by wj
“‘Tis better to have lived and loafed,
than never to have loafed at all.”
Discuss
304 thoughts on “Labor Day Open Thread”
Comments are closed.
"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by wj
“‘Tis better to have lived and loafed,
than never to have loafed at all.”
Discuss
Comments are closed.
In fact, I would argue, there are two sorts of people: those who could happily do nothing all day every day but sit around, and those who would need to find something to do. And a lot of people, even those who consider themselves seriously overworked, fall into the latter category.
Don’t believe it? Consider how many people hit retirement . . . and then rapidly fade away. Consider also that maybe, just maybe, the reason that women live longer past 65 than men is that they are traditionally expected to keep doing the same things that they have done all their lives: cooking, housekeeping, etc. In short, their lives have purpose that doesn’t suddenly disappear on them.
The guys who live a long time seem, from by tiny and personal observation, to be those who have, or rapidly acquire, hobbies to keep them busy. Or who contrive, one way or another, to keep working. Even if not at the same job that formed their career. I think for example of my uncle, who was a lawyer. He didn’t keep practicing law. But he spent his last couple of decades (until age 90+) serving as the part-time country law librarian.
Speaking as one of the sad sacks who had to work on Labor Day, I get to celebrate the achievements of the American Worker by…doing what I would do on any other Monday.
Hooray?
Speaking as one of the sad sacks who had to work on Labor Day
I am lucky in that I love my work. Labor day is a day for laboring, as is (most) other days.
I do feel for the people in service oriented jobs…not only do they not get off, but they tend to have to put up with more (possibly drunken) people than typical. Because holiday!
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Vonnegut
Personally, I’m blessed with the need to get the reading done before death steps in with the punchline.
I admit to mistaking the owning and fondling of some books for the reading of them, because of procrastination and an inability to sit quietly in a room alone, (which presents itelf as a restlessness that makes me stand up with great energy and impulse and move myself to another place to sit down again; I take a book with me on that round trip) which Pascal identified as the source of all the troubles of the human.
I wonder to myself how is it that the writers through the eons found time to write when they hadn’t finished the reading yet.
“Living’s mostly wasting time
I’ll waste my share of mine
But it never feels too good
So let’s don’t take too long”
Townes Van Zandt
I mostly keep busy on Labor Day…I agree with wj’s dichotomy, and am on the “must work” side.
Not today. Loafed all day, thanks to a stomach bug. I’d rather be working.
The Right To Be Lazy
there are two sorts of people
i don’t loaf much, and i never feel the need to find something to do. but there’s always something i want to do.
best 7 months ever were when i was laid-off with severance and bonus, so i could spend my days doing what i want. i got so much done. work is just an interruption of the things i actually want to do. retirement will be heaven.
I tell people “my retirement plan is to keep working.” I enjoy my work but it does get in the way of learning to play the piano (*sigh*).
there’s always something I want to do.
Which merely means that your need to “do something” is readily satisfied.
‘Tis better to have lived and loafed,
than never to have loafed…
Pretty uncontroversial from where I’m lounging.
And I agree with the Count – too many books; too little time.
I wonder to myself how is it that the writers through the eons found time to write when they hadn’t finished the reading yet.
In my experience writing cuts down on the reading.
Case in point: historical novels. Once authors wrote just one (at most two) and did a lot of research (=reading) for that. The most famous ones were written by history professors.
These days ‘authors’ produce them serially, thicker and heavier than bricks but at best the research consists of watching some movies.
Other genres are not immune either. The ‘Twilight’ lady did not read a single book on the subject and (iirc) did not watch any movies either. The result is about a yard of shelf space (and more is not unlikely to come) of stuff that only girls of a certain age can tolerate (some are luckily immune though).
This is what I did yesterday:
-Went to Pep Boys to get my wife’s tire fixed and oil changed.
-Availed myself of their free WiFi; discovered that it was even slower than my Dad’s DSL.
-Went to Lowe’s and tried to find a digital audio cable (NOT TosLink). Went to HH Gregg’s for same. Finally went to Radio Shack and was able to buy one.
-Hooked up the new BluRay machine and downloaded a software upgrade for it. Why it’s necessary to upgrade SW on a brand new machine is a mystery that still haunts me.
-Test-drove it on Breaking Away; then realized that a 35-year-old movie was probably not my best source material. Located a BluRay version of Tangled; verified that it was the only BluRay disc in the house, and watched that. Markedly better.
-Moved the DVD player into our bedroom; hooked it to the TV set there and after a few false starts, got it working.
-Went to the grocery, got some carrots, onions and cabbage to make Poulet Yassa. Chicken and more onions were already marinating from a couple of days before.
-Cooked said Poulet Yassa with rice and had it for dinner, to the delight of all present.
-Learned to play bid euchre; played a couple of games with dad and his wife.
All in all: was not entirely idle, yet managed to avoid most outdoor chores. It’s been 92 degrees here in mid-southern Indiana for the past several days, and it’s humid enough to discourage unnecessary outdoor activities. But we get a break this week, where it’ll fall down below 80 degrees for the highs again.
I tend to agree that everyone has the right to loaf. But I would add that the people who are loafing (as opposed to unable to work) have no reasonable expectation that I should support them in their endeavors.
That’s really all I have to say about that.
Oh, yes:
-Bought a copy of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. It’s on top of my to-read list, as soon as I finish the book I am reading now.
I exaggerate, but I’ve always had a little trouble keeping my attention on the task at hand.
My life is a bit of an open thread.
Not that I’m not paying attention to SOMETHING, just not what’s in front of me.
Just between us, mind you.
In school, I was more likely than not sneaking a peek at a novel in my lap while algebra class droned on around me, but on to English or History class where I would give some rapt surreptitious attention to the baseball box scores or the stats on the backs of baseball cards while questions were directed my non-listening direction regarding the Abyss in Paradise Lost.
One time, on a gorgeous Spring day in English class in 9th grade, I was doing just that, but I was also absentmindedly leaning back in my chair. Suddenly, I started to fall backwards, and I grabbed the desk in front of me, but gravity got the best of me as my chair went over, in slow motion with very little noise, the desk following, and there I was at the back of the class sitting, but on my back, the desk on top of me, and my feet up in the air.
Mr. Monk stopped what he was doing with an expression of disbelief on his face and everyone turned and thank you Tom Ladley for coming back and restoring my uprightness, because I was trapped in a absurdity of my own devising, like maybe this was something he did every day.
Mr. Monk’s expression turned into a smirk and he inquired, bemusedly but with great gentleness, if everything was O.K., and I managed to get a red faced “Yes” out and gave the rest of the class an “As you were and carry on” look.
The Abyss, indeed.
No one said a word, but it occurs to me now that it would have been funny if a yearbook photographer had been on hand to snap a picture and there I would be on page 78 caught in aspic for eternity.
Even when I played baseball as a kid, my mind would be somewhere else some of the time. I remember at the military academy hitting a line drive single as a lead off hitter, rounding first and my mind immediately going into an overdrive technicolor daydream of me at the center of a ticker tape parade, with headline banners unfurling like in the old movies, for getting that incredible hit.
A minute later I heard what sounded like the sound (a beautiful sound now) of a baseball hitting leather and the first baseman tagged me out just off first, and it still took me a few seconds to figure out reality.
Back to the dugout for the silent treatment.
I don’t do that any more.
I pay attention when I cook, too.
You know, it never it occurred to me that the loafing we are talking about was the “work-avoidance” welfare type of loafing, but rather a state of mind.
It always kills me that “loafing” in American culture denotes an object of censure, and something to be warned off of.
😉
It’s “a little work never hurt anyone” one day, the next day it’s “we’ve examined our inputs and outputs and productivity quotients and we’ve decided your services are no longer required.”
Make up your minds.
euchre!
first real card game i learned (‘war’ doesn’t count as a real game). but it’s tough to find people who know that one here in NC. everybody who knows it is either from NY or learned it from family in NY.
Which merely means that your need to “do something” is readily satisfied.
doesn’t feel exactly like i ‘need to do something’. feels more like i have so much that i want to do that i couldn’t possibly not have anything to do. i really only get bored when i’m blocked waiting on something that i have to do. on my own time, i’m never bored.
we’re busy cleaning and de-cluttering the house for selling, packing for moving, nudging the builder to get the new house done. but i also tricked myself into getting interested in non-photorealistic-rendering (teaching computers how to simulate human sketching/painting) so i really want to work on that. there’s also my real job, which eats up all my time but funds all the stuff i really want to do.
rats
I grew up in a town whose chief industries were mobile home and RV manufacturing, and I didn’t learn to play euchre until I was well into college, despite the proliferation of euchre clubs in middle and high school.
I may have mentioned that I was somewhat of an oddball.
And speaking of baseball tragedies: I was once beaned with a line drive while lost in thought, wandering across the baseball fields. So I am feeling a certain kinship with the Count.
We’re not even going to talk about me running myself, my bicycle, and my two front teeth into the back end of a parked car while lost in thought. My testicles impacted the stem right about the time my teeth were snapped off on the back end of the trunk, so it was all rather confusing for a bit as to what should hurt the most.
I said: I am not going to talk about that.
Anyway: euchre is a game that is very common in the Midwest, that one can win while too drunk to stand up from the table. That’s how I define it to newbies, anyway. It helps if you can pay attention and keep track of what has been played, but the game also responds well to what-the-hell, I can make it on left-nine and the queens of the other three suits.
It’s best not to rely on that, though.
Bid euchre, though, is an entirely different game (really, it’s practically an entire category of games), played with two euchre decks (48 cards) and all of the cards are dealt. It’s not as complicated as bridge, but playing of it is also a bit less predictable. Probably best played sober.
The card game was preceded by a chat (with my 14-year-old daughter and all adults) about the movie The Imitation Game, which my wife and kid and I had watched the previous evening. It turned out to have been a really great choice in movies, because she now wants to know all about Alan Turing in particular and cryptography in general. I am this close to getting her to start reading Cryptonomicon. Even better: she’s showing signs of being interested in how all of this stuff worked to steer the course of history.
So, a fairly productive weekend, altogether, in a sense.
I suppose we ought to distinguish two (multiple) versions of loafing. Some is the kind of thing that leaps first to my mind: someone sitting mindlessly watching daytime TV, simply because it requires no effort — physical or mental. Then there is the kind of thing we all see to be describing: doing thing, just not something that pays a regular salary or requires heavy manual labor. Including writing comments here. 😉
And then there is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. One which I happen to regard as mankind’s most underrated virtue: sloth. Sloth, after all, is responsible for most human progress. Who invented the wheel? Someone who got tired of carrying the game home from the hunt, and wanted an easier way. Who invented agriculture? Someone who got tired of tromping all over the countryside forraging for edible plants. The list goes on and on.
And yet nobody seems to value sloth properly. Wonder why that is? (I’m guessing, at least in European cultures, some kind of religious attachment to the supposed virtues of work….)
Rhetorically,
There are still Radio Shacks?
http://www.fastcompany.com/3042121/the-recommender/look-how-awesome-radioshack-was-in-the-1980s
While my mind is wandering, this story.
Some of you may remember my 87-year old mother suffers from Alzheimer’s (why Alzheimer couldn’t have kept this disease to himself is beyond me; I have the same complaint about Lou Gehrig), with all of the usual depredations.
I had been thinking about missing our telephone conversations and the sound of her voice.
Also, one my earliest memories is of me as a toddler seemingly on my own in the living room of the house we lived in at the time. My mother would be doing her thing in the kitchen and mysteriously would call my name in this lilting voice just as I would reach for some fragile geegaw on a table, but I couldn’t see her and couldn’t figure out how she saw me. I would instantly pull my hands away from the desired object and look around for her, probably with mouth open in wonder.
This routine would repeat itself.
Years later, I recounted this memory to her and asked her how she did that and she said there was mirror in the hallway leading from the kitchen to the living room that allowed her to spy on me as she beat the eggs, or shucked the corn, or slaughtered and dismembered a lamb (that last she didn’t do, that I know of).
Anyway, several weeks ago I had a dream in which she called me on the telephone and I could here her very faintly, as if from very far away in the distance, calling my name exactly as she did 62 years ago or so, attentively and sweetly to gently ward off into the right direction.
There would be long pauses in the dream phone call between her utterances of my name, and I would ask her, with increasing frustration in my voice, Mom, what is it, what do you need, etc?
And then wait, until she called my name again, barely audible.
And that was all.
That actually made me cry a bit, Count. It’s a story to make even a rock shed a tear.
“(I’m guessing, at least in European cultures, some kind of religious attachment to the supposed virtues of work….)”
I kid, but there seems to be a fine line between gainful employment and slave labor in most cultures.
As in, everyone needs to pull their weight, and if you don’t, we’ll withhold seafood (in Kansas and a few other states) and other comestibles from you and holding forth the threat that we’ll put you to work sweeping up the sidewalks or some such.
Like it’s a choice.
And with that, the vestigial Protestant guilt in me about wasting my time and yours blogging has set in and I have some things that need to be done.
After a quick lie down.
“hear” as in “hear her”, not as in “she’s still “here”, but not really.
That dream was a companion piece to one I had about five years ago when we were coming to the realization that our mother was embarking on terminally losing it, thought there was not yet a diagnosis and she was still fairly functional, or at least simulating functionality.
I was visiting her to get the lie of the land, and was sleeping in an upstairs bedroom.
The earlier dream was simply this: I was awakened by a noise and noticed my mother, making her way back lit through the hallway, silently stopping at the doorway to my room and looking in, it seemed unseeingly, but maybe checking up on me (she was a champion checker-upper), and then turning like a ghost and entering her room adjacent.
The thing is, in the dream, she was not her age at the time — 82 or so — she was a young woman of maybe 23, the age she was when I was born.
Her hair was long and she was beautiful.
But she wasn’t there.
I went to a military academy too:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/08/1419373/-Trump-always-felt-that-I-was-in-the-military-when-he-was-at-military-themed-boarding-school
I still suffer from PTSD because of the snap inspections and the mess hall chow.
Lost both legs and an arm climbing over a wall in the dark after going AWOL with buddies one night for a little towny action, excuse me, to patrol the hostile teenaged girls in the nearby village, which is to say, none at all.
Yet, the VA turns me down when I seek care.
So I feel for the Donald.
More than I do for Cheney’s and Limbaugh’s various and diversionary anal complaints.
Here’s a little alternate history scenario for us to consider.
As I was recently reminded, back in 1972 President Nixon considered Edward Burke of Massachusettes as a Vice Presidential running mate. (He eventually settled on Spiro Angew.) Suppose he had done that, what would be different today?
Well, for openers, we would have had our first black President in the 1970s. And, when that happened, the seismic shift in US politics which saw the Dixiecrats take over the GOP would have died in its cradle.
The Republicans would have likely remained the more conservative party. But it would be a center right, not a rightwing reactionary, party. And the Democrats would have been, overall, a more liberal party than they are today. If only because they would not have picked up all the liberal, moderate, and ever moderately conservative ex-Republicans that they have.
My dad felt like he was in the military, too, when he went to school at CMA. But then he went on to serve a term of enlistment in the USAF.
Never saw any combat, though. Never even left the country. It probably helped there weren’t any wars in the offing at the time.
Not that I’m not paying attention to SOMETHING, just not what’s in front of me.
My life, in a nutshell.
What I’m trying to figure out is why, now that the industrial revolution and the subsequent innovations in automation etc. have made it unnecessary for most folks to break their freaking backs just to grow a potato or do the laundry, so many folks are still working so many hours, often for not so much money.
Promises were made! And I’m not talking about jetpacks, just, you know, a reasonable balance between work and life.
I would say that Americans don’t have a work ethic, they have a work obsession. A kind of work OCD.
Europeans, to pick up on wj’s comment, in general don’t have this. They work, with great industry and application, and then, when it’s lunchtime or the end of the day or the month of August, they don’t.
Then, they go do something else.
As far as loafing goes, when I have time to loaf, I don’t mess around. I find a couch, I take my shoes off, I put a pillow under my head, and I take a nap.
It drives my wife crazy, especially if there are chores to do, which is basically all the time, but over time I’ve begun wearing her down. She will occasionally take a nap, too, these days, although she has to take a book and pretend she’s reading in order to justify it to herself.
Sometimes I can get her to take a nap at the same time that I do, which, now that I’m approaching geezerhood, seems like marital bliss, to me.
It rather seems to me that the obsession with work among Americans is actually a relatively new phenomena. In my own case, I recall working in the 1970s. We showed up at 8, did our jobs, went home at 5, and didn’t think about work again until the next morning.
But by the 1990s (and I was still doing IT) we would go in (sometimes early), stay late, and when we got home (oron weekends) we’d log in to work and deal with more stuff. I don’t recall details on how that happened. But in retrospect I think a significant part of it was the Internet making it possible to do IT work even after we went home.
It would be interersting to know if of work saw similar expansion in hours over the same period.
No boundaries. And not on our terms.
My sister had a boss who thought nothing of calling her up for 90 minutes of ridiculous points of business at 9:30 pm.
I was in the car with her when he called one time and he talked non-stop for about an hour, mostly regarding strategizing over what seemed to me office politics.
She made funny faces at me throughout and I would pantomime taking the phone from her and sticking it down the front of my pants and such like.
On the other hand, she works entirely from home via phone and email, when she isn’t traveling to check on offices.
On yet the other hand, no one ever calls and says “Hey, we had a lot of fun today. Put down whatever you’re doing and get over here for more fun.”
No one can convince me that email, cell phones, conference calls and the like add anything to productivity, ymmv according to the profession. Mostly they subtract.
In fact, to the extent I’ve been involved, most of it seems like group loafing when some actual work could be accomplished.
And what’s with the question “Who do you report to?” I don’t remember any of my father’s associates or him (he was a steel company executive) ever uttering those words when I happened to be around them, nor anyone else until maybe 20-25 years ago.
If someone asked me that question, I’d answer, “The KGB, what’s it to ya?”
I smell the dirty work of hundreds of thousands of busybody, officious, self-important MBA graduates justifying their existence.
Shut up, Barney. Don’t you have some filing to do?
And what’s with the question “Who do you report to?”
Whenever I interview at any company, one of the first questions I ask is “Who will own my time?”
If there isn’t a clear answer, and/or if the answer includes more than one person, I think more than twice about working there.
No one can convince me that email, cell phones, conference calls and the like add anything to productivity, ymmv according to the profession. Mostly they subtract.
I’ve been pondering this one for some time. I think things may have gotten better as far as e-mail goes. I don’t get the same sense of abuse that I did, say, 10 years ago.
I think it takes a certain amount of time for a group of people to figure out what to do about something, depending on what that might be and how many people are (or should be) involved. Short of it being a matter of doing lots of calculations, I don’t see technology helping much, at least not in the hands of most humans.
The extra time it took in the old days to get information around gave people time to think. They need that same thinking time either way, so I don’t know that much has been gained by constant electronic connectedness.
I think “Who do you report to?” arose because people (at least in some positions) do not have someone who actually supervises their work.
That is, they are expected to get results, but nobody is looking over their shoulder at how they do their job, or how they go about getting the desired results. They are not, in the strict sense of the term, supervised. Or, often, managed. But they do have someone to whom they report their results.
I suppose the alternate way to ask the question would be “Who writes your performance evaluations?” At least, if the organization has performance evals — and some small companies (like the one I work for) don’t. But everybody has someone that they report to. (Even the CEO has a board of directors to report to. 😉
So just put the phrase down to the changing nature of the workplace.
I would agree that things have gotten better with e-mail. Texting, however, has a ways to go yet.
Bah, I had to labor all weekend. Although fundamentally it is my fault, I suppose: I agreed to do the side work that took up Saturday and Monday, and my desire not to lose control of a project kept me working on Sunday, but anyways, in re wj’s firsto comment, I reference a Damon Knight story from the mid-60s, whose name I don’t recall, set in a future in which nobody has to work at all, and doesn’t get old or sick or anything. The bit I’ve always liked is when he describes how the world is made up of Students and Players — those who will find something to do or study even when there’s no need to, and those who would rather, well, play. (Please note that he was not so prefigurative as to call them Playas.) I believe I am the first type, but if I ever get so rich as to have a chance to find out, I’l let you all know if I’m wrong, if I get around to it.
bobbyp sez, You Don’t Really Need to Work So Much.
Happy Labor Day.
wj: Sloth, after all, is responsible for most human progress. Who invented the wheel? Someone who got tired of carrying the game home from the hunt, and wanted an easier way.
Necessity may be the acknowledged mother of invention, but I have long suspected laziness to be the father.
–TP
Tony, it’s a match made in heaven!
From bobbyp’s latest link:
What counts as work, in the skilled trades, has some intrinsic limits; once a house or bridge is built, that’s the end of it. But in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities—that is, reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs. Consider the litigation system, in which the hours worked by lawyers at large law firms are a common complaint. If dispute resolution is the social function of the law, what we have is far from the most efficient way to reach fair or reasonable resolutions. Instead, modern litigation can be understood as a massive, socially unnecessary arms race, wherein lawyers subject each other to torturous amounts of labor just because they can. In older times, the limits of technology and a kind of professionalism created a natural limit to such arms races, but today neither side can stand down, lest it put itself at a competitive disadvantage.
I see a milder version of this in my workplace, not so much resulting in longer hours, but making the hours people do work less truly productive. Some of it comes from lawyers, some from risk managers, some from accountants, some performing whatever unnecessary compliance function, some from people who are just what I would consider natural-born bureaucrats – people who can over-complicate achieving any simple goal, who have virtually no ability to prioritize tasks, and who can endlessly hypothesize and speculate about the most unlikely of negative consequences of any chosen course of action.
Sometimes, in the rarest of cases, even my fellow engineers will create unnecessary work. I know, you’re all terribly shocked by this. And I’m sorry for that.
(On another note, my wife is always impressed with my ability to neatly fold clothes. I tell her it’s a skill gained only out my disdain for ironing anything EVAR!!! In other words, a form of laziness.)
besides, folding clothes is a process that can, and should, be designed and controlled by an engineer.
Laziness would be wearing the clothes after not folding or ironing them.
The next step would be sleeping in your clothes and wearing them the next day as well.
If you are so inclined, shower while wearing your clothes too.
Like Kramer’s (Seinfeld) efficiency measures, take your dirty dishes into the shower with you as well.
My late father-in-law, when I was married, began keeping a bottle under his bed to urinate in at night. We thought this was a sign of his characteristic laziness, but it wasn’t too soon after that we concluded it was an early sign of dementia, which eventually killed him.
The continual onslaught of labor-saving devices must be developed by inherently lazy people. It makes me doubt the sincerity of those who prize hard work and the sweat of one’s brow.
Work shall set you free.
A little work never hurt anyone.
Here’s a device that will save you from doing even the little work.
Now get to work, you lazy bum.
She shot an elephant in her vagina the other day. What it was doing in her vagina, she’ll never know.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/waco-texas-gun-vagina-methamphetamine
Ma’am, you given birth to a brand new little pistol. You say the father was an AK-47 with a big clip? Looks like he shot his wad, I’d say.
Ted Cruz immediately threatened to shut down the government (for which he should be shot in the head by patriots) if the woman used the services of Planned Gunhood to procure either gun control methods or to remove the fetal gun from her vagina unless it was fully operable and capable of killing post-born humans.
Without missing a beat, Mike Huckabee promised, if elected, two guns in every heterosexual vagina and an immediate end to gun adoption by gay couples who might want to defend themselves against subhuman Republican vermin.
Jeb Bush offered a tax plan which included a tax credit for every gun born to woman. Ted Nugent immediately grew a vagina, which now makes two orifices he talks out of.
Donald Trump merely wanted to know, so if that thing goes off when I’m in there with my gun, what then? I’m HUUUGE.
Ben Carson said confiscation of vaginal guns by the government was yet another example of the plague of political correctnes and worse than slavery, the latter of which now comes in third on the list of worst things that have ever happened.
I then dropped all politically correct pretense and called him a former idiot savant surgeon who has backslid into the simple, murderous ideological idiocy of the rest of his filthy, anti-American lickspittle political party of dangerous sh*theads and then he started to cry because his pigf*cker feelings were hurt.
Sarah Death Vagina twitted that she would begin carrying a loaded AR-15 in her vagina to show solidarity with the woman in the news, remarking that “I’ve got plenty of room to spare down there since the McKinley National Guard rented the space while I was Governor of the great state of McKinley a few years ago.”
FOX News and Brietbart vied with each other for who would be the first to have the Waco wacko woman on to demonstrate her gun accuracy by having spread her legs and shoot an apple off the top of a photograph of Barack Obama’s head.
At the last minute, however, Bill O’Reilly unzipped his gun and challenged the woman to a duel.
Dick Cheney said the Iranian deal should be scuttled and American women flown over Iran vagina-downwards to shoot Iranians in the tops of their heads.
For her part, the woman with the loaded vagina asked on no one ion particular, “What has happened to this great c*ntry of mine?
I say we’re about a year and a half away from reality making satire completely superfluous.
Modern life is even gonna put the folks at the Onion out of work.
The Republican leaders in Congress will bring a Bill to the floor to change the name of the State of Alaska to Ohio, saying it sounded less politically correct and more murican than one of them homosexual Injun names.
Have Donald Trump and Vermin Supreme ever been seen in the same room?
Just asking…
If Vermin Supreme causes all the Vermin (including Vermin Lesser) to lose elections permanently … that would be a really good thing. Unfortunately, the electorate has surprised us in a bad way several too many times during my adulthood.
i’d normally expect to see at least some ObWi conservative regulars stepping up to applaud the GOP circus. but clearly these aren’t normal times.
Laziness would be wearing the clothes after not folding or ironing them.
That’s laziness of body and mind. Practical laziness is calculated layering; that way the outer clothes go from your body back to the hanger, and the inner layer gets balled up and chucked in a hamper with no concern whatever about whether it’s wrinkled. Obviously, this doesn’t work as well in hot environments, but when you can do it, it also spares wear and tear from excessive laundering on your less-expendable non-basics. I’d not recommend it without a suitably large wardrobe that you can give any particular parcel of clothing a week off between wearings, though.
Can you be obsessive and lazy at the same time?
😉
cleek, it is possible to be a conservative regular and not be crazy. But it is, apparently, extremely difficult if not impossible to be a candidate for the GOP nomination without at least giving a convincing simulation of insanity.
There are a couple of folks among them who look relatively sane and sensible. But I suspect that the critical work in that sentence is “relatively.”
And that’s why you don’t see any of us applauding. We may not like any of the Democrats currently on offer. But even if we vote for the Republican candidate next year, it will very likely be a vote against, not a vote for. And some of us may not be able, depending on who ends up with the nomination, to do even that.
…when he describes how the world is made up of Students and Players
The fun people are both.
I say we’re about a year and a half away from reality making satire completely superfluous…
You think President Trump is likely, then ?
i’d normally expect to see at least some ObWi conservative regulars stepping up to applaud the GOP circus. but clearly these aren’t normal times.
I’m primarily occupied watching Hillary’s ever-growing, modified limited hang out. I’m a Fiorina fan, Kasich second. Not really a third.
McKinney,
When you say “not really a third”, do you mean that if neither of them gets the GOP nomination you will not bother to vote in the general election?
I mean, if my own impossible dream comes true, and we get a Trump-Cheney versus Sanders-Biden race, would you just stay home next November?
–TP
McKinney, just curious. What do you think Fiorina brings to the table that Kasich doesn’t?
Half of Republican Voters Now Support Trump or Carson: The Donald might turn out be the new Rick or Rudy, but we haven’t seen this kind of sustained outsider enthusiasm in recent history
we haven’t seen this kind of sustained outsider enthusiasm in recent history
indeed. and in at least one poll, Sanders leads Clinton in both NH and Iowa.
When you say “not really a third”, do you mean that if neither of them gets the GOP nomination you will not bother to vote in the general election?
My I-Phone response didn’t go through. It will depend on who the Dems run, but I’d likely vote the down ballot and write in if it was Trump or Huckabee or Cruz. Have to wait and see.
McKinney, just curious. What do you think Fiorina brings to the table that Kasich doesn’t?
I think she’ intelligent, answers questions substantively and responsively. She isn’t shielded from public view except for limited, “spontaneous” events and doesn’t have to reinvent herself every several months. Also, she doesn’t seem to lie a lot. Generally, she answers the way I would if I were as quick on my feet as she is.
I don’t view Hewlitt Packard as a deal breaker at all. Plenty of CEO’s make bad decisions. I’m sure her’s was the worst ever, or will be played that way–by people who couldn’t get within five levels of CEO in a publicly traded company. I have had some personal insight into Fortune 500 decision making over the years. Bad decisions are often the product of underlying advice that could have been better, a misread of the future or bad luck. Good luck is often confused with great insight–I should know. Nothing Fiorina did at HP matches, say, the foolishness and naivete of the Russian reset. Or dismissing ISIL as the “JV”. Or going into Libya on his own initiative.
So, everyone makes mistakes. Even me, although they are vanishingly rare.
I ran across a quote the other day by somebody, maybe Ambrose Bierce, and it went something like this:
There is something wrong in the Constitution and I don’t know how we are going to fix it. It seems only crazy people run for President.
How do both Trump AND Sanders lead in New Hampshire, let alone Iowa?
Did they count Vermonters in the Sanders poll?
Or do the “Live Free or Die” franchisees want their sh*tty roads fixed with increased taxes before they commit suicide.
I say it’s Daffy Duck’s time to shine.
As for Putin, he and the Republican Party use every attempt at a reset to bare their nipples and to f*ck Obama, who, yes, is extremely naive in many ways.
It’s almost as if they ……
There is no soul within either of these enemies, despite rumors to the contrary.
Sending our troops to Crimea, for example, or threatening other unidentified military action there would have necessitated sending troops or embarking on other military action against the State of Texas as well to prevent Putin/Republican flanking maneuvers.
I’m often wrong, but as in another of Bierce’s helpful definitions — of an optimist, in this case — I’m mistaken at the top of my voice.
So, everyone makes mistakes…
Of course.
But owing those mistakes, rather than pretending they weren’t mistakes at all, is for me a necessary precondition for consideration.
Bad decisions are often the product of underlying advice that could have been better, a misread of the future or bad luck.
Bad decisions are also the product of vanity, infighting, jealousy, misplaced priorities, narcissistic personalities, selfishness, and personality conflicts, among other things, based on personal insight into Fortune 25 decision making over the years.
In any event, even assuming Fiorina did the best possible job anyone could have done as CEO of HP during her tenure, she’s handicapped by the party apparatus/membership she’s attached herself to in this race. Until there is significant change in that, it needs to be kept as far away from the U.S. Executive Branch as possible. Preferably the Dark Side of the Moon.
But owing those mistakes, rather than pretending they weren’t mistakes at all, is for me a necessary precondition for consideration.
Sure. And does that extend to Hillary and Obama?
In any event, even assuming Fiorina did the best possible job anyone could have done as CEO of HP during her tenure, she’s handicapped by the party apparatus/membership she’s attached herself to in this race. Until there is significant change in that, it needs to be kept as far away from the U.S. Executive Branch as possible. Preferably the Dark Side of the Moon.
Partisanship = tunnel vision. There are abundant defects to go around.
First off, and McKinney knows this more than anyone else here, I don’t count him as a member of the enemy side.
However, the enemy side, by its own definition and stated goals of ransacking the Republican Party of every trace of moderation, compromise, common sense and RINO sensibilities and vowing now, repeatedly in recent days, to burn that Party down to punish it, clearly counts McKinney among its enemies.
In a way, McKinney et al, are the first line of defense in preventing these malignant sociopaths from destroying the country and burning me down in the process.
I’m not particularly interested any longer in the pretense of elections to defeat this mortal enemy, because each two-year iteration in which they lose or in which they don’t win by overwhelming landslides, as they believe they should by God’s intention, they rachet up the malignancy and become yet more armed, vicious, threatening, and dangerous.
They aren’t going to burn themselves out.
And, elections won’t solve this. For the good of the country, it will take savage violence against these enemies to fix this problem.
The kind Lincoln put into effect, except there won’t be uniformed armies and identifiable battlegrounds, or battle fronts.
They’ll start it.
In a way, McKinney et al, are the first line of defense in preventing these malignant sociopaths from destroying the country and burning me down in the process.
Ok, let’s chat. What specific issues on the right are so far out of the mainstream as to merit the Count’s locked and loaded intervention?
I’ll throw one in: Cruz’s pledge to abolish the IRS.
What else and who, as a *viable* nominee, holds that position?
From my side of it, I look at the thought-policing and conformity-enforcing left, particularly the despicable twitter mobs , and it scares the shit out of me. Because almost no one on the left is pushing back.
I see something as ridiculous as the dishonestly-named “yes means yes” passed with minimal discussion and no meaningful pushback, and it occurs to me that if the left is willing to regulate sex, there really isn’t any limit to what is fair for regulatory reach.
From friends who practice under–or quit practicing because of–ACA, I know how freaking, overwhelmingly, stupidly oppressive the regulatory state can be. And it is nauseating. One example, all physicians were required to pay for electronic records keeping systems that start at 100K. Boom, a federal fiat and no right of appeal. No public debate, nothing. Doctors are twinkies by and large, and failed to fight back.
We all saw the EPA ruin a river with zero accountability. If it had been a private actor, Doc S would have posted on the need for more regs, blah, blah, blah. When the state is running the show and fncks up, it’s radio silence.
So, yes, the Tea Party and others have their issues. But for long term damage to freedom of thought and conscience, for the right to make a living without every damn thing you do being subject to gov’t inspection and regulation, I’ll take the right any day.
I don’t expect anyone here to agree with me. I cannot take the Count seriously when he equates Putin and conservatives in America. Conservatives would resist Putin (e.g. not taking anti-missile defense out of Poland because Vlad said to), Obama is mute. When the PRC flexes its muscle, Obama is mute. There is a humanitarian crises in the Mid East authored by Obama’s JV. Obama is mute. Obama gets a pass from the media and from the left–why? No accountability. And, it’s all Bush’ fault anyway.
When the state is running the show and fncks up, it’s radio silence.
Allow me to correct that.
The EPA, in the process of trying to clean up the toxic, poisonous crap left behind at an abandoned mine site, fucked up. It leaked into the Animas River. That was bad.
Clearly, the solution is to 86 all of the regs having to do with mining operations, and rely on the private operators of mines to do the right thing.
Which they will, of course, do.
All we need to do is get the freaking government out of the way. Then all the problems will just correct themselves.
And yeah, the ACA is great big stinking regulatory train wreck. And, the number of uninsured people has gone down significantly. Which was the point.
It’s true, doctors have had lots more expense and general BS to deal with, which I’m sure is a PITA.
That said, to me, 50 million people with no fucking health insurance, in the wealthiest nation on the planet, is kind of nauseating.
To each his own.
Also, not for nothing, but the connection between Putin and American conservatives is that American conservatives freaking love him. They can’t get enough of him.
Vlad with no shirt on, riding a horse.
Vlad with a gun, hunting big game.
Vlad the judo master, kicking somebody’s ass.
He’s a bully and an authoritarian thug, and that makes their hearts go pit-a-pat.
I got sick of hearing all about it, so I asked some folks I know, including family, to stop sending me the Putin mash notes.
That’s why your average lefty might be inclined to think there’s a connection between Putin and American conservatives.
And yeah, I know, it’s just those fringe knuckleheads, not like anybody any of us know.
Last but not least, I won’t speak for the Count, but the thing that would prompt me to get my lock and load freak on would be another couple of years of listening to right-wing @ssholes talking about all the people they are going to shoot.
You know, people like me.
I’m bloody well sick of it.
If the Count’s shtick bugs you, just consider it a fun house mirror for what the right sounds like to the rest of us.
Also, not for nothing, but the connection between Putin and American conservatives is that American conservatives freaking love him. They can’t get enough of him.
Seriously? Who, of any national prominence?
The EPA, in the process of trying to clean up the toxic, poisonous crap left behind at an abandoned mine site, fucked up. It leaked into the Animas River. That was bad.
Anyone being fired? And the VA? Accountability?
And yeah, the ACA is great big stinking regulatory train wreck. And, the number of uninsured people has gone down significantly. Which was the point.
Does anyone have reliable numbers on how many uninsured are now insured? And at what cost?
but the thing that would prompt me to get my lock and load freak on would be another couple of years of listening to right-wing @ssholes talking about all the people they are going to shoot.
Who, on the national level, endorses this kind of thing? Are you talking outliers or mainstream conservatives? If there is some remote corner of the internet where freaks make threats, that is part of the weirdness you are going to get in a country our size. But, are saying that death threats is main stream conservatism? I need more than one, non-outlier example of this.
The EPA, in the process of trying to clean up the toxic, poisonous crap left behind at an abandoned mine site…
Unlike those who walked away without a care in the world after they were done with the mineral extraction, leaving an ecological time bomb for the rest of us to deal with.
Conservatives: Always, always, always, digging to privatize profits and socialize costs. The lesson is this: They never stop.
Neither should we.
I look at the thought-policing and conformity-enforcing left
WTeverlovinF
“conservatives” are still going on, eight years on, about Obama’s religion: is he Christian at all? is he the right kind of Christian? is he Christian enough?
does he love America? does he love it enough? is he even culturally American? what about Michelle – does she love America enough?
why won’t Obama wear a flag pin? does he love Israel enough? why won’t he use the magic words when talking about ISIS?
the GOP thought police are always on duty.
if the left is willing to regulate sex,
it isn’t.
One example, all physicians were required to pay for electronic records keeping systems that start at 100K.
i’m willing to bet that the price of the systems was not specified in the law.
We all saw the EPA ruin a river with zero accountability.
now that’s some disingenuous bullshit, right there.
Ruined!
Seriously? Who, of any national prominence?
Nobody of any prominence whatsoever.
Just all of those despicable twitter mobs.
Anyone being fired? And the VA? Accountability?
I don’t know, I haven’t really been following it.
Who got fired for abandoning the mine in the first place?
And yeah, the VA apparently sucks. Tear it the hell down, if you like, and give all the vets vouchers to private hospitals.
If you want to play the “accountability” game, I have a really really really long list for you, both government and private actors.
NYT says uninsureds are down by about 25%.
Does anyone have reliable numbers on how many uninsured are now insured?
Your turn to explain why those numbers are utter horseshit, and/or Google up something from Heritage or some other libertarian talk shop explaining why it’s all lies.
As far as cost, the health care sector in the US is, and has been, a great big pile of burning Benjamins for at least a decade.
There are ways to reduce the cost of health care, but most of them involve things that are politically impossible in the US.
Beginning with a public single payer.
Are you talking outliers or mainstream conservatives?
Erick son of Erick, notable American conservative, on the jailing of Kim Davis for contempt of court:
Personally, I consider folks like that to be outliers, because IMO they are fucking nuts.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of them. Lots of them have TV shows, and radio shows, and lots of them like to run around armed.
It ain’t my call whether they are mainstream or not. Frankly, I don’t really give a crap. If they keep threatening violence, I’m going to start taking them seriously.
I need more than one, non-outlier example of this.
To complete your sentence, you need more than one, non-outlier example of this *for you to find my point persuasive*.
Whether you find my point persuasive or not is not my problem. If people keep threatening violence, publicly and consistently, I’m going to assume they intend violence.
I’m not going to wait around for you to be persuaded about it.
Frankly, I doubt it will ever amount to all that much, because IMO most of these people are do-nothing loudmouth idiots.
But they, for sure, out there, and they are, for sure, almost exclusive right-wingers of one stripe or another.
If the Count bugs you, just consider him a fun-house mirror reflecting what the right looks like to people like me. I been living with shtick like the Count’s for about 15 years now, only not as a joke.
One example, all physicians were required to pay for electronic records keeping systems that start at 100K. Boom, a federal fiat and no right of appeal..
There are two”>http://www.ihealthbeat.org/perspectives/2013/dont-forget-electronic-health-records-are-benefiting-patients”>two sides to this, but then where are conservatives when public policies are adopted “with no appeal” that put regular working folks OUT OF THEIR F*CKING JOBS altogether? I figure a lot of steelworkers would be more than willing to put up with a bit of red tape to have those good paying jobs back.
I would match my special pleading against yours any day, Tex.
Keep your head down.
The American Right’s crush on Putin.
From friends who practice under–or quit practicing because of–ACA, I know how freaking, overwhelmingly, stupidly oppressive the regulatory state can be.
Last Thanksgiving, I had a conversation with a general practice MD who was a guest at the dinner, which was hosted by a good family friend who is a principal in an OB/GYN practice.
They had many bad things to say about the ACA. Lots of new regulation, all time-consuming, much of it counter-productive in one way or another.
They made a number of really good points.
The GP was kind of a bog-standard New Hampshire libertarian. Government governs best that governs least, the whole Ayn Rand-ian nine-yards.
Among other things, he found the idea that he now had to ask patients for their birth date every time he entered the room, whether he knew them or not, and whether he had just left that very room for 10 seconds, to be not just a PITA, but unbearably oppressive.
Do you know what it reminds me of?, he asked.
You all know what it reminded him of, I don’t even need to tell you.
First they came for my birth date, then they came for… you know the drill.
As a doctor, he works in a skilled trade which has an extremely high barrier to entry, no small part of which is enforced by – wait for it – government regulation.
He was aware of that, and in fact he felt that a lot of what he did could be handled by a nurse or an NP at some kind of local clinic.
He would just do higher-value-added stuff, like out patient surgery.
The fact that, in the good old unregulated days, which were actually not that long ago, surgery was the province of barbers, didn’t seem to come up.
My OB/GYN host’s specialty didn’t exist at all, back in the day. An “OB/GYN” was a midwife, whose professional training was probably acquired by watching somebody else catch babies.
We could just go back to that. Health care would be lots cheaper.
But, are saying that death threats is main stream conservatism? I need more than one, non-outlier example of this.
I aim to please. Also, too, Google is at my fingertips.
Not “death threats”, but threats of political violence.
Googling up “2nd Amendment solution” gives me such conservative leading lights as Sharon Angle, Jodi Ernst, former VP candidate Sarah Palin, POTUS candidate Ted Cruz – how much time do you have?
If you want to tell me they are all nut-jobs, I will not argue the point.
But they are also all conservative (R) office holders, including at the national level.
I didn’t vote for them, but somebody did.
I feel left out.
2nd Amendment solution
Dissolving commas?
Yes, Tex. The EPA made a big mistake. contracted the work out to a private firm.
Using your logic, the entire private sector stands condemned. OK by me.
But, are saying that death threats is main stream conservatism?
Huckabee’s lead guitarist, Ted Nugent, can’t go a week without threatening to kill someone. hasn’t stopped him from showing up on conservatism’s official media outlet. and almost no one on the right is pushing back.
particularly the despicable twitter mobs
I’ve never seen online lynch mobs in general as being overly concerned with enforcing one ideology or another. They just want an acceptable target, and blood.
And yeah, the VA apparently sucks. Tear it the hell down, if you like, and give all the vets vouchers to private hospitals.
Thank you, no. I personally am quite happy with my care as provided by the VA, and would prefer to keep it rather than having to wade through all the crap I see my family doing to deal with private care provenance and billing resolution.
the despicable twitter mobs
do they check the composition of people’s countertops?
IMainstream conservatives never seem to get invited to these junkets across the country by armed Republican vigilante paramilitary groups:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/09/10/kentucky-fried-showdown/
These punks are preceded in their threats of violence by a former governor of an American state and a man who, under the next Republican Administration will be nominated to the Supreme Court — Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz respectively, who despite being termed marginal candidates for President of the United States by disenfranchised Republicans, wield symbolic clout no longer available by the aforementioned disenfranchised Republicans.
Wake me when armed liberal paramilitary forces start showing up at Republican and conservative events.
Every time recently that I hear a mainstream Republican dismiss Donald Trump et al, the latter’s poll number rise again.
My poll numbers remain buried below zero, just below McKT’s.
I have more to address MckT’s points (in addition to what has already been addressed) but it will be hit or miss over a couple of days.
We could on all day about features of either political party that go either unmentioned or barely noticed by each party’s supporters (to the extent that nearly everyone here is reasonable and moderate in their real lives) here at OBW (I don’t expect objectivity at, for example, a Ford Dealership either regrading competitors. Where does this politically correct outcry come from?), but I can’t recall a single instance of paramilitary groups converging to point automatic war weaponry at whomever it is these fascists have a grievance with, being condemned here by those of a reasonable, conservative, Second Amendment supporting disposition.
We once had a guy or two here who out and out defended the practice, which only means that I’m yelling at the wrong people all the time anymore.
re Erickson:
http://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2015/08/28/the-end-of-the-republican-party-is-at-hand/
A National magazine, yeah, it has a liberal tilt, so what, called Erickson the most powerful conservative in America. Show me an objective conservative political publication or editorial page.
How is he a marginal figure? His calls are answered by the most powerful people in the Republican party. As Jeb Bush closes in on the Republican nomination, Erickson will be there for him.
The Atlantic got him wrong by the way. The toxicity of the Republican Party is not what bothers him. It’s that it’s not his toxicity alone poisoning the water supply.
And speaking of lynch mobs:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/09/10/the-house-judiciary-committee-fox-newses-planned-parenthood/
Isn’t it customary to invite the guest of honor to the lynching party?
Cite for “most pwerful blah-blah”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/is-the-most-powerful-conservative-in-america-losing-his-edge/383503/
Mea culpa! I have totally ignored the unsupportable twitter-mobbings of people that deviated from the politically-acceptable microcosm of expression.
In my (pitiful) defense, I’m not signed up as a “twit”.
Nor much interested in their centa quadraginta litteris nonsense littering the internets.
Mainstream conservatives never seem to get invited to these junkets across the country by armed Republican vigilante paramilitary groups
When the Oath Keepers first popped up, I was actually interested in what they were about.
Insisting that military people observe their oath to defend the Constitution, even if that was in conflict with the orders they were given. Especially for officers, who (unlike enlisted people) aren’t even sworn to obey the POTUS.
As it turned out, their focus was on one sentence of the Constitution, and not even the core text of the document, but one sentence of one amendment, specifically the 2nd A.
Now, as far as I can tell, they are a group of heavily armed free-lance vigilantes, operating apart from and without the sanction of any civil authority.
We are, somehow, expected to tolerate this. I don’t know why.
What color shirts do they wear?
As it turned out, their focus was on one sentence of the Constitution, and not even the core text of the document, but one sentence of one amendment, specifically the 2nd A.
it’s a thing people do.
Changing gears a bit, since this is an open thread, this is what science does – takes in new data to interpret what it means, possibly changing the currently accepted theories.
I know, I know, we’re (non-conservatives, regardless of what we call ourselves) supposed to cling with a deathly grip only to information in support of the worst case climate science has to offer. The funny thing is, I actually don’t want there to be a looming global upheaval because of climate change. I’d be happy if we found out, via legitimate and sound scientific inquiry, that the situation wasn’t as bad as it has looked so far.
I don’t know what these scientists are thinking, though. This kind of news could put all that government lucre in jeopardy and end the justification for gleefully ruining the world economy with all them regyellayshuns.
There’s a slate of Tea Party ideologues who were elected to the Jefferson County, Colorado school board three years ago, where my son attended and received a superb education before they appeared on the scene.
Petitions have been submitted to put their recall on the ballot this Fall.
Among the many things these filth believe is the odd notion that all mention in U.S. history of civil disobedience and unrest, presumably against government, should be expunged from history and other classroom textbooks, materials, and teachings, in favor of teaching only America’s unblemished exceptionalism.
This includes racial civil rights and women’s rights disobedience, union strikes, environmental and antiwar demonstration.
All, verboten, meine kinder.
Given their political lineage, I suppose we can guess their opinion on the violent civil disobedience threatened against any number of targets by their armed Right-wing colleagues and the calls for disobedience from the very highest political figures and public figures in the Republican Party in this country.
I haven’t been a participant in school board meetings for a number of years in that county, and I don’t live within its boundaries any longer.
I remember, however the first two audience rows of every meeting back then being taken over by rude right-wing threatening, interrupting pigf*ckers, in the midst of the rest of the attendees, who were nearly universally civil.
I was silent back then. I’m a different person now.
If these ilk survive their recall this recall, I may start attending the Board meetings again.
There will be disobedience and it will not be civil.
If the parking becomes the location of where the Boards and their supporters want to fall out to make final decisions, count me in.
From a business publication:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/military-coup-u-surprising-number-195400272.html
These are the people conservatives run with.
Fuck off and bring it on.
The conservative American public is ripening for fascism in this country and the suppression and killing of progressives.
Go ahead, dismiss it.
food for thought
“I’d much rather live in a world filled with hypocrites.”
That’s the last line by the author of bobby’s cite.
I’d say his wish has been granted ….. universally.
I certainly do my part.
We all know how you try, Count. You’re a very trying person.
But the percentage who “could see supporting a coup”? 29%. That seems…likely, somehow.
It’s always mildly astonishing the amount of apparent overlap between those who say they might well support a military coup (because they trust the military more than the government) and those who are sure that a long-planned and innocuous military exercise is a secret ploy to take over their states.
But maybe it’s just that, while they would support a military coup to take over the Federal government, they don’t want the same reasoning applied to anything closer to home.
What specific issues on the right are so far out of the mainstream as to merit the Count’s locked and loaded intervention?
Climate change. Debt ceiling idiocies. Fences on the US-Canada border. Round up and deport 11 million people. Military action against Iran. Tax policy – all of it. Environmental rules. Voting rights. Government shutdowns, etc.
Is all that “out of the mainstream?” I don’t know. Maybe Rush and company have done a good enough job that it’s not. I know it’s all hopelessly stupid. IMO the right is in fact a destructive force in the country today.
Left out:
Kim Davis. Cliven Bundy. Social Security. Medicare. ACA (if you don’t like it, fine. Offer a sensible, workable alternative instead of raving about “market-oriented reforms.”) Medicaid expansion.
The lies conservatives sent around the blabosphere and social media regarding gun laws in other countries:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/10/1420157/-About-that-pro-gun-meme-your-friends-have-been-sharing
So, basically, if you’re not a Democrat, or progressive, you’re a destructive force who should be at the wrong end of the Counts locked and loaded intervention.
Maybe I will pick up a gun or two.
It’s always mildly astonishing the amount of apparent overlap between those who say they might well support a military coup (because they trust the military more than the government) and those who are sure that a long-planned and innocuous military exercise is a secret ploy to take over their states.
drama queens.
Maybe I will pick up a gun or two.
bring it.
Doesn’t sound like I’ll be “bringing it”, I’ll just be defending myself. Because I don’t believe that climate change is “settled science”. Or that the ACA really put very many people on insurance, certainly not many actually poor people. Or that we shouldn’t be discussing Social Security, including privitization. So shoot me.
Or that we shouldn’t be discussing Social Security, including privitization.
How exactly does one privatize social security? The entire premise of SS is certainty (hence that second “S”), so individual gambling on the stock market is a fundamental failure – well, unless you belong to the broker class, in which case it’s a goldmine. So what does a “serious” discussion of SS “reform” entail? “Real talk” about the “tragic truth” that some people were just meant to starve to death under bridges when they got too old or infirm to add to a company’s bottom line?
Find a conservative to shoot you, Dobie, because liberals are a bunch of unarmed, politically correct dick-sucking liberal faggots who are outgunned.
Love, Maynard G.
You know, Marty, it’s no fair drinking while enrolled in Obamacare and slagging your benefactor.
“very many people on insurance”
You’re one of millions. Bite it.
You’ll need three guns, because my words are bullets and dollars, and your bullets are merely words, probably mostly adverbs or dangling partiputinnipples.
“Maybe I will pick up a gun or two”
don’t shoot at me, and I won’t shoot at you. problem solved.
the count isn’t gonna shoot at anybody.
Jebilla the Hun is apparently feeling slighted by the Donald’s momentary distraction away from him and toward the other malign sociopaths vowing to kill the four wealthy Americans enrolled in Obamacare:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeb-bush-donald-trump-insults
Sorry, are we supposed to talk about Social Security or not supposed to talk about it? The double negative has me confused.
You may talk about it in the past tense, while you pay Larry Kudlow exorbitant fees to help you exercise your animal spirits, as long as it’s not putting your dollars into solar power or federally-subsidized dialysis or Animus River clean-ups.
I’ll just be defending myself. Because I don’t believe that climate change is “settled science”.
you need a gun to defend yourself against science ?
conservatism is one fncked-up mindset.
Talk about Social Security all you want. Talk about taxes too, or climate change, or whatever. Just make sure your numbers add up correctly
nope, there aren’t any conservative thought police.
nope.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/what-a-puke-conservatives-furious-after-fox-news-shep-smith-mocks-kim-davis-hypocrisy/
not a one.
what set me off here was McK’s citing the Animas River incident as “the EPA ruining a river with zero accountability”.
The EPA was involved in the area because generations of mining in the area have left stockpiles of poisonous materials behind. There are ways to treat that stuff so that it doesn’t leach out of the mine into the environment, but the last private operator to own the mine in question was allowed to not do that, and to simply plug the mine up with concrete instead.
To no intelligent person’s great surprise, that did not prove to be a permanent solution.
A local group tried to sort it out, but they couldn’t get it done. Eventually, the ball landed in the EPA’s lap.
Somebody, either at the EPA or working under their authority, screwed up and there was a spill.
The Animas River doesn’t appear to be ruined, as it turns out. It has apparently returned to pre-spill conditions, which weren’t actually that great because the freaking area is riddled with abandoned mines containing toxic crap. But, it doesn’t appear to be worse off.
But NOBODY GOT FIRED and there was NO OUTCRY FROM THE LEFT. So, government sucks.
And DocS didn’t follow up with a front-page post calling out those incompetent ass-covering feds, so we’re all just a bunch of boot-licking toadies.
Oh yeah, and we want to police your thoughts and enforce conformity.
Whatever.
The whole ACA thing basically makes me want to puke. You will get no argument from me that it’s a crappy law – it’s a crappy law because, to get it passed at all, every stakeholder remotely connected to health care had to have their pet interest considered.
So, it’s a big confusing mess.
The point of it was to reduce the number of uninsured people in the US. Because there was a sh*tload of them. Now there are less.
How many less? It depends on who you ask, because everybody has a f**king agenda. However you squint when you look at it, now there are less.
Prior to the ACA, the private insurance solution to uninsured people was a mix of (a) you’re uninsured because you were sick once and we don’t want to write you a policy, (b) you’re uninsured because you made a claim and rather than pay the claim we went over your policy application with a fine-toothed comb and discovered that you misspelled the street name on your address so we’re cutting you loose, (c) we’ll insure you if you will agree to pay the first $10K of your medical expenses out of pocket, and (d) f***k you.
So, all things considered, I’m calling the ACA an improvement. It’s only an improvement because every single damned aspect of how we provide and pay for medical care in this country is a colossal cluster**k, but given that all of it *is* a colossal clusterf**k, it’s a small step in the right direction.
It’s the best thing that was possible to do, given who we are and what our priorities are as a nation.
If it makes you puke, perhaps the thing to do is consider WTF is wrong with us here in the good old USA.
Compare EPA’s performance at the Animas River with Fiorina’s at HP.
Maybe we should fire the EPA administrator and hand him a $20 million check to go away.
Or that the ACA really put very many people on insurance, certainly not many actually poor people.
This (Obamacare’s Enrollment Increase: Mainly Due to Medicaid Expansion) is from almost a year ago, but it has numbers. One can guess from the title that it shows that enrollment increases were largely due to Medicaid expansion. If memory serves, that is a program for low-income people (sometimes referred to as “the poor”).
The previous open thread had a title more in line with this, but this open thread is still alive, so I’m putting it here.
Some meat:
and
and
and
Fun stuff!
so much winning. winning bigly, even.
the folks at the Onion should polish up their resumes.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the EPA is held accountable (it should be, in some way), the spill into the Animus (the longer term effects of the sediments left in some parts of the river are yet to be determined) is being used by powerful monied and ideological forces in this country and their lickspittles in Congress to terminate the EPA completely.
They tell us that every day. Get rid of the EPA! On the first day I’m President! Hasn’t this been reported?
Most of the mining industry out here (there are some good eggs in there too) does not want to spend the money to clean up the ongoing century and half long leakage of heavy metals from @200 mines in Colorado alone that leak hourly into our rivers.
Look, no one was expected to be held accountable in 1890 for heavy metal leakage into waterways because the science has not been developed yet.
http://www.mining.com/web/toxic-mine-waste-spill-into-animas-river-symptom-of-larger-problem/
http://www.denverpost.com/environment/ci_28624471/animas-river-spill-gold-king-mine-one-many-area-releasing-heavy
Regarding thought police and speech codes, which I of all people should be against and am. People can say whatever they want and I’m happy to outshout them if required:
Any State Education Board that lets fantasist David Barton anywhere near school textbooks and teaching standards is marinating in religious and ahistorical political correctness.
Doctors in Florida are punished if they ask their patients if they keep firearms at home:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/upshot/do-you-own-a-gun-in-florida-doctors-cant-ask-you-that.html
Ask and you shall be censored and fined.
One wonders if a guy crawls into an emergency room down there bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds what protocol is allowed. Do they have to ask twenty questions alluding to guns and play charades to find out if the wounded guy owns a gun. Maybe start out asking about bows and arrows and such like.
“Were these bullet .. sorry … these mysterious holes in your abdomen caused by (imagine the church lady’s intonation here), let me see, could it be an SUV backed over you, because according to the Bellmore Medical Manual, attempted murder with an SUV is just as likely as someone firing off a God-given pistol in your direction. Hmmm?”
Since we’re wondering about the numbers of Americans who have signed up and paid for their ACA policies and/or been provided with Medicaid (these numbers are provided by HHS, (does no one get a morning paper any longer?) but if the question then is, why would you believe the government, the next question is why would you believe the government’s National Weather Service when it issues a tornado warning, excuse me, an unproven tornado “theory” warning, since obviously these meteorological elitists are making those warnings up to keep their cushy sinecures where can be routinely abused by know-nothing blockheads), I’d like to know the precise number of doctors in the country who have given up their practices because of ACA depredations.
The next question I have is why didn’t these doctors go to work and practice their beloved profession at an HMO, like Kaiser, where electronic record-keeping technology was provided by the organization at no cost to the doctors who work there.
What did these doctors who fled the profession do next? Become bond salesmen? Frackers? Beachcombers? Cowboys?
I agree with McKT and Russell that the ACA is a bit of a clusterf*ck, for all of the reasons Russell cited, much of which are features of our byzantine “medical delivery” and insurance system.
It has also achieved many of its numerical goals.
Deductibles are way too high for the low premium choices, but I blame this on the conservative stakeholders who had to be satisfied to pass the bill as well.
Aren’t we told ad nauseum that increasing the cost of medicine to the patient will make him or her a better “consumer” and save money.
“Honey, I’m having chest pains.”
“Alright, let’s go consume some medical care”
“Hold on …. ouch … make a few calls and compare prices would you?”
“It’s going to cost a sh*tload where ever you go and whomever you see, especially those independent contractor specialists who pop in daily to palpate your wallet.”
“Screw it, I’ll be a patriot and take my chances here at home. Bring me a tall drink … the cheap stuff.”
More progress in the Foxification of culture..
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2015/09/national-geographic-sells-soul-to-devil.html
I quit drinking….
why didn’t these doctors go to work and practice their beloved profession at an HMO, like Kaiser, where electronic record-keeping technology was provided by the organization at no cost to the doctors who work there.
What did these doctors who fled the profession do next? Become bond salesmen? Frackers? Beachcombers? Cowboys?
Doctors at Kaiser get a salary, vs doctors in private practice, who get paid according to which patients they see and what procedures they perform. The Kaiser doctors are very well paid, but them make less that the others because they are relieved of dealing with all the administrative garbage that comes with practicing medicine.
So what do doctors who leave the profession over the ACA do? Well, presumably they want to maintain their income levels — since they left rather than spend some of that income on the ACA-mandated electronic records etc. So they have to go with something like running a hedge fund, or becoming a sleezebag personal injury lawyer (I’m excluding the other kinds). Otherwise their incomes drop drastically.
Drinking is thinking of quitting me too, the little minx.
I wonder if soon we’ll be treated to a National Geographic cover story (with Megyn Kelly featured on the cover chewing the betel nut and pounding gigantic cassava roots in her 12-speed food processor on cheap laminated decal countertops) regarding the lost white tribes of Inner and Outer Sanctimonia being driven to cultural decimation and virtual extinction at the hands of encroaching political correctness.
Headman Donald Trump and entourage will pay a visitation to the lair of the sacred hairpiece deep in the vault of a moldering casino and seek counsel about the parlous future of his people.
Our forefathers were HUGE and we are less huge and the hairpiece knows who is to blame and how to return our people to huge hugeosity, hugemensity, and hugetopofthefoodchainaliciousness and our place in charge of the little ones who now sap our inner sappiness for their own.
Now, says Trump headman, they want to take our gated reservations from us. And subjugate our women, who are adequately subjugated by us, I tell you, even my daughter who I wish to date and lavish with the ancestral glibness of our people.
From MkT:
“From my side of it, I look at the thought-policing and conformity-enforcing left, particularly the despicable twitter mobs , and it scares the shit out of me. Because almost no one on the left is pushing back.”
I agree. I used to consider myself a lefty, but I cannot countenance the nonsense coming from the left these days. Just insane levels of bigotry.
Yama,
could you explain to us all what kind of bigotry you see on the left? preferably bigotry that’s exclusive to the left.
maybe there’s some anti-religious bigotry, but that’s aimed at people who want the law to enforce their own idiosyncratic religious interpretations. all the lefties i know seem perfectly fine with religion.
“I agree. I used to consider myself a lefty, but I cannot countenance the nonsense coming from the left these days. Just insane levels of bigotry.”
Back in the old days they were all “fascist, fascist, fascist”, but then they couldn’t say that any more, unacceptable, right? So instead it was all about “rural mouthbreathers wearing brown shirts”, everyone knows who you mean, but not saying it out loud. By the time we get to now, it’s completely coded and abstract: “upper 1%, NRO columnists, Oathkeepers”. But it’s still the same thing, you just can’t say that any more.
I’m thinking Yama was being satirical, though I’m not entirely sure.
The trouble with satire today is that you have to know the person speaking fairly well to be sure that it is satire. Far too often, what would be taken as satire in other circumstances turns out to be a sincere opinion. Sadly.
Sadly.
Oh, com’on. Stop pulling my leg.
I’m still trying to get my head around the whole twitter mob thing.
I feel so out of touch.
They’re inescapable. Well, unless you aren’t on twitter.
Ever seen someone beaten to death by an enraged twitter mob? It’s brutal!. No wonder McTx is skeered of them.
Yama,
could you explain to us all what kind of bigotry you see on the left? preferably bigotry that’s exclusive to the left.
I am not Yama, but am a person who is very “left”.
I don’t see “bigotry” as much as stifling of discussion about race, gender, privacy, the military … among people who, like me, identify with the left.
Take racism. As an example, I recently came across a literary work, obviously coming from an anti-racism perspective, that used the “n” word. The author was white. It was barely possible to publish this work, knowing that universal “trigger warnings” wouldn’t take care of the hurt feelings that may have arisen in people who reacted to the word without reading the work.
Take gay marriage. I am happy for my gay friends who want to join the mainstream. But it’s really wrong right now to criticize the mainstream when it comes to marriage. Because marriage is good, and gay marriage is better. Of course, for some people, that’s all true. But is this really a “left” vision? That we should all appear two by two and land on Noah’s ark? Sure, not to diminish the wonderful thing that happens among SOME couples.
Take rape. What about women (and men) who bravely or stupidly drink too much before wandering into a sexual encounter that’s more than they bargained for? Isn’t it true that people aren’t always in their right minds, and willfully so? I’m pretty sure it’s a time honored tradition to drink in anticipation of intimacy.
Oh, and finally, the military. It’s obviously wrong to support any effort to fight against people who are determined to bring horror to the world. Because …. we’re a colonialist hegemon. (By the way, I am completely in favor of the Iraq deal, because military action isn’t the ideal way to solve problems.) Drones on Islamic extremists planning terrorism? Im for that, and will continue to be.
None of these things worry me too much – I have very limited say. And at this point in my life, my school of hard knocks in some of these areas may have given me a Stockholm syndrome perspective.
Ever seen someone beaten to death by an enraged twitter mob? It’s brutal!.
Actually, I’ve seen that sort of happen. Yes, it’s brutal, and yes, it’s death. Not that there’s anything wrong with brutality or death.
“I don’t see “bigotry” as much as stifling of discussion about race, gender, privacy, the military … among people who, like me, identify with the left.”
most folks wear some kind of blinders.
that’s the value of talking to people who aren’t like you.
“Ever seen someone beaten to death by an enraged twitter mob? It’s brutal!.
Actually, I’ve seen that sort of happen. ”
?????????
Probably the Justine Sacco thing and the like.
I sort of get what Yama and Sap are saying.
To call it bigotry seems inaccurate, ‘tribalism’ might be more accurate.
Being something of a photography geek, I spend more time on photo gear sites than is probably healthy. The ‘conversation’ between enthusiasts for the products of (for instance) Nikon, Canon or Sony frequently descends to this level. That people can get so emotionally worked up over what is inherently utterly trivial is a source of wonder.
It’s entirely irrational, and it’s part of the human condition.
Clearly, politics is a little different. Important stuff is at stake.
The tribalism doesnt seem much different.
I neither tweet nor twit nor twat. I leave open the possibility of twerking, but that might be an involuntary spasm. Someone place a stick between my teeth so I don’t bite off my tongue.
Someone should write a mock Twitter feed featuring John Adams and Thomas Jefferson eviscerating each other. No doubt Sam Adams would quickly dominate as the King George III’s supporters trolled the lot of them.
I think people tweet as individuals, but are enabled into “tribalism”, I’d rather call it the false courage (I have plenty of that) enabled by peer influence, and once the ball gets rolling, what you have is something similar to the well-documented phenomenon of the more teenagers in a car on a Saturday night, the more likely said car is found as a burned out hulk at the bottom of a cliff in the abandoned quarry outside town, if not crossing the median into oncoming truck traffic.
Anyway, someone wake me when a dozen or so liberal bigots (real liberals, not conservative ones like George Wallace et al, masquerading as liberals and who have yet to succumb to Nixon’s Southern Strategy) get themselves on the Presidential primary ballot and invited to the debates as we’ve seen on the other side in this latest iteration of sociopathic malevolence.
If you assemble a twitter feed consisting of the yeah-well-see-if-you-can-top-this bigotry and thugwackery of Jindal, Cruz, Huckabee, Walker, Trump, and their supporters toward the tens of millions of people this filth count as the Other, not to mention all of the disenfranchised RINOs who have been savaged, and maybe throw a bunch of the other usual suspects in, with the rest of the candidates stooping as low as they can on the feed to poach the attention of the most radical vermin in the base, I think what you would have is several cars full of teenagers in a drag race on a busy thoroughfare, then a high speed chase with law enforcement in hot pursuit, and guns a blazing as they round the hairpin turn before the lip of the quarry looms ahead.
Except the fate of the entire country is locked in the trunk of the teenyboppers car.
So if it takes a racheting up of “bigotry” on the liberal side to block the roads and shoot out their tires, I am all for it.
Can a person be bigoted against political rhetoric and policy prescriptions that will kill Americans?
I think that’s stretching the definition of the word.
Those weren’t bigots that hung Mussolini up by his heels and took care of business.
Now, where is that stick, because my tongue requires biting.
Those weren’t bigots that hung Mussolini up by his heels and took care of business.
And they had the decency to shoot him first. A proper old-fashioned US lynchmob would consider that spoiling the fun. And there are high ranking guys that say openly that in their opinion painless executions defy the real purposes of the death penalty (revenge, punishment and deterrence). And at least one SCOTUS justice agrees, although he had the (in)decency to torture his language a bit in order for it to not sound so blatant.
I love it when carnivores and reptiles get a little nervous when bloodthirsty cannibals show up:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/morton-klein-donald-trump-carson
The only difference between lunatic Carson and lunatic Trump is in their manner of flesh-eating.
Trump eats with his hands and throw the bones of his victims over his shoulder.
Like Chance in “Being There”, Carson is calm and courteous, wears a bib and chews with his mouth closed while he expostulates his plans to murder Americans and immigrants.
here is the thing.
whatever you think, not everyone is going to agree with you.
sometimes people will give you a ration of crap for voicing your opinion. it’s part of life.
you can’t take it personally. or, you can, but you’re going to be offended a lot.
it would be nice if everyone participated in discussions in good faith, with open minds, putting aside all of their preconceived understandings of the world and all of the personal baggage that gets attached to their point of view.
it’s not going to happen.
if you feel like “twitter mobs” are ganging up on you and harshing your mellow, just turn the damned thing off. really and truly, nobody can hurt you with digital messages limited to 140 characters.
it’s true, sometimes people can be hostile, or rude, or make things really personal. it can be annoying, or even hurtful. if it starts to get under your skin and interfere with other parts of your life, step away for a while.
we’ve pretty much all done that, at some point.
the online world suffers from the fact that people are anonymous, or are otherwise free to rant away without much accountability. so, they quite often do. it’s not an optimal social environment.
the topics of discussion are also often things that people are upset about, or otherwise feel very strongly about, and that heats things up as well.
but none of this, whatsoever, amounts to preventing people from expressing their point of view, or censoring what they say, or otherwise enforcing any kind of conformity or thought, word, or deed.
it certainly does not amount to a physical beating.
if folks aren’t open to what you want to say, you can keep trying, or try again another day, or try saying it a different way. if it seems like they’re just using you as a punching bag to vent their personal hostility, ask them to quit it, or maybe just turn the computer off and do something less frustrating.
regarding ObWi, specifically, I’m hard pressed to find any two people who are in complete agreement on any collection of five issues or more, and you can pick whatever five issues you like. Folks here are kind of all over the map, regardless of whatever bucket you think of them as belonging to.
A beating is when somebody physically hits you. Being attacked by a mob is when lots of folks are doing that at the same time. Censorship is when you are actually prevented from saying what you want to say.
Everybody not agreeing with you, and doing so with some heat, is none of those things.
If folks feel like things are getting too heated, or they or someone else is being piled on unfairly, just speak up and ask folks to knock it off. ObWi tends to be reasonably responsive to requests like that.
IMO.
If I was an bigger twit than I appear to be, I’d firebomb the Twaddle feeds of the Trump, Cruz, and every other Republican campaign with this:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rem-michael-stipe-trump-cruz
These two and their 16 colleagues are vying to get out in front of a deranged, dangerous mob and what is needed to counter them are much larger deranged, dangerous mobs amassed in threatening contradiction to their disgraceful conduct.
I don’t see the difference between a nest of hot-under-the-collar liberals getting their hate on via Twitter, and the content of any FOXNews day, Brietbart, the editorial page of Investors Business Daily or any old issue of National Review Online, just to scratch the surface.
There is one difference. Most of the liberals are unarmed big mouths. Most of the above pride of velociraptors are armed with deadly force.
The first group uses only the First Amendment to cloak their rhetoric. The second group holds the Second Amendment in reserve at all times to change the terms of the debate.
The latter self-proclaim this difference.
The problem is that “twitter mobs” and other negative social media outpourings have gotten people fired or had other adverse impacts on their meat space lives.
Yet another downside of fire-at-will.
Employers could develop some backbone.
Other addressed McTX’s comments regarding the depredations for doctors (no numbers, but what the heck) inherent in the ACA.
Several times a week, I lower myself into the belly of various beasts, in this case Investors Business Daily — I like the stock charts and SOME of the business news content; the editorial page is the wrong end of the alimentary canal of this beast — and I came across this short article today, which in some ways counters, or at least provides counterpoint to McTX’s anecdotal evidence.
I’ll have to transcribe the article because it can’t be linked to without subscription:
“Americans are getting older, and more than 70 million have mental problems. Those are some of the demographic trends behind the growth of Universal Health Services.
The company is one of the largest operators of hospitals and behavioral health facilities in the US, with more than ……. (and so on).
An aging population — the percentage of Americans 65 and older is accelerating — is helping hospitals grow.
Legislative changes are another tailwind.
An improved operating performance sat UHS’ acute care hospitals this year was due in part to an improving economy and a drop in uninsured patients, thanks mainly to Obamacare, the company said in a filing with the SEC.
Revenue at its acute care facilities in Q1 shot up 12.2% and 6.3% in behavioral health facilities.
In addition, federal rules that provide health insurers to provide the same coverage for behavorial treatments as they do for medical problems* have boosted business.” end quote.
Many other hospital chains have experienced similar growth in recent years since you know when.
Are these facilities not filled with doctors and other medical personnel and are they not happy for the influx of patients (“consumers” in the current misguided parlance), and moreover, are they not happy to receive payment now for their services from the increased numbers of insured, instead of the alternatives?
I was tickled by the words “thanks to” and “Obamacare” in the same sentence, words that the language police and speech code enforcing, nativist, authoritarian, Obama-hating John Birchers who smear their daily scat on the paper’s editorial page, are not likely to place anywhere near each other.
Ben Carson’s “worse than slavery” guff regarding Obamacare came to mind, too.
If I was a siamese twin separated by him from my twin, I’d consider asking someone to sew us back together again after listening to his delusional crap.
I wonder if there any Siamese twins enrolled in Obamacare?
We’re going to need much bigger and more savage Twitter mobs:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/12/1420694/-Breitbart-source-arrested-for-terrorism-tried-to-incite-9-11-terrorist-attack
The problem is that “twitter mobs” and other negative social media outpourings have gotten people fired or had other adverse impacts on their meat space lives.
That’s a good point, and if that’s what McK and sapient are talking about, I stand corrected.
We’re going to need much bigger and more savage Twitter mobs
Art Immelmann is alive and well and living in his parent’s basement.
Where’s your evidence?
Sorry, the Republican thought police and speech code enforcers have made it illegal to collect evidence:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_09/in_the_era_of_big_data_gop_pre057565.php
I would say this is creeping something or other, but I think the creeps have already crept across the finish line.
I’m not living in this piece of shit country they are creating, and I’m not leaving either, which leaves only one alternative.
That’s a good point, and if that’s what McK and sapient are talking about, I stand corrected.
That is what I was talking about, and thanks. There are some highly publicized incidents of people having their lives ruined by delivering an inartful expression of humor, etc. but that kind of thing happens on a smaller scale all the time to people involved in work where their public reputation matters. It has a chilling effect.
Not that I know what to do about it, but it’s something that shouldn’t be dismissed as nonexistent.
A quick pass over the Brodmann 32 area of the brain with the Quantitative Qualitative Ontotological Lapsometer will restore those heavy sodium peaks to their proper levels:
The long …
http://nonsite.org/article/the-american-evasion-of-pragmatism-souls-science-and-the-case-of-walker-percy
and the short of it ….
http://reflexionesfinales.blogspot.com/2011/12/love-in-ruins-review.html
Scroll down, Russell, and meet the author of that last cite, none other than Russell.
Hmmmmm …….
I clicked on his name and there was nothing about drums, so I don’t know.
“It’s obviously wrong to fight against people determined to bring horror to the world,”
Which ones? ISIS, Gadaffi, Saddam, Assad? How about the U.S. and its allies like Israel in Gaza last summer or Saudi Arabia, whose U.S. supported war in Yemen is helping to cause a humanitarian catastrophe?
I happen to agree that ISIS is at Nazi- level in terms of evil, or they would be if they had the power. I don’t actually see a lot of people complaining when we hit their camps as opposed to civilians. A lot of people wanted to topple Assad and he has probably killed more civilians than the jihadists in Syria,but if we had weakened him which armed groups would have benefited? What happened in Libya?
And when we go in and create a gigantic mess and maybe commit our own war crimes or support allies who commit them, what sort of accountability is there? None. Only for leakers.
Some want to hear more:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-deportation-plan-18-months
Me, I’m just disappointed that he didn’t put it all in book form so we could have had a head’s up, maybe an intervening putsch or two to tenderize the expectations of the unsuspecting.
“Mein Combover”
To this side, kleine mutter.
Heraus!
One presumes there will be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pig vermin deputized to rat the eleven million out who will be targeted for concentration, transport, and deportation.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/donald-trump-deportation-plan-18-months
Maybe now is the time to create free zones, sanctuaries, safe houses, underground railroads and the like to shield these victims of fascist Republican government.
Arming the eleven million would seem a worthy goal.
Perhaps a free floating mercenary force to sabotage the jackbooted Trumpfantastic (it will look pretty much the same under all of the candidates’ policies) Republican infrastructure and bureaucracy put in place to accomplish these disgraceful goals.
An expensive government infrastructure that will be kept in place to deal with the rest of us later, except for the chosen.
Which ones? ISIS, Gadaffi, Saddam, Assad? How about the U.S. and its allies like Israel in Gaza last summer or Saudi Arabia, whose U.S. supported war in Yemen is helping to cause a humanitarian catastrophe?
There you go again, Donald, stifling the discussion….;)
I clicked on his name and there was nothing about drums, so I don’t know.
Not me. Good essay!
I happen to agree that ISIS is at Nazi- level in terms of evil, or they would be if they had the power.
I will go out on a limb and guess that, if anyone here on ObWi has issues with using American military force against ISIS, they are probably pragmatic and logistical ones.
I could be wrong, that’s just my guess.
I don’t actually know enough to say what we might be able to accomplish there, what it would involve, how long it would take, what downsides there might be. I just don’t know.
But if there is an achievable way to grind them into the dirt, I’m for it.
Pragmatic and logistical ones, yes.
Let’s say we scatter ISIS and take out the Syrian Assad government (that’s merely two of, what, 79 loosely affiliated paramilitary forces, besides the Oath Keepers, who hate out guts) by … what …. means? Yet to be unveiled.
Think of the refugee crisis from THOSE miscalculations.
Details, details, which I’m sure cocksure Republicans have at their fingertips, out of the box, ready to go, Republican Presidents and his (and her, see how politically correct I am) big swinging dicks will be able to snap their fingers and bare their Putin nipples and order a la carte.
The enemies will dissolve before our eyes like djinns in the deserts and shatter into 500 more groups endlessly, armed mostly by us, like they have done in Afghanistan and the country formerly known as Iraq, and kill us, decapitated head by blown off leg at the hip, so we can argue domestically whether an underfunded VA can handle the carnage or should we privatize the veterans and christen them “consumers” to be carroted and sticked, and copayed and deducted, we’re so pigf*cking stupid.
We set out to shake the Mideast up and bestow the magic of cruise missiles through small windows, flat taxes, and double cheeseburgers with a side of hummus extra.
Thank you so much for that, naive motherf*ckers.
You could get your Trump on and set a deadline, say, next Friday at high noon, for all of the parties, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, from Israel to Turkey, from Yemen to Turkey and the horn of Africa to cut this sh*t out, all of it, or we will unleash our entire nuclear arsenal and turn the entire region into glass.
Except for the Israel part, I adopted that strategy from Redstate comment threads.
Forgot Iran.
That is what I was talking about, and thanks. There are some highly publicized incidents of people having their lives ruined by delivering an inartful expression of humor, etc.
on-line outrage storms over jokes that hurt people’s livelihoods are not limited to ‘the left’ in any way.
ask Melissa Harris-Perry how her joke about Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson went over with ‘conservatives’.
the Dixie Chicks’s famous joke wasn’t exactly well-received by the right.
and “conservative twitter mob” turns up plenty of instances of conservatives losing their collective shit because someone somewhere said something they didn’t approve of.
the notion that the right doesn’t do the exact same kind of stuff is 100% false. don’t play along.
Republican Presidents and his (and her, see how politically correct I am) . . . will be able to snap their fingers and bare their Putin nipples and order a la carte.
So, Count, are you picturing Fiorina like this? Certainly it will be surprising if any of the rest of them actually emulate Putin on camera. (Admire, sure. But actually walk the walk? Shudder!) But if she does, it will take our culture wars into a whole new territory, don’t you think? Could absolutely split the party between the macho war mongers and the cultural conservatives.
Hmmmm. Suppose I shouldn’t post before I’ve had my morning OJ and gotten my brain out of autopilot….
“conservatives” are mad that Colbertwore a #BLM bracelet but didn’t wear a bracelet to support the police.
nope, no thought police there!
cleek, just to be clear, I am not excusing the right-wing. I’m just noting that it doesn’t help further the discussion when the left eats their own.
An example.
In Dublin, and working (ineptly) on phone, but just wanted to say that I agree with every word of russell’s at 11.50, and although I’m a very moderate lefty, centrist really on most things, it looks from over here (i.e. outside America) very much indeed as if most of the intolerant,crazy demonisation of the other side is coming from the right. And your right seems currently so much crazier than almost anybody else’s.
… most of the intolerant,crazy demonisation of the other side is coming from the right. And your right seems currently so much crazier than almost anybody else’s.
No quarrel with that. The thing is, other than work to be sure that the right doesn’t increase its power, there’s not much to do about the crazy except to call it out. On the other hand, as someone who identifies as a liberal, I think it’s important to be vigilant about encouraging serious ideological and policy debate without resorting to name-calling and censorship. The fact that the right-wing is practically beyond civil discourse doesn’t absolve the left when it shuts down conversation among its factions.
And your right seems currently so much crazier than almost anybody else’s.
America! We’re number 1!!!
Interesting, too, an article in yesterday’s New York Times.
we saw Seinfeld do a stand-up show last Friday night, 9/11. about halfway through, some guy started shouting at Seinfeld because he hadn’t memorialized our national day of wallowing and scab-picking. he went back and forth with Seinfeld about this for maybe five minutes before the crowd finally shut him down.
who here thinks the heckler was likely to be a liberal ?
Sapient, I think what we are seeing here is a problem of the momentum of success.
We have a protest movement which started out objecting to a very real problem. And they succeeded in moving universities away from their problematic stance of the past.
But then what do you do? The right thing to do, I believe, would be to celebrate your success and move on to something else.
But there seems to be a human tendency (which we see in lots of other places as well) to decide that past success demand pushing for future success in the same arena. Sure, there are cases where an initial success does not finish dealing with the real problem. But there are also cases where “problem” gets continually redefined in order to keep the movement alive for its own sake.
One would hope that an educational institution would take the opportunity to educate its students to the concept that you can finish when you have achieved your goals. That an area of protest does not have to be eternal.
But it appears that Harvard, at least (and I can recall a couple of other large universities as well), has decided instead to enable those who do want to keep protesting the same thing forever. Apparently they do not realize that doing so is likely to result in a reaction which will cause them at least as much grief as telling their students that enough is enough.
We can’t let ourselves be politically correct:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ben-carson-syrian-refugee-crisis
Woah, Nelly, let’s try and be more politically correct.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/reince-priebus-latinos-hispanics-gop-candidates
Why, it’s a veritable Republican speech code Mobius strip.
Wait, no political correctness permitted.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/ben_carson_compares_homosexuality_to_muder/
If Ben Carson is such a fan of political incorrectness, he should have walked into my maternal grandfather’s hospital room in the early 1960’s and announced HE was the surgeon who was going to remove my grandpappy’s gall bladder the next morning.
The emergency call button would have been furiously activated and lit up the nurse’s station, and Tourette Syndrome specialists placed on call from far and wide to put a cork in my grandfather’s politically incorrect mouth.
Someone fetch me a bucket, cause I’m bailing out the luxury dumbsh*t cruise.
To be fair, which is to say politically correct, Seinfeld has kvetched about too much political correctness among liberal college audiences as well, and recently called out his own teenage daughter for her political correctness.
On yet the other hand from wikipedia:
“Laugh Factory incident
During a November 17, 2006 performance at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood, California, Richards shouted a racially charged response to noise from black audience members, shouting “He’s a nigger!” several times, and referring to lynching, and the Jim Crow era.[6][15][16][17][18] Kyle Doss, a member of the group Richards addressed, said that the group had arrived in the middle of the performance, going on to explain:
[H]ere’s what happened. As we walked in, we sat down and started ordering drinks. And, as we ordered drinks, I guess we’re being a little loud, because there was 20 of us ordering drinks. And he said, “Look at the stupid Mexicans and blacks being loud up there.” That’s the first thing he said. And then he kept on with his bit. And, then, after a while, I told him, “My friend doesn’t think you’re funny.” And then when I told him that, that’s when he flipped me off and said, “F-you N-word.” And that’s how it all started.
— Kyle Doss, Interview on The Situation Room[19]
Richards made a public apology on the Late Show with David Letterman, when Jerry Seinfeld was the guest, saying, “For me to be at a comedy club and to flip out and say this crap, I’m deeply, deeply sorry. I’m not a racist, that’s what’s so insane about this.”[20] The audience initially laughed during uncomfortable pauses in Richards’ explanation and apology, unable to decide if the interview was a bit; at one point Seinfeld chided the audience, “Stop laughing, it’s not funny.” Richards said that he had been trying to defuse heckling by being even more outrageous, but that it had backfired. He later called civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to apologize.[19][21] He also appeared as a guest on Jackson’s syndicated radio show.[22] However both Doss and Sharpton have refused to accept Richards’ apology, with the former saying “…if he wanted to apologize, he could have contacted somebody to one of us from the group…but he didn’t. He apologized on camera just because the tape got out.”[21][23]
The incident was later parodied on several TV shows, including MadTV, Family Guy, South Park, and Extras. In an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Richards appeared as himself and poked fun at the incident. In a 2012 episode of Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Richards admitted that the outburst still haunted him, and was a major reason for his withdrawal from performing stand-up.[24]
Cameo roles, guest appearances, and film roles”
Not that Donald Trump and the racist, sexist, vermin rump (now head) end of the Republican Party are going to operate with any of Seinfeld’s subtlety.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/12/1420764/-Scuttling-the-Paris-Climate-Talks
If there is a Republican President one day, in addition to all of the other radical measures that will have to be taken in the streets domestically, by those who didn’t vote for them, and to emulate the disgraceful Republican behavior of the past seven years (going on 40) and to make this country completely ungovernable by those filth, a shadow State Department, and shadow US embassies in every country and a shadow UN Ambassador, and shadow delegations to international forums and treaty negotiations must be put into place to disrupt, interdict, and destroy all of their international efforts as well, including declarations of perpetual war.
Two can play this game.
This could apply of all 18 (19, counting Trump’s rump; have you seen that thing lately?) Republican candidates:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0JiN1dzx_YY/VfW7tJBbTgI/AAAAAAAAbbE/mk9dhk76w7o/s1600/Screenshot%2B2015-09-13%2Bat%2B10.26.55%2BAM.png
Sapient, I agree with your 12.40. “There is nothing I so much covet as that they should be like themselves, and I should be like myself.” Although few of us can (or would want to) emulate Caesar, I do believe that whatever depths one’s opponent sinks to one should continue to behave in an open-minded, reasonable fashion. But that only seems possible in real life when one’s opponent is acting/arguing in good faith, which seems to be getting vanishingly rare except perhaps in cases like McKT.
Or even one’s “opponent” on the (roughly) same side, as you suggest.
“here is nothing I so much covet as that they should be like themselves, and I should be like myself”
Apropos of nothing except my free-associating brain, this, from the great Thelonious Sphere Monk:
The genius is the one who is most like him (ed. or her) self.
The fact that the right-wing is practically beyond civil discourse doesn’t absolve the left when it shuts down conversation among its factions.
Internecine ideological warfare between the all too many (like f*cking Protestants, only worse) sects on “The Left” has been a feature, not a bug, since the French Revolution.
As a self proclaimed “leftist” this should not come as a surprise.
Despite your assertions, there has been no such “shut down” on the issues you cite. In each and every instance, the proponents you claim to have been “stifled” have the preponderance of institutional power and the biggest media platforms.
This rather bald fact mocks your claim.
Perhaps you could explain that.
bobby, now here you go bringing “facts” into it! How very very uncivil of you. Next, you’re going to demand that their super-tax-cut budget plan numbers add up, MADNESS!
I thought that I posted it, but I guess I didn’t. This piece, via alumni Thomas Nephew’s FB, is the counterpoint to sapient’s call for more self policing on the left. Here is what Thomas writes about it:
From 1973, Ralph Miliband’s unsentimental, hard look at the Chilean coup that year – and how (by his telling) unready, almost unwilling Allende was to prepare to resist it: “When Salvador Allende was elected to the presidency of Chile in September 1970, the regime that was then inaugurated was said to constitute a test case for the peaceful or parliamentary transition to socialism. As it turned out over the following three years, this was something of an exaggeration. It achieved a great deal by way of economic and social reform, under incredibly difficult conditions — but it remained a deliberately “moderate” regime: indeed, it does not seem far-fetched to say that the cause of its death, or at least one main cause of it, was its stubborn “moderation.””
In each and every instance, the proponents you claim to have been “stifled” have the preponderance of institutional power and the biggest media platforms.
You really could have addressed the issues raised in the links I provided if you wanted to discuss specific “facts”.
I’d enjoy a not-so-snarky discussion around sapient’s link from September 13, 2015 at 12:16 PM.
While I’m thoroughly annoyed by generalized complaints about “political correctness” (something that deserves scare quotes, always and forever), people can take their pet causes too far, to the point that the vast majority of people can’t even understand what they’re on about, let alone navigate the sensitivities of those whose cause is at issue to the satisfaction of the same.
It’s the sort of thing that can really only happen in somewhat rarified environments where battles of words can take on increasing levels of abstraction, at the opposite end of the spectrum of intellectualization from that of, say, a bar fight.
They’re mostly tempests in tea pots, but I do wonder how much they can possibly affect the broader culture and political discourse. (Is it like a fashion designer who puts some wacky stuff on the runway in Milan, and five years later you can buy some watered-down version of it off the rack at Walmart?)
At least as universities are concerned, there appears to be a groundswell of stories from faculty members about the chilling of open discourse, but it’s hard to say if that isn’t, itself, a tempest in a teapot that has gotten outsized play on the intertubes and in certain magazines.
It’s hard for me tell, not being close enough too it or having a sense of the relative scope. Some people are convinced there’s a raging open war against police because of recent media coverage, even though the actual numbers are well within historical norms. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing.
I’d enjoy a not-so-snarky discussion around sapient’s link from September 13, 2015 at 12:16 PM.
I guess my non-snarky comment is that conflating campus political correctness wars with “the left” is a couple of bridges too far.
All instances of intellectual (or other) intolerance are not the same.
All instances of concern about predatory sexual behavior on campuses, likewise, for that matter.
The reaction to Kipnis seems, to me, overwrought. The reaction to Yale frat-boys chanting “No means yes, yes means anal”, less so.
And none of the above is, at least as far as I can see, representative of whatever the left can be construed to be in the US at this point.
I mostly think of left vs right issues in socio-economic terms, not so much in terms of political correctness arguments. It could be that I’m out of touch with the times.
I mostly think of left vs right issues in socio-economic terms, not so much in terms of political correctness arguments.
i was thinking something along these lines, too.
it seems unfortunate to me that it’s automatically assumed that what the BLM folks say is of the left. it’s obvious that the BLM message finds more allies on the left than it does on the right. but BLM’s basic demands sound like libertarian demands: treat people fairly regardless of race, reduce the militarization of the police, reduce the unquestioning worship of police authority, etc.. those things aren’t necessarily left or right; they’re basic libertarian small-govt stuff. IMO, what makes it stick to the left, is that ‘B’. and that’s also what makes it automatically repellent to the right. again, IMO.
Nobody should conflait the antics of frat boys with the reality of what generally happens on university campuses. At least were I went to college they were definitely a fringe element.
Although I suppose some notice should be taken of the number of ex-frat-boys in executive positions in business and government.
(Hoping that doesn’t count as snarky….)
“I mostly think of left vs right issues in socio-economic terms, not so much in terms of political correctness arguments. It could be that I’m out of touch with the times.”
I’d like to think that way, too.
But consider, the top two poll-rated Republican Presidential candidates, and a good many more of them, pander to a base that considers any concern whatsoever over socioeconomic imbalances in this country, and the issues connected to them, including any measures even discussed to ameliorate these imbalances, except massive tax cuts for the rich to exacerbate the imbalances, to be limp-wristed, effeminate, pinko political correctness, to be squashed by any means at every turn.
This is the apotheosis of the bullsh*t arguments the Right has been crapping out via their pieholes these many decades, starting with their opposition to civil rights legislation.
The Left, and the middle, are permanently construed.
And don’t be surprised if those frat boys chanting “no means yes, yes means anal” show up at Fiorina rallies wearing Trump buttons if she begins to rise in the polls, and if we don’t see them there, we’ll definitely see them at Hillary Clinton rallies wearing the campaign buttons of whomever wins the Republican nomination, including Fiorina.
That’s just as sure as a conservative assassin booking a motel room near Martin Luther King’s motel in 1968.
Things are broken irretrievably. The signal 35-year long Gingrich/Luntz/Norquist/Tea Party-enabled efforts to destroy civility and comity in the political process have won the day.
There is only one way left to respond — in kind …. times an exponential variable, despite the better natures here who counsel not stooping to their tactics.
F8ck Scott Walker:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/scott-walker-federal-unions
I fully expect him to be named head of OPM under a Jeb Bush Administration, which may go f*ck itelf as well.
Walker’s destroy-all-unions promise is a page torn directly from the Putin/Chinese CCP playbook.
First, thanks, hairshirthedonist, for reading the links. I’ll say something about that at the end of this comment.
But, my comments weren’t intended to be a plea for “moderation” of views. My worry is the stifling of discussion, which I do think is happening to a greater degree than it should.
The essay by Michelle Goldberg talks about an issue that is at the heart of modern feminism: whether women are so vulnerable to sexual predation that they need to be accommodated (in the way that term is being used in, say the ADA), or whether that kind of attitude infantilizes women. And the subsequent link, to the New York Times article about Catherine McKinnon, indicates that, in a way, Catherine McKinnon’s views of feminism has gained traction in a way that risks turning womanhood into an affliction.
It was interesting to me that when Rachel Dolezal was discovered to be a white woman who “identified” as black, she was widely derided by people who are very accepting of transgendered people to the point that people were outraged by the comparison.
I guess I’m unclear on how the examples you give here, with the possible exception of the political correctness mania on campuses, amount to a stifling of discussion.
People who deride Dolezal but accept transgendered folks are, perhaps, being inconsistent. That isn’t a stifling of discussion.
How is it “wrong” to criticize marriage? Are you saying that you are being prevented from offering opinions that are in some way critical of marriage as an institution? Or are you saying that not many folks agree with you? Those two things are different.
I’m not sure exactly what point you want to make on the rape topic, but are you saying you are *unable* to make that point? Or are you saying that your point of view is not popular? Again, those two things are different.
Ditto the issue of drone strikes, etc.
I don’t know what n-word book you are actually talking about, so I don’t really have any thoughts to offer on that.
Everyone isn’t going to agree with you. Some folks will disagree with you with more heat than others.
None of that is censorship. Censorship is when you are *prevented* from expressing whatever it is you have to say.
Of all of the examples you have given, Kipnis might have a basis for claiming to have been actually punished unfairly for speaking her mind, *if in fact she ends up suffering some material negative consequence* for publishing her essay.
But I’m not seeing it in the other cases.
But are material negative consequences the only kind worth considering? It seems like economic impacts, while important, are not the only ones that should get some notice.
Sapient,
1. You provide no link or other facts regarding the “n” word example.
2. I have read your snip on gay marriage several times, and cannot make heads or tails of it.
3. Rape. Much noise here, but I would offer this: Those claiming to be stifled get to have their views published in a leading journal. They get a sympathetic article about them in Nation Magazine and a lengthy article in the NY Times, and you seriously claim the discussion is “stifled”. Are you serious?
4. Drones. We disagree about foreign policy. The majority of the Democratic Party (if election results are to be believed) seem to share your viewpoint. They currently hold the levers of power. But yet again, you claim people like myself are “stifling” the discussion? That is pure unmitigated bullshit.
And yes, I read your links.
Have a good day.
None of that is censorship. Censorship is when you are *prevented* from expressing whatever it is you have to say.
I understand what censorship is, which is why I said instead “stifling of discussion”. Stifling of discussion occurs when people dismiss certain views rather than engaging in a discussion of them by ridiculing, namecalling and other nonsubstantive reactions. Often it results in shutting down the unpopular view.
And it does have collateral consequences, whether material or not. The consequence I’m interested in is that people give up talking about things that might be worth talking about because they’re intimidated by people who profess to be liberal and open-minded.
Some consequences: Rachel Dolezal left her job. President Obama’s use of the N word was bleeped. Domestic partners are losing benefits because they are not “married”. People are being
kicked out of school for rape without due process.
Some of these examples represent a shutting-down of discussion, and others represent other kinds of collateral damage that has occurred because discussion was shut down. Nuance is lost in many debates on the left because if a certain way of thinking isn’t followed, people are maligned. If you don’t see that happening, that’s fine. I do.
Stifling of discussion occurs when people dismiss certain views rather than engaging in a discussion of them by ridiculing, namecalling and other nonsubstantive reactions. Often it results in shutting down the unpopular view.
this happens everywhere, all the time, in every domain. stronger voices shout down weaker voices. nuance is crushed by absolutists. ideologues demand purity.
and it’s not a “left” problem. it’s a fundamental aspect of human interaction.
For what it’s worth, I’m against all three of those consequences, sapient, though in the third instance, I’m a little ambivalent.
I hereby call for less stifling and more high-decibel discussion.
Things haven’t really changed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8
I love the Thurston Howell III Locust Valley lockjaw accented threats of fisticuffs on the poncy nose of Gore Vidal.
Or:
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/qza67k/drunk-history-john-adams-vs–thomas-jefferson
The real version:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/19668/election-1800-birth-negative-campaigning-us
In 1851, conservative Confederate Democratic House member Charles Sumner caned a liberal, politically correct Republican Senator nearly to death on the floor of the Senate.
We’re not quite there again yet. Give it a few weeks.
Domestic partners are losing benefits because they are not “married”.
The whole idea of “domestic partnership” owes its existance to trying to create something for homosexuals which avoided the term “marriage.” It missed some things, but that was the aim. However, now that gays can get married, what useful purpose does it serve?
As far as I can tell, the only benefit from a domestic partnership is for those who want to take advantage to the fact that it gets them most of the benefits of marriage (at least at the state level), without having to assume the responsibilities that come with being married. The sooner it gets tossed on the junk heap of history the better.
and it’s not a “left” problem. it’s a fundamental aspect of human interaction.
Sure, but when it happens by the left, it should be called out by the left. Because its ugly and it has anti-democratic consequences.
As to the “right”, intolerance is their thing. So calling it out is no different than just disagreeing with them generally.
The consequence I’m interested in is that people give up talking about things that might be worth talking about because they’re intimidated by people who profess to be liberal and open-minded.
It strikes me that what you are looking for is for everyone to be fair and polite in public discussions.
Which would be great. I have no desire to argue against that point.
I will say that none – not one – of the examples you give in the rest of your comment are examples either of discussion being stifled, or of consequences following from discussion being stifled.
Dolezal left her job because she was discovered to have misrepresented who she was, in ways that compromised her ability to do her job.
Obama’s use of nigger was bleeped because we bleep offensive words in broadcast media.
Benefits for domestic partners may now be at risk in some cases, but not through lack of discussion about it.
The kid that was thrown out of school was tossed for violating the student code of conduct, which he no doubt agreed to comply with upon enrolling. I don’t think schools are held to constitutional due process standards in deciding those matters. In any case, the student has responded with a lawsuit, so his voice is being heard.
Unfair things happen when different people pursue their various interests, because we don’t really have a way to find perfect solutions.
That isn’t the same as having your voice stifled.
Expressing yourself can, in fact, result in adversarial and even hostile results. It’s unfortunate that that is true, I will not disagree with you on that.
As far as I can tell, the only benefit from a domestic partnership is for those who want to take advantage to the fact that it gets them most of the benefits of marriage (at least at the state level), without having to assume the responsibilities that come with being married.
Other people feel differently. Some people want to establish a household with one or more other people without being discriminated against for health benefits, etc., and without pledging lifelong fidelity, etc., or other having to get a “divorce” when the arrangement comes to an end.
It strikes me that what you are looking for is for everyone to be fair and polite in public discussions.
That would be nice, but that’s not what I’m “looking for”. I’m “looking for” people to analyze their more doctrinaire views on things, and to ask themselves whether they’ve given those views thoughtful consideration, or whether they hold them because that’s what a good left-leaning “progressive” should think.
Some people want to establish a household with one or more other people without being discriminated against for health benefits, etc.
The issue there is not whether people should be able to organize their households and personal lives as they wish.
The issue is that for historical reasons health insurance, specifically, has been provided through an employer in this country. And, for employers, the logistics of dealing with providing benefits for less formal and more fluid family arrangements are problematic.
So, they don’t want to do it.
It’s a matter of your (or someone’s) interests vs. the interests of the employer. You have to duke it out and try to prevail.
Or, argue for an arrangement that makes things like that available through other means.
As to the “right”, intolerance is their thing.
That may be true if you embrace the definition of “right” (i.e. “conservative”) that today’s US conservatives, especially the purist ones, use. But that is far from the only reasonable definition. For example, on can be a fiscal conservative without believing that anybody different from yourself should be repressed. You can be a social conservative without believing that those with different lifestyles are horrid people. (Misguided and foolish, perhaps, but not horrid.)
That would be nice, but that’s not what I’m “looking for”. I’m “looking for” people to analyze their more doctrinaire views on things, and to ask themselves whether they’ve given those views thoughtful consideration…
Yes. People who disagree with you are being “doctrinaire” and not giving opposing views “thoughtful consideration”.
This is crap. I give you just about all your hysterical and moralizing responses on this board to Donald Johnson and others (me included) when it comes to foreign policy. When it comes to “shutting down the conversation” you take the cake on that issue.
People are being kicked out of school for rape without due process.
Is this really a “left” thing though? To me this looks much more like a consequence of the predominance of the overzealous “student as customer” brand-protective corrupt collegiate administrator class.
the overzealous “student as customer” brand-protective corrupt collegiate administrator class.
Maybe, but the young men who are being kicked out are customers too. (And I would suggest to russell that in order to determine whether someone violates school policy by raping someone else requires a whole lot of due process, even if the punishment is expulsion rather than jail time.)
hysterical and moralizing
As compared to you and, especially, Donald Johnson?
I agree with part of sapient’s complaint–though like most lefties I think the right is far worse, I do see some attempts at shutting down discussion on the left. I see it on a microscopic scale at another blog I frequent, sometimes in ways that are frankly so paranoid it’s comical. (It would take me paragraphs to explain how absurd the discussions can get over at That Other Blog and it’s not important, though it is mildly entertaining.) And I get the impression that campus lefties sometimes go too far. (Though I suspect that reporting on this is cherrypicked–on the issue I follow, the I/P conflict, the pro-Israel side also sometimes clutches its smelling salts and claims to be the victim of antisemitism when it is just harsh criticism of Zionism at stake.)
But on foreign policy it seems to me the humanitarian interventionist hawks have more than their fair share of the public microphone where it counts. On Libya, for instance, they won and the results were bad. If the Republicans were a sane opposition they would be grilling Obama on that, rather than Benghazi. But I’m guessing most supported the intervention. That’s a tangent. The point is I don’t feel terribly sorry if the anti-interventionist left dominates some comment sections at some liberal blogs–it’s not as if the comment sections at liberal blogs set policy.
To clarify, there is no blog (that I know of) called That Other Blog, though it would make a fine name. I just don’t want to ridicule them behind their back, so I’m being vague and not naming names.
Thank you, Donald. I enjoy heated discussion. What I don’t enjoy is being called a homophobe, a racist, a misogynist, a warmonger, someone who supports war crimes, etc.
As far as hysterical and moralizing, I am willing to say that “both sides do it” – both you and me.
As compared to you and, especially, Donald Johnson?
Sigh. Somehow I sense an utter lack of any appreciation or thoughtful consideration of my viewpoint. 🙂
I’m curious, what was the due process for college age kids being caught and punished or kicked out of school for having consensual sex back in the one foot-on-the-floor, open dorm room door, curfew days somewhat before I went to college in the early19aughtsevens?
And what due process was followed by college administrators who dragooned pregnant college coeds into leaving school, at least until the “problem” was cleared up one way or the other?
Was there testimony heard in a Court of Law or was it just an in house administrative hearing, with maybe some glaring parents on hand?
Conversely, once it was my time to attend college, things went somewhat the other direction in that college campuses were pretty-much free zones by tacit understanding between the townie police forces and the local municipal law enforcement.
Just about anything short of murder and rape … drugs for example, or breaking and entering into ROTC offices, in my case, whimsically, but with high seriousness, the natatorium (ROTC office adjoining; you could walk ten paces from the door of the ROTC office and do a cannonball off the diving board; UP THE SPEEDOs Mofos!! Alright, everyone out of the pool, we need to make a list of demands!!) to protest the invasion of Cambodia.
God, I loved college.
A war on college men: Jared Polis’ idea to deprive college men of due process highlights toxic campus culture of discrimination against men.
Of course, up the road, that same day, Kent State went berserk.
Donald,
A couple of “cut and pastes” from “The Other Blog” might bring your point into sharper focus. But yes, intolerance is no stranger to “the Left”, and it should be called out.
It is my opinion that Sapient, attorney that he is, is baldly overstating his case. For example, I note he has not raised his cudgel in support of heterosexual domestic partners….:) of which I assume there are a whole lot. I guess that conversation got shut down by, well, somebody.
Polis is wrong.
On the other hand, if ten male students are accused of rape and all ten go on criminal trial, the eight innocent ones can say goodbye to their careers as well, probably.
So what recourse do women have under the status quo ante of everything being largely ignored and slaps on the wrists issued all around.
Especially when you have an ethic of this type possibly being pushed by the infiltration of the Court Systems by conservative Christian judges who follow this line of moral thinking:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslice/duggars-bill-gothard-iblp
A war on college men:
written by Glenn Reynolds.
are current reactions to sexual assault too harsh on the accused (but not convicted)? yes, possibly.
were former reactions to sexual assault too easy on the accused? yes, definitely.
did Reynolds write op/eds about problems with the former state of sexual assault response? i’d like to see ’em.
That would be nice, but that’s not what I’m “looking for”. I’m “looking for” people to analyze their more doctrinaire views on things, and to ask themselves whether they’ve given those views thoughtful consideration
IMO, a very fair request.
I would suggest to russell that in order to determine whether someone violates school policy by raping someone else requires a whole lot of due process
I guess I have a couple of thoughts about this. Not that I have any expertise, or any wealth of information or experience, just a couple of thoughts.
IMO it’s OK for schools to boot people for behavior that runs afoul of the school’s own standards, whether that involves criminal behavior or not. Don’t like it, don’t go that school, or try to change the policy.
I agree that there should be *a process* for determining whether a violation has occurred, that it should be known and understood by all parties, and that it should be followed fairly. I don’t think it necessarily has to comply with the rules that apply to criminal procedures, assuming criminal charges aren’t being brought.
I don’t know what procedures were followed in this case, or whether they complied with the school’s policies and/or any applicable laws or regulations. Presumably, all of that will be sorted, by third parties, in the process of pursuing the young man’s lawsuit.
I have no idea what the facts are in this situation, hopefully the legal process will shed some light.
I get the impression that campus lefties sometimes go too far.
It’s been quite a while, but as I recall, university years were full of people discovering that life was not fair, which made them very angry, and in turn they demanded that it all be fixed, preferably before they graduated.
Colleges are hothouses. I’m not sure they should be considered to be representative of life in general.
I didn’t see the Reynolds byline.
Let me amend. Polis is wrong, but Reynolds long ago disqualified himself from judging so.
back in the one foot-on-the-floor
Count, I hadn’t realized how recently you were in school. In my day, it was three feet on the floor!
Apropos (sort-of) of the topic, there was a lot of this N-quite-SFW item going around recently.
Talk about stifling expression!
First they came for my right hand….
What? No trigger warnings?
heh, I dated only one-legged women. The only way there were three feet on the floor was if I was dating three one-legged women simultaneously, and I kid.
Actually, truth be told, even while alone in my college dorm room, I always kept one foot (actually, my peg leg) on the floor. Like the wag cracked, I was afraid I’d give myself something.
Now, these days, what with the trend toward polyamory (I’ve always been a serial polyamorist), institutions of higher learning and lower standards have had to adjust their rules.
Now, they demand at least nine feet on the floor in any one room. The kids call it the “centipede rule”.
I’ve heard that at the Rick Santorum University of Stifled Fun, in Hypocrite City, South Carolina, the rule is two feet and four paws on the floor at all times.
Incidentally, someone is going to have both their feet called on the carpet for misreading Scripture, I’ll bet:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/bernie-goes-to-lynchburg-by-bloggersrus.html
Russell, didn’t your high school guidance counselor and college advisor counsel you to become ambidextrous BEFORE you matriculated.
I don’t recall any “NO Matriculation” signs in the dorm shower rooms.
Trigger Warnings?
I thought you hollered “FORE!”
But you’re a true Scotsman.
My university was still operating under nominally Methodist strictures when I attended, so we had portraits of John Wesley in all of the shower rooms.
The women’s shower facilities had a portrait of John Wesley’s uptight older sister with a shower cap on glaring at them.
Don’t ask me how I know that.
Iowa conservatives get sh*tfaced and the country gets a hangover:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_09/tailgating_with_trump057595.php
We’re going to need the hair of the Trump in the morning.
I forget which thread the meme that’s being circulated regarding the increase in police deaths at the bloody hands of Black Lives Matter and President Obama was discussed, but here is some deserved stifling:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/14/1421126/-Iraq-war-veteran-speaks-out-against-the-blatant-lies-being-told-in-the-local-police-academy
Here’s more on Scott Walker’s union destroying proposals and the subhuman filth bankrolling them:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/special-delivery-for-shelly.html
“Radical Islam and right to more easily join a union are the two most fundamental threats to society.”
When Adelson is dead, that’ll be another threat extinquished. That day can’t come too soon.
The ultimate stifling measure.
Meanwhile, another ruthless Ayn Rand type, Steve Wynn, has had a casino knocked over in Macau.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/macau-getting-rocked-reports-258-154338929.html;_ylt=AwrXnCHFUPdVmhEAlaGTmYlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByZDNzZTI1BGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw–
More of this, please.
I’m not willing to say that condemning the Obama Adminisrtation for supporting and sometimes lying about war crimes is hysterical.
Stepping back a bit, when people argue about whether to blow people up, some of whom are terrorists, I expect heated language on both sides. And sometimes the heated language might be accurate.
On being thoughtful, I think the burden of proof falls on the advocate for intervention. Occasionally the burden could be met, but usually it won’t.
Bobbyp, I wrote a long post about the sillier comments at That Other Blog and deleted it. Basically a subset of the commenters there really do fit the stereotype the right has about the left and the moderate left has about the far left–there really are a few Western lefties who blame America and Israel for practically everything bad in the world, to the point of paranoid insanity. 9/11 trutherism is one example, but there are others.. I don’t think the many on the right and some moderate liberals (sometimes including sapient in a bad mood) can tell the difference between me and people like that, but the gap is huge.
“That many on the right”—autocorrect strikes again.
Donald: peace.
I actually love you (in your ObWi persona), but disagree in many ways. I’ll leave it at this: You remember a lot of horrible things the U.S. has done, and that’s a good thing. It’s also important that the memory of that informs what we do in the future. But I’m afraid that it also distorts our view of what we can’t, can, and should do.
Did you see this? I saw it on another blog, and we need to keep in mind that people our [my] parents’ age lived through this. The idea of “trigger warnings” is put into a different perspective.
https://vimeo.com/128373915
Sapient, thanks for that.
Thanks for viewing it, McKinney.
I’m going to pass it around. One of the few here or elsewhere not driven by an agenda. Very useful context.
Re Sapient’s complaint…I am reminded of the recent Jon Chait kefluffle on “PC”.
See here and here.
As a past denizen of the far, far radical left, I can only say I find this handwringing over the “stifling effects of PC” rather tame by comparison to what has happened in the past (cf Stalin’s murderous -literally-efforts to stamp out “Trotskyim” or the loony debates at the 1968 SDS national convention for just two examples).
Trump could put McCain in a tiger cage ad dislocate his shoulders, but the latter will support the nominee no matter what:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/14/1421140/–If-he-has-to-McCain-will-ignore-the-insults-and-crazies-to-support-Trump
McCain’s been stifled and gelded.
Puke.
As a past denizen of the far, far radical left, I can only say I find this handwringing over the “stifling effects of PC” rather tame by comparison to what has happened in the past (cf Stalin’s murderous -literally-efforts to stamp out “Trotskyim” or the loony debates at the 1968 SDS national convention for just two examples).
Yeah, kind of glad we’re not there. I’m visiting China and Vietnam soon. Stifling by “the left” has a whole different meaning there. But then, “the left” has a whole different meaning there.
I don’t get it.
“The left” in China, if you mean the CPC government, is a stodgy, conservative monolith.
“The left” in China, if you mean the CPC government, is a stodgy, conservative monolith.
Zackly. The “left” means many different things.
That’s right. It was Young Republicans wearing Mao caps and Che tee shirts. Solidarity!
I started to watch it, sapient, but I’ve read WW2 statistics, a fair number of books about it and my father was a veteran of Pacific war. I’m sure it’s a fine graphical presentation of the statistics ( I’ve also read a lot about death tolls in other wars and atrocities all through history). Incidentally, though my father was grateful the Bomb was dropped, he was not in the slightest bothered when people questioned whether it should have been. He had me reading books written about the war from the Japanese pov– one on the battle of Midway and the other’John Toland’s The Rising Sun, which tells the history of the war from the perspective of various Japanese. He tried to get me to read a novel about Stalingrad, but except for a Reader’s digest account of the siege of Leningrad I just wasn’t interested in the eastern front as a child for some reason.
On trigger warnings, I would defer to people who know whether it makes sense for victims of rape or people suffering from PTSD. I am opposed to them for people who might be offended by exposure to ideas they don’t like.
That kind of thing is as likely to be used against causes I support as for them, not that this should be the deciding factor.
You are terminated!
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-arnold-schwarzenegger-to-replace-donald-trump-as-celebrity-apprentice-host-20150914-story.html
Maybe they could get conservative Steven Seagal and his Crimean/Putin buddies in to escort the losing contestants to the waiting limos.
“Hey, this isn’t the way to the airport”
“Pipe down, my buddies Vlad Putin and Sheriff Arpaio have a safe house for you. Now, get in the trunk.”
Donald, I would urge you to spend the 20 minutes, or whatever it is. Obviously, if your dad was there fighting (as mine was) we are both second generation casualties in a way. But it’s a good use of your time nonetheless to watch the whole thing. That kind of violence informed the people who made decisions. My dad felt the same way your dad did. He was a leftie, as were a lot of people who signed up for that war against fascism.
I agree with you too about “trigger warnings” I think. The usual warning about graphic violence does the trick. Although people are so freaking protected. Is it too much to ask that they experience a picture or movie of something that so many people actually had to endure? This is a question, not an opinion.
The video is very good. Thanks. My computer loads Vimeo very slowly so I’ll go back again and watch without the stutter steps.
I read a lot of WWII (and WWI) history and we really have no conception of the scope and the breadth of the enemy opposition and strength.
Bob Dole and George McGovern, good, honest, decent men on opposite ends of the political spectrum, were heroes in the face of cataclysm.
The WWII video was very moving.
I guess I’m unclear on what the message is that we should take away from it.
Should we not have, or express, opinions about things that happen now?
Does it indicate a lack of historical perspective if we object to things like, for example, drone strikes, or some drone strikes, or drone strikes in some cases?
My father, father-in-law, step-father, uncle, all fought in WWII. I have my old man’s hand-written notes from the invasion of Okinawa. His brother, my uncle, was killed in France.
They are all, sadly, dead now, all of them. I miss them. WWII fucking sucked. I hope we never see the likes of it again.
And, I don’t really see the relevance of it to the discussion at hand.
Should everyone who hasn’t had experiences of the scale and horror of WWII just shut up?
I’m unclear on what we’re all supposed to take away from it.
Thanks, Count.
I do think that even though I’ve been a student of WWII since I was born, that ver short video taught me a lot about the scale of destruction.
I feel that our subsequent foreign policy, especially conducted by the people who had seen that time, is not something we can particularly condemn. Until LBJ, in a small way, then Nixon, in a huge way, then forward we can think about foreign policy as having learned (but not a casualty of) those horrible times.
Worth considering. Al qaeda, ISIS, whatever. Those guys are not pro-peace.
I’m unclear on what we’re all supposed to take away from it.
Me too. I’m unclear on what we’re all supposed to take away from any kind of human experience, including mine. I’m just thinking that most American college students are extremely privileged. That someone drinks too much and has sex with someone? Really? Is that even a thing?
WWII veterans couldn’t wait to get back stateside, complete their socialist GI Bill paperwork, and go to or back to college and drink too much and have sex, but, yeah, I get the drift.
My Dad, for example.
My Dad, for example.
And everyone else. Including women, who [trigger warning] sometimes drink and have sex.
Oops, but NO they’re not allowed to, because that would be rape!!!!
I’ll watch it later, but no, I don’t think WWII is any sort of excuse for the worst aspects of US foreign policy in the Cold War. It provides context, but terrorists have context too–much of it happens to involve US foreign policy. That’s not even remotely an excuse, but ISIS, for instance owes its birth to the Iraq War and to some degree Shiite death squads. Hamas has a hell of a lot of context. Probably most terrorists can point to some terrible thing which they can use for recruitment or justification.
Donald, not to be mean, but where does God’s will play into this? My math friend should be able to find an equation. Are we not praying hard enough?
Send us all something to read, at least.
So, I began the exchange with sapient in this thread because, IMO, his claim that people’s points of view were being stifled seemed to be kind of an overstatement.
People disagree, sometimes they do so with some heat. Sometimes they are, plainly, rude. That can be unpleasant if you’re on the receiving end.
I get all of that.
What I disagree with is the idea that any of that constitutes a stifling of expression, in any really meaningful way.
That’s my point.
I have no disagreement with the idea that it would be good if people examined what they think and believe, rather than simply absorbing the general opinions and received wisdom of whatever peer groups they belong to.
I’m not really interested in comparing the experience of today’s college undergrads with people who were slaughtered in WWII, because they are not, in any way shape or form, commensurate experiences.
I’m not interested in making determinations about who really got raped and who only got drunk, had sex, got embarrassed, and cried rape. Because both things happen, and the particulars of each case need to be evaluated on their own merits. There isn’t a useful general statement that can be made about it.
I’m not even interested in getting into the whole drone thing, because we’ve been over it all a million times, we all have our own legitimate reasons for holding the opinions that we do, and we simply don’t all agree.
I’ll just leave my basic point as it is. Nothing that has been presented in this thread has persuaded me away from it, so it remains as is.
I’m not sure I get where you are going with that, but it’s late.
Anyway, as far as what we are to get from the experiences of our fathers, and uncles, and grandfathers in World War II, and its lessons for the cushy life of a college student today, I’m reminded of the train compartment scene on “A Hard Day’s Night”, in which the Beatles (the four-headed monster, as Mick Jagger called them), shared the space with a stiff upper lip Englishman in a bowler hat, who, after scowling at some preliminary drollery from the Beatles (“give us a kiss”, says Lennon, leaning in close), proclaims dismissively of what a parlous things and hairstyles had come to, “I fought in the war, you know,” to which Ringo retorts “I bet you wish you’d lost.”
Think about that when I compare Putin the conservative to say, Ted Cruz, the conservative, both longing for war and restoration.
Which is to say the Brit was witnessing right there WHAT he fought for, freedom, and the Beatles were one of the foremost examples of entrepreneurial, unbridled freedom in the history of unbridledness.
What the Beatles and the conservatives who pooh-poohed them didn’t see coming, of course, was the the band’s far-reaching influence and the renaissance they helped lead in opening up not only western culture to the new and the fresh, but also the stunning impression they also made on Russian kids who gave up anything and placed themselves in jeopardy at the time and later to get their hands on the Beatles’ subversive sound and all that came with, while of course their opposites in certain locations around the U.S. were using Beatles LPs as bonfire kindling (though as Ringo — again – pointed out — they just went out and had to replace the kids’ record collections, providing him with more money)
The Beatles et al were “tearing down that wall” long before the Reagan revolution degenerated into the “Build Lots of High Walls on the Borders” nonsense of today.
Ask the Russians who turned out in throngs (and thongs) to hear Paul McCartney sing “Back In The USSR” within a few feet of the Kremlin not too many years ago what a subversive force western pop culture was for them and how it contributed to bringing down the Soviet edifice by steady inner cultural erosion over decades.
The Brit veteran reactionary conservative (Blue Meanie) in the train compartment didn’t know what he was beholding — war by other means.
Of course, Putin, (Bigger Blue Meanie, oh glovey dovey) the reactionary conservative longing for the restoration of the great Soviet past is putting things in jeopardy again.
The first sentence of my 10:47 was for sapient.
You get a little odd at night sometimes, sapient.
I don’t particularly want to argue any more tonight. I thought of a slightly new point to make but it can wait. In my saner moments I understand that making a point on a blog doesn’t actually change anything.
I have no disagreement with the idea that it would be good if people examined what they think and believe, rather than simply absorbing the general opinions and received wisdom of whatever peer groups they belong to.
Yeah, thanks. That’s incredibly good news.
I’m not interested …
And that’s your prerogative. I’m not interested in a lot of things too, like sports, and I just stay out of it usually. Good for you that you’re doing something else more worthwhile, I hope.
That is, I hope
Hope I fixed the itals.
You get a little odd at night sometimes, sapient.
Yep. Time for bed.
Going back a bit, to the whole “campus rape” issues, in particular the pseudo-judicial procedures used before expulsion.
I’ve only read over *one* such procedure document, but realize that college admins crib from each other with wild abandon, so it may not be a unique case.
My reaction? Stalin is crying in his grave, that he missed out on such sweet show-trial material.
How it actually works in practice, I have no idea.
BUT, I think it’s important to understand the motivation of those who impose such rules on colleges: upper admins, trustees, etc., 1%ers all, are MORTIFIED by the potential of being named in a lawsuit because they didn’t do X, Y, Z. So the name of the game is “butt-covering”. If it means summarily ejecting Mr. Frat Jerk, they’ll do it just as fast as they can while avoiding lawsuit exposure.
There are other examples, but they all start with “university upper admins/trustees getting sued”.
The Feds are also leaning on the universities using Title IX.
The Brit veteran reactionary conservative (Blue Meanie) in the train compartment didn’t know what he was beholding — war by other means.
There’s that.
I always thought Ringo was just being a bit of a dick.
I keep seeing good Beatles stuff, and thinking “the Count would like that”, but nowhere to put it – we need a permanently open Beatles thread 🙂 I’m still on my bloody phone, so can’t easily watch video, scroll backwards and forwards to check previous comments etc (because not a kid), but I just wanted to clarify my previous comments: I don’t just think we shouldn’t descend to the levels of our opponents (whoever they may be, but for these purposes let’s call them the extreme right) because I value civilised discourse, although I do. It’s more because if we do, we become more like them (hence my earlier julius Caesar quote), and not only are they as mad as a box of frogs, but then the whole thing spirals downhill into more and more violence and madness. I understand and sympathise with the Count’s path, but if we all adopted it, what hope for sane discussion then? And why vote for anyone, etc etc? Although….
Well, it was a movie, but Ringo was being cheeky and meant no harm.
What I like about that scene is it gives us a taste, I’ll wager, of what it was like to encounter the four-headed monster in person, which early on, because they lived cheek to jowl in seedy accommodations in Hamburg (minus Ringo at that time, though he knew the place from when he was with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, I think it was) and together as just kids, really, and had to deal with — and conquer by giving evrything back these audiences gave, including the odd thrown chair and beer bottle — sometimes ten hours a day on stage, hostile German dockworkers, sailors, and thugs (heck, Lennon would sieg heil them from the stage after a while, but by then it was all dicey fun) they became very tight as a band and as comrades and all spoke the same language as a cheeky unit from which no one was provided sanctuary.
Conquering America was nothing after that, though they were happy to pass the audition, thank you very much.
I thought it was great that they put that line in Ringo’s mouth in the movie instead of Lennon’s, who we would expect it from.
I do go on (hey, every thread is a permanently open Beatles thread to me 😉 but GFTNC’s suggestion is welcome, course, then I’ll clam up and hijack that thread for other purposes), but this four-faced irresistible personality was exactly what the urbane, sophisticated George Martin found charming enough to sign to a record deal (and Martin was really the Beatles last chance as the story goes).
After he had auditioned them at Abbey Road and had concluded that they were not particularly proficient musicians, but at least two them could sing, and there was “something” about them, after giving them the lie of the land, he turned and asked if they had anything they would like to tell him.
George, who was second only to John with a ready deadpan evisceration, said, “Well, for starters, we don’t like your tie.”
That cinched the deal for Martin. I wish I could that in job interviews. The little secret the Beatles did not know yet was that Martin had previously worked with Dudley Moore and the Goons and also Peter Sellers on comedy records, so he was well-versed in clever repartee.
“mad as a box of frogs” I wish I was British so I could talk better. I’ll be (k)nicking that.
I don’t expect anyone else to sympathize with the Count’s path. It’s something I do in this small corner of the world.
But I have found that if you throw the chair back at the thugs who threw it first, it makes an impression. If you don’t, they’ll throw a table at you to see if you can handle it.
Plus, it gives you a moment to duck out the back.
It will be up to history to judge how dangerous and destructive the Count’s leftist militancy on ObWi actually was. I don’t think we have the perspective necessary to evaluate its full breadth and scope here in the now. It’s all just too damned much.
big noise in a little room.
George Martin will be 90 soon.
I’m going to fix the hole where the time gets out and then lie down.
Italics dysfunction fixed.
If you are arguing that conservatives long for a totalitarian plutocracy wherein dissidents are executed and their families billed for the cost, I would hope that you keep in mind that conservatives in this country probably would not agree to institute such a thing.
Bonus: we’re so widely disparate in opinion that no such consensus could occur.
If you’re arguing that the PRC government is not in fact leftist in origin, well, the facts are not on your side in this particular instance.
Not to advance an argument that left/right craziness wraps upon itself, Ouroboros-like, but Mao and his ideological offspring were really a lot about accruing power. Much as Stalin and HIS ideological offspring. To the point where purported-left-craziness has more than overbalanced purported-right-craziness.
But the finger-pointing must continue, I suppose, to the exclusion of the point that craziness itself is to blame.
An unexpected and (given the source) surprising perspective on political correctness.
craziness itself is to blame
The penny drops.
What strikes me is that authoritarian vs libertarian, and left vs right, are somewhat orthogonal poles.
And independent of both of the above are accountable and responsive vs their opposites.
Unlike things get conflated. Confusion ensues.
By conservative, I mean standing athwart history and yelling stop and attempting a restoration of a previous glorious status quo, a formerly strict order, and shutting out and/or eliminating any opposition by either non-lethal or lethal means.
The Southern Confederacy and the PRC Government were and are conservative and equally monolithic in this sense, regardless of political and ideological categories, the latter arguably more lethal, but the technology available to the Confederacy to enable a more efficient lethality was lacking 150 years ago.
William F. Buckley fought against integration and Civil Rights for decades and John Boehner has a delusional nostalgia for the restoration of a golden time when America was great, which included racial and gender segregation and prejudice, the elderly and the poor bankrupted by medical bills, and oddly enough for him, a high marginal tax rate of 91%.
The PRC and the Putin regime want to restore and maintain a golden time, in their conservative minds, when power was within the confined grasp of a few, but I’m completely aware of the difference in degree between our home-grown brand of conservatism and this latter more lethal variety.
But tell me one way, besides the sizable handing over the means of production to the State (now transmuted into good old corrupt bureaucratic state capitalism), these people are liberal.
None of them looks kindly on a Pussy Riot.
But, agreed on Mao and Stalin and their offspring, if we account for the changing meanings of liberal and conservstive over time and between cultures.
I hate the Hitler vrs Stalin contests, with Mao thrown in. They weren’t liberal or conservative in any sense of the word. They were totalitarian in their maintenance of their desired sense or Order.
IMHO, if we’re talking about terminating Obamacare and such like, that would be lethal. And it will be named as such.
The PRC got rid of universal healthcare, such as it was, in China, two decades or so ago, except for the very poor, and conservatives here called it liberalization, in the old sense of the word Liberal.
Well, it’s not liberal for the Chinese middle class. Its privation in many instances.
A slim majority on our Supreme Court and 27% or more of the population wants to return to a fabulist imaginary golden age when a narrow, literal interpretation of the Constitution and religious texts supposedly were in force.
I say nonsense. We’ve made it up as we’ve gone along, which is all that reasonable people can do.
Leonid Brezhnev, the bland stick-in-the-mud conservatives in the PRC, and most of the 18 Republican candidates running today blanch, by different means, at change, unless its to some past untenable privation for great numbers of people.
None of these characters will put up with a Pussy Riot, he repeated.
In my sense of the meaning, I will concede that I’m conservative in wanting to stand athwart history and stop the rollback of how we manage healthcare in this country to a time when everyone was on their own, those with resources and those without.
I’ll concede that while I’m personally against abortion, by my own definition, I’m conservative in wanting to maintain that choice for women, within some limitations that nearly everyone will disagree with and because I’m not interested in returning to a time when women were disfigured or died from seeking illegal abortion on the sly.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I can hold all of those contradictory crazy thoughts together in my head at one time.
I conflate, inflate, deflate, and oblate. I’ve been known to incubate, probate, stipulate, confabulate, extirpate, and all other -ates. All I’m saying is, give peace a chance and let me punch Al Capp in the prostate, too for good measure because I’m just a guy in my pajamas having a little harmless fun.
Further, by the self-professed definitions of the ascendant, exlusive conservative movement that has kidnapped the entire now radical Republican Party, that movement does not consider decent “conservatives” still here at OBWI as members of the tribe, for one or another reasons (McTX’s in favor of gay marriage and is a civil individual, as is Slart, who as well does not generalize from the particular in his judgements of wide swathes of people, as the ascendant and vocal members of the Republican tribe do. I do it to get the dander up; it’s performance art, as you have noted, but that’s just between you and me, right?) regardless of whether you and I agree with each other on policy much.
Yes, they ARE crazy and you folks are not.
I’m crazy by design (well, some of it comes naturally; my mother was wiry too) but not crazy enough to convince you to join the Democratic Party, and if you did, welcome, but at least as far as I’m concerned you won’t be required to sign a pledge promising allegiance to every jot and tittle (try saying the word “tittle” in Mike Huckabee’s presence and watch the speech code police come out of the woodwork, though he makes an exception for Ted Nugent’s crap) of my point of view.
footnote: I’m a politically incorrect guy, no kidding. By design. But my sense is now that the Tea Party crowd and the conservative enemies of “political correctness”, whatever that ever meant, just want license to forgo all civility and manners so they can use the words “nigger” and “wetback” and “faggot” in public, while packing a weapon to dissuade any trouble coming their way. They are actually tired of mere dog-whistles, being dogs of the unhouse-broken variety.
Some of them are my friends in real life. They are tired of having to go all sotto voce, even in private, when they want to generalize from the particular when they want to explain to you the real reason Barry Bonds behaves as he does, like my grandfather use to talk.
Hey, go for it.
Then we fight. Those days are gone.
Confusing enough? That was long-winded enough to qualify as a Politburo speech or a Ted Cruz filibuster.
Let me check my categories.
And, yes, our superior Constitutional arrangement in the U.S. and other legitimate democracies for accommodating peaceful change beats the other totalitarian systems hands down.
So, why the guns? Gotcha.
Count, that’s not ‘conservative’ – that’s reactionary.
Conservatism is (or at least should be) about the desire not to abandon traditional practice unless an clear improvement offers itself.
Of course, not all (not many ?) conservative live up to that – but how many socialists live up to their ideals ?
No one lives up to their ideals.
Agreed, that reactionary is the better term.
But, reactionary conservatives in the U.S. don’t call themselves reactionary. So I use their term of preference.
Putin is reactionary, bullying so, and thus the appreciation of his stance (wide, shirtless) by a segment of the reactionaries in the Republican Party in the U.S, for mostly of the way he slaps down any entreaty by Obama regarding, say, the Ukraine.
It’s come on handy by conservative reactionaries for slapping Obama down on Obamacare at every turn.
Which he has weathered as a gentleman through it all.
By now, if I was President, they would have had to replace a few dozen mangled podiums by now.
To the plus side of real “conservatism”, here’s a few reasonable, civil non-reactionaries on one issue:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/house-republicans-climate-change-pope
“It will be up to history to judge how dangerous and destructive the Count’s leftist militancy on ObWi actually was.”
I don’t think the Count’s m.o. is dangerous and destructive, because of the extraordinary wit and vigour with which he does it, and how frequently he undercuts it. A laureateship should be established, and he should be the Fulminator Laureate, yearly emolument to be a butt of Canary wine like Charles I paid to the Poet Laureate. But what I say is that the Count’s approach would be dangerous if more widespread, and done by practitioners without his talent.
I’m back on a computer, hip hip hooray, but would appreciate it if any other lo-tech type could tell me how you italicise quotations etc. I’ve tried, and can’t work it out.
“but would appreciate it if any other lo-tech type could tell me how you italicise quotations etc.”
you are asking to be led down a dark and pothole strewn road. I urge caution.
I submit that this stated desire for order is more accurately stated as a desire for What I Order, for certain values of “I”. Mao in particular was only nominally for the victory of Socialist Thought, and more accurately for the victory of Socialist Thought as exemplified by Himself.
He and Hitler might well have been role models for each other; I am woefully ignorant of any possible connections between the two. Mao was, of the two, more willing to kill off his current allies that may represent a threat to his power in the future. Also, anybody else. Mao was exceptionally careless of which of his allies he chose to kill off at the time. It’s a wonder he didn’t manage to exterminate the entire country.
It’s megalomania. It was wrong of me to decry Teh Crazy as a universal bad, because not all flavors of Teh Crazy result in millions of people being suddenly (over a period of a few years) or less suddenly being rendered deceased.
I don’t think either political party in the US has at this time a monopoly in the area of just leaving people the hell alone.
but would appreciate it if any other lo-tech type could tell me how you italicise quotations etc. I’ve tried, and can’t work it out.
you start typing like this, and then you type <i>and your stuff is in italics. and then when you’re done, you type</i> and the italics are gone.
if you want to get really fancy, there’s blockquote, which works like this:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
and for <b>BOLD</b>… etc.
oh dear… 🙂
you must always ‘close’ these tags.
so that blockquote MUST be:
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
if you don’t close the tag (with the ‘/’ version at the end of the text you’re modifying) the tag might spill over into other comments. or worse.
Apologies for messing up the html go like this:
Crap. Help!
i give up!
🙂
you are asking to be led down a dark and pothole strewn road. I urge caution.
Eeeek!
Thanks all.
Cleek’s 4:30 pm post has been fixed and should be instructive.
How’d you display html tags without them simply becoming html tags, cleek?
Agree on the megalomania point and the gradations of crazy, Slart.
I think it was Charles Peirce who said the other day, generalizing from the particular, though the particular in their case seems to be generalizing, that the GOP likes to sit all of the crazy uncles and aunts in the front parlor for all to see when company calls.
Uncle Joe was an uncle of a whole different color.
Thanks, girl of the north country (I should be singing this), but …. 1. you are a much better writer than I am. … and 2. any bestowal of laureateships in my direction would result in stage fright, lockjaw, writer’s cramp, writer’s block, stuttering, and binge drinking on my part and pretty much ruin the whole gig.
In fact, I think now I’m feeling a bout of tonguetiedness coming on.
More accurately, Thanks Cleek 🙂
But Count, the butt of Canary wine would deal with all those symptoms. However, have it your way: you’re a lousy writer without any talent, particularly for inventive invective. That should do the trick 🙂
I’m feeling better already.
via Balloon Juice, maybe other R candidates should take a page from Obama in their effort to derail the thin-skinned Trumpinator:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember?intcid=mod-most-popular
Probably not.
Maybe Trump is the apotheosis of the entire Republican Party taking the simple fact of an Obama Presidency, and its frequent eloquent (uppity) rhetoric toward them, even in harmless jest, as a personal affront to be avenged.
Cleek’s 4:30 pm post has been fixed and should be instructive.
Some of use continue to have problems. Maybe we need Common Core for the internets.
Mao in particular was only nominally for the victory of Socialist Thought…
Without disputing his murderous megalomania one whit, I would take issue with this…but that’s a subject for another day.
reactionary conservatives in the U.S. don’t call themselves reactionary. So I use their term of preference.
Count, what that is is enabling their misbehavior and misusage. Not least because if helps freeze out real conservatives, and leave the nut cases in charge of the only alternative. Not a good idea, unless you expect one party rule to prevail henceforth.
How’d you display html tags without them simply becoming html tags, cleek?
html, clever language that it is, has ways to get “greater than” and “less than” signs in the text without the risk of creating a new control character. It involves using &, followed by codes (e.g. gt and lt). All you have to be is a) a computer geek, and b) one who knows html.
Conservatism is (or at least should be) about the desire not to abandon traditional practice unless an clear improvement offers itself.
In the case of conservative as a movement in the US, as opposed to people who are conservative as a personal inclination, IMO the Count’s original formulation is closer to the truth.
The “stand athwart history and yell stop” thing is not something the Count made up, it’s a quote, and from a notable self-described American conservative.
“Conservatism is (or at least should be) about the desire not to abandon traditional practice unless an clear improvement offers itself.”
Maybe, though in the US it clearly isn’t.
I think one problem with the view this particular definition describes is that sometimes, often, IMO, the “clear improvement” in question is simply elimination of the “traditional practice.”
This is clear most prominently in the civil rights movement, which so troubled many on the right. And of course broader extensions of rights often fall into the same category. If it is “traditional” to pay women less than why does changing that require a stronger argument than “Gee, that seems unfair?”
So while it may be the conservative’s role to defend traditional practice, I think the defense needs to be based on that practice’s own merits to have any credibility.
FWIW, I offer this, from Darwin:
Or, MLK:
History doesn’t care if you stand athwart it, or not.
By temperament, I’m a skeptic – and I extend that skepticism to both radical proposals and conservative shibboleths.
Meanwhile, some UK conservatives can find common cause even with Corbyn (#opercula):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p032l2fn
(And one might also note that Corbyn’s policies do indicate a certain nostalgia for the 1970s.)
How’d you display html tags without them simply becoming html tags, cleek?
< and > are how you output the brackets.
they’re two of the many wonderful characters you can display using the &…; trick.
slarti @4:50 – thanks!
Or c) one who can Google “HTML italics how to”, and make an idiot of oneself getting it wrong several times before, finally & inconsistently, getting it right. Sometimes. Also helps to be somewhat of a computer geek in the first place; the first rule of geekdom being RTFM. Second & third rules being something like “See First Rule”.
It helps, too, to have the keys to the blog and be able to go back and rectify failures of attempted cleverness before other people notice it. Or, better yet, slightly after other people have noticed, but before they’ve had a chance to double-take, leaving them wondering whether that mistake was really a figment of their imagination.
No problem! It gives me something of a purpose.
Without running afoul of any Right/Left Democrat/Republican confusions: not our finest moment; any of us.
I can’t even say I would’ve been different had I had anything to say about it back then, sadly. I don’t harbor any such illusions about myself because I was once more bigoted than I am now. The now-me would have been different, but would the now-me even had a chance to evolve, back then? Again: I hope for the best, but expect the worst.
I like that so much I am going to steal it.
One person’s voice makes little difference, unless she/he can persuade others with it. No one was able to effect change, ever, without many others agreeing with them.
Sadly, this indicts a lot more people than the sole-source notion does.
they’re two of the many wonderful characters you can display using the &…; trick.
Ŧħăńķš!!!
So now you have to tell me how you demonstrated the & trick without gt and lt showing up as brackets.
I going to guess that you didn’t simply type the &, but used the &…; code for &.
yup. &
So we started out talking about sloth and its merits. And ended up digging deep into how html works.
Now that’s how an Open Thread is supposed to go! Thanks, all.