Oppressed and repressed no more, protesting Brits tear down a statue of Bush.
Archives for November 2003
Look at All the Pretty Pictures
I really don’t have any comments- I just thought this was a really cool picture:
Hundreds of Monarch butterflies crowd a pine tree at the Piedra Herrada Sanctuary in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Mexican police have been called in to protect the sanctuaries for the butterflies(AFP/File/Mario Vazquez)
Sick People
Oliver engages in a little fringebaiting with this post, but over all, he is right- these comments are unacceptable:
“This is great that Massachusett’s gay judges did this. Let all the fudgepackers move there and be clients of the Dickem and Dunkem (Ted Kennedy) law firm.”
“Born Gay” is Marxist propaganda. They’re vile perverts, nothing more.
In the past, they were confined to mental institutions to protect the innocent. Some touchie feelie let them out. They thought they could be rehabilitated and placed back into society. They were wrong. It’s too bad they can’t see the damage they’ve done to society by their ignorant mistake.”“The reason for that stat is that male queers are ungodly horny pigs. I used to be an inner city bartender and when one of these trouser pilots came into the bar they practically dropped their drawers around any male in the place. they’re sick sob’s.”
Now while Oliver would like for you to think that this represents the mainstream of conservative thought, I can assure you it is not. These disgusting comments do not represent any sort of position that can be derived from conservative ideology or from the philosophical underpinnings of conservative ideology. There is, however, a name for it. Bigotry.
It really is that simple, this is bigotry in its ugliest form. I simply have no tolerance for it, and no patience for people who think like this. People like this should just crawl into a hole and leave the rest of decent society alone- and they can take Derbyshire with them. That guy has been the “thinking man’s” homophobe for too god damn long, and it is time he stops providing cover for the bigots and homophobes who use his arguments to mask their hate and cotempt.
Kill This Bill, Please
The Prescription Drug Vote Buying Scheme must be stopped:
We had hopes that a GOP Medicare reform might do so, but this bill’s fine print reveals that short-term politics has overwhelmed the policy. Republicans are offering the certainty of trillions in new entitlements in return for the mere promise of future reform, and that’s too expensive a gamble for principled conservatives to support.
Bunch of idiots, these Republicans. If they had any brains or balls, they would write the right kind of bill, one that all Democrats would vote against, and then we would not have to worry about this enormous ill-advised giveaway or the Democrats running their mouths about it all election cycle, as they would be the ones who killed the bill.
Precisely what is wrong with means testing, again?
Idiot Labels
Yesterday, in response to Nick And Josh’s hitpiece on Glassman (which smeared TCS by accident), Matt Yglesias wrote this post about the issue. Like Dan Drezner, the Instpaundit, and everyone else I have seen who actually has written pieces for TCS (Pejman elaborates quite nicely on the subject), Matt asserted that he was never pressured to change his piece, etc.
However, this is still troubling to many of Matt’s readers. Apparently, it is important to know who pays the bills in order to determine whether an argument is good or not. In the word of one commenter:
John: I think you may be somewhat alone in thinking that the source of funding is completely out of bounds when deciding what credence to grant an article. I mean, I congratulate you on your loyalty to your libertarian ideals, but for the most part, people really do care.
So, since the American public is now so damned stupid (in the views of some) that they are incapable of reading something and determining for themselves whether it contains a valid argument, here are my proposals:
1.) In every newspaper, newsmagazine, newsweely,- everything in print- the first section, whether it takes up 2, 3, or 20 pages, will be an item by item accounting of everyone and everybody who is contributing or has contributed a penny to the company in the past ten years. On newsmagazines like Newsweek, the cover story must be an expose about the largest individual contributer to the magazie, whether that be an individual or company. That expose is to be written by an independent, government approved commission, and should be a complete life story of the individual- including how that person has voted in every election.
2.) The next 10 pages of all publications must be a government approved history of the publishers. This information must include any contact with government officials, corporate officals, a complete accounting of the publisher’s financial portfolio, and any financial statements from every member of the publisher’s family.
3.) Before every story, there must be an in depth 2-3 page examination of the author, including an attempt to cover voting history, education, prejudices, taste in women, etc.
4.) Much like the MPAA, a rating system will be created for all publications, so that idiots like Zizka (really- I am not being overly harsh- go read his comments at the Yglesias piece linked to here) will not accidentally pick up a piece of literature with one ideological bend and confuse it for another. Some sample ratings could be:
L-TDNCL– Liberal, Toes DNC Line (The New York Times)
XL-PTBM– Extreme Liberal, Pretends To Be Mainstream (The Nation)
NC-CH– Neo-Cons, Clinton Haters (The Weekly Standard)
CENT– Centrist (The Washington Post)
You get the idea. This way, Democrats and the rest of society who can not think for themselves will never pick up something that is outside their pre-conceived ideological bend. Can you imagine what might happen if, for example, if Zizka accidentally picked up the National Review instead of the Nation. If that were to happen today, he would not have a rating system or any of the biographical information I am suggesting, and hell, without that, he might run around parroting the ideas written in National Review.
I think these steps will help to alleviate the deep critical thinking skills problem we are currently experiencing. Now, with these labels and knowing where all the money is coming from, we can all conveniently dismiss certain publications completely, safe and secure in the knowledge that there are no real arguments or ideas in them becuase they took money from Exxon. This will help us all hone our argumentation skills, and we can save time in debates because everything can now be boiled down to a circumstantial ad hominem attack. I think it is a great idea, and it will help keep the liberals from getting dizzy and having to actually decide if there is a reasonable argument in what they are reading.
*** Update ***
Apparently these types of labels and disclosures would be really helpful to all the ‘smart’ people at Crooked Timber.
Maybe the broad brush extremists on the right are correct about liberals- they just don’t like money. It is evil and corrupting. Unless it comes from George Soros.
*** Update #2 ***
There seems to be some confusion- I don’t think the American people are stupid- which is why I find it so amusing that every liberal site is condemning TCS for its funding source, as if that matters. My point was that arguments stand or fall on their own, regardless of who pays for Matt Yglesias or Dan Drezner’s efforts. This post was supposed to be tongue in cheek…
*** Update #3 ***
Crooked Timber speaks– I am a charming antique or naive. Yipee. I am also a right wing circle! Whole article condensed- TCS is not communicating in good faith (they are still under the assumption that TCS is nothing more than an outlet for corporate expression masquerading as independent thought, a link that not even Confessore has attempted to make). Other than that, it is about 1000 words of word salad that at points sounded very similar to the widely ridiculed (in my circle, at least) Coordinated Management of Meaning.
New Edwards Site
Jack O’Toole is creating a new website for John Edwards. Go give him a hand if you are so inclined.
French Perfidy
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin has urged that power be handed over to a provisional Iraqi government by the end of the year. Mr de Villepin said the June 2004 date favoured by the US was “too late”.
“We need to move faster. This is an extremely urgent situation,” he told French newspaper La Croix.
He proposed creating an assembly of members of existing bodies and other “forces” that would elect a government by the end of this year.
Dominique de Villepin translated:
If we don’t have a weak government in place soon that can be toppled quickly by insurgents and Saddam loyalists, all of our former Ba’ath party business partners might be dead or in custody, and with two real functioning democracies in the Middle East, it will be very difficult to continue our proxy colonialism by playing the entire Arab world off against Israel.
Also, go read this Eliot Cohen piece on the dangers of cutting and running or making the transition too quickly:
Cut-and-run cannot be disguised, and the price to be paid for it would be appalling. No one else would take on the burdens of Iraq; talk of handing it over to the United Nations or NATO is wishfulness, not strategy. Whatever one’s view of the war’s rationale, conception, planning or conduct, our war it remains, and we had best figure out how to win it.