Showing posts with label jonah goldberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jonah goldberg. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

GOTV.

Election season has brought the usual crop of conservatives telling you that too many people vote so you filthy paupers should desist and to leave the franchise to your betters. In the last ditch, knowing that you won't vote Republican, they may try and steer you toward their deceptive niche brand. But by and large they'd rather you just gave up.

National Review legacy pledge Jonah Goldberg has been doing this routine for years but never gets any better at it. Perhaps sensing his audience has become jaded, this year he's added a hook designed to excite them:


They just can't quit Lena Dunham, see; she's like the anti-Fox Fembot and her very existence, even on the fringes of popular art, enrages them. (I understand Goldberg's second choice was "Why Obama's birth certificate shouldn't be allowed to vote.") National Review even has an actual editorial about Dunham, as if she were ISIS or the Cyprus question.

Back to Goldberg: How's the content? Bet you're sorry you asked:
Dunham says that "voting is kind of a gateway drug to 'getting involved.'" 
This is a widely held view and, as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no truth to it. But even if voting boosted civic participation, the very idea puts the cart before the horse. It is like saying you should buy a car because that way you might learn to drive or take the test and then study for it.
Similarly, it's like reading a book to become smart, which is backwards; everybody knows that only smart people with Van Dykes and designer specs can read books cuz they've been properly educated in liberal fasciology -- try and read without that, and you might learn the wrong things.

Anyway, you know how they feel about you voting -- and in America's redder precincts on Election Day, their message is spread by deeds rather than words. So let's go ahead and vote, then, if only because it pisses off the idiots.

UPDATE. So, when's the impeachment start?

Monday, January 27, 2014

WATCH YOUR BACK, GOLDBERG.

Betsy Woodruff of National Review on how Macklemore won a Grammy because homos:
Far be it from me to assume there’s any rhyme or reason behind who wins Grammys (ha! not doing that).
The very next goddamn sentence:
But it’s hard not to look at this situation and wonder if the Grammys put politics before music.
This breathtaking display of self-unawareness, along with her ridiculous Lena Dunham columns, makes Woodruff the front-runner to replace Jonah Goldberg as the Corporal Agarn of NR's culture war troops.

Anyway I don't know what she's complaining about; one might as easily argue that Daft Punk's big night is a victory for the Singularity.

UPDATE. Hear hear, M. Krebs in comments: "Actually it's hard not to wonder if there's anything the Grammys don't put before music."

Plus, Formerly_Nom_De_Plume:
I won’t be talking about Ryan Lewis at all here because first, I don’t know anything about him 
lost out to someone named Ariana Grande about whom I know nothing 
Someone with a better grasp of hip-hop history than I (read: someone with any grasp of it at all, really) 
(And if this piece already exists, can someone send it to me?)
Her training is complete. Jonah watch his back? More like congratulate himself on a job well done.