, and when airlines (via deregulation) began cutting prices and everything else.
By the turn of this century, U.S.-based manufacturing for many goods simply could not compete in any meaningful way. I once had a woman approach me for help in getting a factory to produce a little plastic handloom she was selling. After 6 months of diligent search among U.S. manufacturers of plastic products, she couldn't get any quote that put the product in her hand for under $20 a unit. A handful of phonecalls to the Chinese embassy put her in touch with a factory that could deliver the product to her door at a shade more than $1 a unit. (Of course, she had to order a minimum of 20,000 of them, but that was pretty close to the production run she'd wanted all along.)
Obviously, nobody would ever pay $30 for a plastic handloom. But lots of people will pay $10 for one. So the consumer does decide to move production to China because the consumer will not pay what it costs to produce many non-essential (and some essential) products here in the US of A.
https://youtu.be/Rb8bzRZCGDY?t=1m38s
ReplyDeleteWe didn't decide we wanted inexpensive goods at any cost. Factories didn't move abroad because of lack of demand. They moved abroad because they wanted higher profits via lower labor cost. Trade barrier were then lowered, a very deliberate political act.
ReplyDeleteAuthoritarians love their strong daddies.
ReplyDeleteI denounce myself, for now I know the true meaning of what it is to be politically incorrect. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to camp I go.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clearing that up for me! Now I just have to find a couple of those cute little caps for my feline overlords.
ReplyDeleteShorter Williamson: You liberals all wanna turn America into Denmark, we conservatives want to turn it into Somalia. Now who's the real racist?!!
ReplyDeleteBut if an alligator just bit a rabid drunk 20 year old and then bit you...um, well anyway it's just not safe, not at all.
ReplyDeleteThis is a case of losing the battle AND the war.
ReplyDeletePinning racism on Liberals requires admitting that racism is an evil. Nobody of any account (i.e. significant voting bloc) is going to buy the former, but by doing the latter they offend their base, for which racism is as much a right as the air they breathe.
Lose/Lose.
Oh god. Kevin read about Scandinavian demographics "Immigration contributed 60% to the
ReplyDeleteoverall population increase in Finland, 66% in Norway and 76% in Sweden over the 2005-
2010 period." https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?language=ENG&source=emfromsendlink&format=PDF&document_id=912177241&serialid=372OkIowMXrYfFds1HtPCo9vKwsadTZLoiVt71GZa7s%3D
But it's just one big homogenous block of liberal white supremisists uh huh.
All true, but it does ultimately come back to the consumer. By the early 1980s, anyone selling a consumer good or service who tried to compete on the basis of anything other than price (quality, durability, after-sale service, etc.) either ended up swallowed in an M&A (remember those? Quite popular in the '80s), bankrupt and out of business, or relegated to the low-volume "luxury" market.
ReplyDeleteAir travel is a great example here. There's no offshoring of costs, and the product is both ubiquitous and perishable. Airlines once competed on quality of service because rates were set by the CAB. After deregulation, NOBODY competed based on quality of service because consumers stated quite emphatically that they did not care about it: They wanted cheap air fares no matter what. Today we're treated like cattle and gouged at every turn by the airlines--and carriers are still forced to compete solely on the basis of price. Any airline that advertised additional legroom, more fresh air in the cabin, free baggage and free WiFi but charged $10 more per ticket would be out of business in a week when competing with a carrier that offered none of those amenities but cost fractionally less.
Ask any air traveler how important things like legroom are and they'll run on and on about how it's a priority. Right up until they find they can save that $10. And so it is with most consumer goods. It's comforting to think we as consumers didn't choose to send our jobs overseas--that it was those greedy business people who did it. But that's just a comforting tale we tell ourselves to deflect our own rather large portion of the blame.
You know Mike and Gabriel were cracking up the whole time.
ReplyDeleteHeavenly Intercom: "Will the Cherubim please remain silent until His stand-up rou...er, His Good Works are complete"
Thank you. Hey, all it requires to be factual is to replace 'living' with 'dorm'.
ReplyDeleteThis.
ReplyDelete"I can't have it so why should anybody else" with a big chaser of self-righteousness.
Harrumph!
ReplyDeleteThe consumer is not faultless, you are right. But they are not the ones with the power when it comes to jobs.
ReplyDeleteWe need to go back to the causes of airline deregulation, stagflation, the oil shock, and monetary policy which takes more knowledge than I have.
There's no offshoring of costs
ReplyDeleteRemote (drone-style) piloting from wherever you like.
Cabin crew is harder to offshore; but that's what robots are for!
How long exactly is it supposed to take for the brown hordes to destroy a society?
ReplyDeleteHowever long to import enough American bigots.
The real crime in this whole piece is, I'm pretty sure FDR was never in a country club.
ReplyDeleteGiven that they've been here for four centuries and we somehow still have a society I'm gonna go with "never".
ReplyDeleteAlso what about Eurabia? The Right had a massive pants pooing about that in the 2000s (Steyn et al). Has this been reversed in some way?
ReplyDeleteZeiss.
ReplyDeleteIt imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people
ReplyDeleteSolvang, on the other hand...
Can't help you much with the hot water pot or the washers, but go get yourself a couple of screwdrivers from Klein Tools. I bought some to test when I was editing an airplane maintenance magazine, and they proved to be better than any screwdrivers available--they even made Snap-On look like cheap Chinese imports. I've had those for going on 25 years now and despite having removed literally thousands of badly stuck screws, they're still as crisp as the day I bought them.
ReplyDeleteAt present, they feel this https://youtu.be/AeeE6JCNi-Y
ReplyDeleteabout that
evicted for gentrification
ReplyDeleteLook on the bright side; with a black mark like
that on your record you'll never get drafted to Vietnam.
I really want Tommy Friedman's job to be outsourced to Bangalore. Even a half-assed job from someone with English as a third language would be an improvement. And if they wrote it in a style to evoke the original, so much the better.
ReplyDeleteSorry, that was a bit vague.
ReplyDeleteThe 'brown menace' doesn't exist without enough bigots.. Denmark would have to import enough peckerwoods before the hoards 'destroyed society', just as they have for four centuries here. I'd say it would require having 27% of your population to be barking mad.
The brown menace is pure projection, existing only in their alleged minds. I mean come on, these people are scared of terrorist attack. I try to tell the golfers that holding a putter* straight up in a lightning storm is the safest place to be.
(Yes, the putter. I don't want him to hold up the 9 iron by accident. :) )
A couple years ago, I proposed an explanation for the New York TImes editorial page:
ReplyDeleteAt some point during the Bush presidency Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd are drinking one evening and Tom has the great idea to start up a little betting pool. "We all put ten bucks in, see, and the first one to get a column rejected wins the pot, right? It'll be fun!"
Brooks says, "Let's make it interesting. Let's each put in a hundred bucks. A week."
Dowd says, "I'm in. You two clowns will be flying me to Paris before two months are out."
There is now over $800,000 in the pot.
I would do McArdle's job for 1/4 of what she is paid. Plus my work would actually make sense.
ReplyDeleteThe stupid has been weaponized, proceed to your bunkers in an orderly fashion.
ReplyDeleteMakes about as much sense as any other theory.
ReplyDeleteApparently, most of the Nordic states don't track ethnicity in their censuses, so immigrant count is the best you're going to get. Copenhagen's non-Western immigrant population runs around 14%, mostly from Pakistan and NAME countries.
ReplyDeleteMake it a tontine and we're in business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Box_(novel)
ReplyDeleteWe are now at DerpCon 4...
ReplyDeleteI would do McArdle's job
ReplyDeleteWait, you don't still think she's actually being paid to do business and economic reporting, do you? Her job is to keep a steady stream of cheap-labor conservative* bullshit injected into popular discourse. Expect her to suggest that poor people's debt should be inheritable, while the rich should be able to discharge it because otherwise how will they innovate? Perhaps she will propose kidney mortgages to dictate the mortgagees behavior: no drinking, drugs, or risky sex. It'll be good for underserved minorities! Or that we should not only privatize prisons, but also the judicial process--why shouldn't defendants who can afford it get a speedier trial?
No, Susan, I'm afraid you can't do McArdle's job, because you're not Grima Wormtongue.
There's one political party in the US that supports something akin to Sharia, and it sure isn't Obama's.
ReplyDeleteI could be evil.
ReplyDeleteOh wait. I couldn't tell people that we should be able to cut out the organs from living people and sell them.
Crap. Now I'm always going to be poor.
Democrats are racist because they were the ones who put up the Confederate Flag and they are racist because they are the ones who want to take it down. The Confederacy was evil because it was a bunch of Democrats and the Democrats are evil because they don't romanticize the Confederacy. Huff huff pass pass fart fart.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite- well, "favorite"- part of the Breivik response was when Pam Geller shrieked and wailed that Breivik was influenced by some old posts on Little Green Footballs and therefore progressives the real racists etc. Of course those LGF posts were back when Charles Johnson was a batshit loon and friends with, ta da, Pam Geller.
ReplyDeleteJesus. I live in Atlanta and even we'd balk at that development combo of greed and cultural disregard.
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe.
Never mind that Norway has one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship in the world
ReplyDeletehttp://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html
Coca Cola world HQ--built on a spot where its shadow covers the Aerospace Engineering buildings on the Georgia Tech campus. And erected AFTER the school paid to install solar panels on the roofs of those buildings.
ReplyDeleteOf course he wasn't. Fascists hate country clubs.
ReplyDelete