Just got an email reminding me of the Obama election movie on HBO tonight.
I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I still find movies like this kind of creepy. Whatever, though. I’m weird.
Archives for 2009
We Are All Levi-Strauss Now
From the NYT obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss:
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective… he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare…
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
Of course humans have always had an obsessive interest in the odd ways of That Tribe Across the River, but how many scholars can say they’ve had so much influence on the way “we” discuss “they” today, whether as political bloggers or Media Village Idiots?
Mid-Afternoon Geek Post
I’m actually kind of excited for the series opener of V tonight- I wonder how it will compare to the series from the 80’s. With Morena Baccarin, they have the hotness factor covered, that is for sure.
Also kind of excited about Dragon Age
Who is Hugh G. Rection and Why Is He Visiting the White House?
I guess I missed this particular episode of wingnuttery. I’m a big fan of how after they made asses out of themselves asserting Wright and Ayers and others falsely visited the White House, they then blamed it on the WH for not warning them that different people can have the same name.
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Open Thread
Mr. Furious, On the Blue Ridge Parkway, north of Asheville.
Moonbatting Average, Moonrise through the yuccas, Whipple Mountains, CA
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
We’re All Moderates Now
I’m really loving this special election in NY. I’m sorry that those people are going to be represented by a Bachmann style wingnut, but hey- they voted for him, so they can just deal with it.
But what I find really amusing is that they are taking a win for the Republican in that district as a sign of a conservative resurgence, emboldening them to take their tea party on the road to savage other apostates and those insufficiently loyal to the ideology, when that district hasn’t elected anything BUT Republicans since the Civil War. Again, nothing but Republicans for 70 straight elections, and they are taking the 71st (or whatever it actually is) as a “sign.”
When you think about it, that is funnier than the birthers.
And what makes it extra special is that they will probably succeed in a few safe Republican districts, and primary out a couple of people and replace them with Glen Beck following religious nuts like Hoffman. I wonder if the short-sighted fools at Reason are proud of the monsters they helped create when they were pimping the teabaggers the last six months. I bet Hoffman has really enlightened views on marijuana, pornography, the justice system, and individuals rights. Well done, glibertarians!
What is a teabagger that thou art mindful of him?
I have to admit that the teabagger candidate in NY-23 is polling better than I expected he would. Though, in retrospect, it makes a reasonable amount of sense: the teabag movement appeals largely to the old and the district is old. But I’m wondering if there’s even more to it. It’s my sense that the basic tenets of teabaggerism are:
- Low taxes!
- Small government!
- Get off my lawn!
Conspicuously absent are
- Jesus!
- Fight the new Hitler!
In particular, the Dick Armey outfit FreedomWorks seems to be about promoting freedom (I guess from taxes and regulations) here as opposed to freedom (to be a quasi-western American puppet state) abroad. And they don’t seem to talk about Jesus much. Obviously, all kinds of crazy people showed up at the 9/12 festivities, mean of them Hitler-obsessed and heavy into Jesus. But some of that is just that, to paraphrase James Carville, if you drag a Fox News crew through a retirement home, there’s no telling what you’ll find.
I think that a Jesus-reduced, Hitler-reduced conservative message might work reasonably well in some parts of the country, including the rural northeast. It’s probably too anti-union to really work in New York State at large and too anti-immigrant to really work nationally, but if teabagging is traditional wingerism with more Rand and less religion, more Galt and less GWOT, it may end up less fringey that I originally thought.
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