Forced Confession

by

by hilzoy

With his usual insistence on strict accuracy, Jonah Goldberg writes:

“I have to confess, I’ve been disgusted by Jell-O for many years now. I loved it as a kid until I found out that it will congeal without benefit of refrigeration. I always assumed that Jell-O was related to ice cream but it just “froze” at a warmer temp. Once I found out that its gelatinous wiggliness is its natural state I could no longer eat it. I think it tastes fine, but it just grosses me out.”

No, Jonah. You did not have to confess this. You really didn’t. Not at all. And if you had managed not to tell us that you find gelatinous wiggliness repulsive, you would have made the world just a little bit better. You would have lit a tiny candle, instead of adding to the sum of darkness by linking the heretofore pleasant thought of jello with the much less pleasant thought of your neuroses.

Consider this a gelatinous, wiggly open thread.

34 thoughts on “Forced Confession”

  1. Actually, here’s a good place to link to something I saw recently. It won one of the Ig Nobels too, and I love it. Description:
    “Clocky is an alarm clock in development for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When you hit the snooze button, Clocky will roll off of the nightstand, fall to the floor, and run around the room, searching for a place to hide. Clocky is patent pending.”

  4. On the off chance that this is a bash Jonah Goldberg open thread, this, via Brad DeLong is too good to not pass on
    Jonah Goldberg writes:
    The Corner on National Review Online : WANTED: HERBERT SPENCER EXPERT [Jonah Goldberg]I’m working on a chapter of the book which requires me to read a lot about and by Herbert Spencer. There’s simply no way I can read all of it, nor do I really need to. But if there are any real experts on Spencer out there — regardless of ideological affiliation — I’d love to ask you a few questions in case I’m missing something.
    Unbelievable.

  6. In all seriousness, Herbert Spencer has been terribly misunderstood. He neither said nor wrote the overwhelming majority of damning things that people attribute to him.
    This article by philosophy professor Roderick Long is instructive about Spencer’s real views and may be worth forwarding to Goldberg if he hasn’t already found it through Google:
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html
    And here is a quote that might change a few minds about what sympathies Spencer held for the poor:

    It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people – very easy for you to censure their extravagant and vicious habits …. It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you …? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that …. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termed “the great unwashed”; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious … and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. … How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen …. (Social Statics, pp. 203–5)

  7. I think all of us should take this as a sign to go to the grocery store, purchase 4 packages of Jello and mail them to Mr. Goldberg to show him how much we think of him.

  9. instead of adding to the sum of darkness by linking the heretofore pleasant thought of jello with the much less pleasant thought of your neuroses.
    I thought you were going to end this sentence “with the much less pleasant thought of your own gelatinous wiggliness.”

  10. I thought you were going to end this sentence “with the much less pleasant thought of your own gelatinous wiggliness.”
    As I constantly tell my wife, they’re love handles, damnit!!

  11. As I constantly tell my wife, they’re love handles, damnit!!
    I try that but then I get “did you say something fat-ass.”

  12. With his usual insistence on strict accuracy…

    I sense some departure from literalism, here.
    My own personal confession would be something to the effect that I’m a complete asshole, but that’d have the effect of making me less of an asshole, so you can see the problem.

  13. Slarti: either that, or irony. The choice is yours.
    Ugh: I thought about it (at one point, what I said Jonah revealed was the source of his own self-loathing), but decided it was gratuitously mean, and a distraction from the free-standing idiocy of the jello comment itself.

  17. Roxanne: having gone through rejected more drafts of this fairly insignificant post than you’d think possible, all for that very reason, I can empathize. 😉

  22. You can put those love handles to work in the Fast for Justice.
    I won’t be in Washington and letter writing has no use. But in related news: in the Netherlands the judge has decided today (after an appeal case) that a terrorist suspect can not be sent to the US since the US cannot guarantee humane treatment. The statements of the US government are to vague and general…

  25. “Do elaborate.”
    A shoddily assembled collection of neuroses and disgust reactions founded on astoundingly stupid premises.

  26. 1. Chinese put manned rocket into low earth orbit.
    2. Link to Poor Man on left-hand side still wrong.
    3. Maxspeak has v. interesting post on the bankruptcy of Delphi and private health care for retirees.
    4. US Sup Ct grants cert in two wetlands cases. What will Roberts do to the Commerce Clause?

  31. Did anybody see Serenity yet? Did you like it (I did, but I am a whedon fan).
    Saw it opening night on a biiiiig screen with a bunch of other Whedonauts. ‘Twas good!

  32. … Serenity …
    We saw it early thanks to the “bloggers preview.” I am a Buffy fan, but my wife, who refuses to watch Buffy, also enjoyed it. She had never seen Firefly either but now we’re watching the DVDs together. So, judging by her reaction, the movie stands on its own even to the uninitiated.

  33. So far most people seem to like it, ratings are good. But I am greedy, I want the sequal and so far ticket sales are not good enough for that 🙁
    The Netherlands unfortunately will not make much of a difference to that – we are small and somehow SF never seems to do well over here *sigh*.

  34. I liked Serenity. It suffered a little from the Star Trek syndrome of filling in backstory with expository dialogue when it would be much more interesting to actually show it (of course, rather like “The Two Towers”, the opening flashback probably made me set my expectations a bit high), and the deep dark secret ended up being a little bit silly. But it was fun.
    On another subject, the Potemkin Presidency laid bare. Not that anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention (and who isn’t hopelessly in denial) should be surprised. Heck, the reporter says “For many of us who cover these White House events that is nothing new.” Which leads to some uncomfortable questions for the press, such as, why should there be any significant gap between what is “new” to WH correspondents and what is “new” to their audiences?

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