Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Books are my comfort food!

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

No one could have predicted…

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Happy Burns day

Happy Burns day

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The great Scot and poet Robert Burns would be two hundred and fifty-five-six years old today. Of his poems that you will find set to music on YouTube Ae Fond Kiss could be my favorite.

I would love to see Address to the Toothache set to metal, but you can’t always get what you want.

Reader Interactions

35Comments

  5. 5.

    mellowjohn

    from Krugman’s blog last thursday:

    Paging Mr. Burns

    This Bloomberg report from Davos is making the rounds:

    Billionaire Jeff Greene, who amassed a multibillion dollar fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities, says the U.S. faces a jobs crisis that will cause social unrest and radical politics.

    “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

    Later in the article:

    Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week …

  8. 8.

    Pogonip

    And happy Robert Burns Day to you too! If I could, I’d have some Scotch in his honor.

    It’s been an auld lang time since we’ve had a pupdate.

  10. 10.

    Tree With Water

    “The great Scot and poet Robert Burns would be two hundred and fifty-five years old today”.

    As historian Gordon Wood reminds readers of his book Revolutionary Characters, Scotland was a particularly interesting place during the that century. The American colonies shared much in common with it (both were geographic outposts of a powerful England), and our founders were profoundly influenced by Scottish intellectual movements. Wonder what Burns thought of the American experiment? Paging Mr. Google…

  16. 16.

    rikyrah

    smartypants pointing out the obvious, but it still needs to be said:

    Sunday, January 25, 2015

    Dog Whistles from the Left (updated)

    I’ve written before about how uncomfortable I am with the idea that Democrats need to figure out how to appeal to working class white voters. It’s not that I object to building a bigger coalition. My concern is the often unspoken message that appealing to the unique concerns of people of color is the wrong message.

    In an op-ed in the NYT today, Noam Scheiber makes that often unspoken argument overtly. He’s writing about Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s drop in the polls. But I don’t want to get distracted with analyzing DeBlasio’s performance. Instead, let’s pay attention to the overall message.

    From the get-go, Mr. de Blasio’s campaign fused two distinct strands of progressivism. The first was economic populism, not least his criticism that Michael R. Bloomberg had placed the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy above those of average New Yorkers.

    The second was what some have called “identity group” liberalism, which appealed to black and Latino voters as blacks and Latinos, not on the basis of economic interests they shared with whites. The centerpiece of Mr. de Blasio’s identity-group agenda was his promise to win better treatment for minorities at the hands of the police.

    The problem for Mr. de Blasio is that only the first approach has widespread appeal…

    If you were to rank issues by their potential to unite whites and minority voters, the most promising would be populist economic issues like raising taxes on the rich. Somewhere in the middle would be an issue like health care, which has large economic benefits for both whites and nonwhites, even if opponents can portray it as a sop to the latter. At the very bottom would be issues with little economic content, but which different racial groups view in radically different ways.

    What Scheiber is basically saying is that if you want to unite whites and minority voters, you have to focus on the issues that are a priority to whites. That’s pretty much white supremacy in a nutshell.

    immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2015/01/dog-whistles-from-left.html?spref=tw

  19. 19.

    Tommy

    So happy to see a shout-out to Soctland. Here is a little more Scotland for you. A dude in the Isle of Skye, where my family is literally from, doing things on a mountain bike that should not be humanly possible.

    youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_IQS3VKjA

    When I watch this I think there is a reason I am a hiker/camper. That I prefer mountains to beaches. Maybe it is something in my DNA :)!

  21. 21.

    Origuy

    @Tree With Water:

    Wonder what Burns thought of the American experiment? Paging Mr. Google…

    Mr Google offered up “Ballad on the American War“, which isn’t particularly pro-America:

    When Guilford good our pilot stood,
    An’ did our hellim thraw, man,
    Ae night, at tea, began a plea,
    Within America, man:
    Then up they gat the maskin-pat,
    And in the sea did jaw, man;
    An’ did nae less, in full Congress,
    Than quite refuse our law, man.

    The Battle of Guilford County Courthouse was one of the pivotal battles of the Southern campaign.

  23. 23.

    raven

    @Origuy: We had passed the exit for Cowpens a zillion times and, after working on an open source American History text, my interest was piqued and we stopped. It’s a nice National Battlefield and I’m glad we stopped.

    “In the opinion of John Marshall,[61] “Seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens.” It gave General Nathanael Greene his chance to conduct a campaign of “dazzling shiftiness” that led Cornwallis by “an unbroken chain of consequences to the catastrophe at Yorktown which finally separated America from the British crown.”[62]”

  26. 26.

    rikyrah

    water is wet news

    ……………..

    Black Workers With Advanced Degrees, White Workers With B.A.’s Make Roughly the Same

    by Julianne Hing, Friday, January 23 2015, 4:44 PM EST

    You’ve heard of the racial wealth gap, the racial employment gap, and surely also about racial job callback disparities. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers an updated look at another dynamic of our racialized economy: the racial income gap.

    As in: In 2014, while white workers 25 years or older with at least an undergrad degree took home median earnings of $1,219 per week, similarly aged and educated Latino workers made $1,007, and Asian workers made $1,328 per week. Black workers with at least a college degree, meanwhile, posted median earnings of $970 per week.

    The racial income gap is so pronounced that black workers with an advanced degree made $1,149—roughly the same as white workers who had only a bachelor’s degree ($1,132).

    For more on what this kind of economic inequality means for the country, read Kai Wright’s in-depth look at young black men’s struggle for employment. As Wright wrote last June, “This is an inequity that grows from tangled roots—historic labor market discrimination, ongoing residential segregation, stubborn racial biases among employers. But it’s also one with consequences that stretch out beyond the men themselves, and that will linger long past today’s troubled economy.”

    colorlines.com/archives/2015/01/black_workers_with_advanced_degrees_white_workers_with_bas_make_roug…

  27. 27.

    Tree With Water

    @raven: Assuming you haven’t yet read it, there’s a contemporaneous account of the battle by a British soldier you’d probably find interesting (paging Mr. Google). In it, he wrote what a nasty shock it was to march into sight of the colonial riflemen resting their shooters on the wood railings of the pens..

  28. 28.

    raven

    @Tree With Water: Ooo, sounds good.They have a really cool presentation at the battlefield and they emphasized how worn out the Limey’s were after marching from King’s Mountain. What I found interesting was how the Americans were able to put out a call and dudes came from Georgia and Virginia. How did they do that? How did they get there?

  29. 29.

    Cervantes

    @Tree With Water:

    He was, with others, a radical supporter of the universal rights of man, at home and in the American Revolution. If I recall correctly, he even bought a cannon once and sent it to Paris to aid in the storming of the Bastille.

  30. 30.

    Tree With Water

    @raven: My father used to wonder essentially the same thing about Kit Carson. How on earth that man got around all points of the compass in the frontier west is awe inspiring, but he did it.

    By the way, their was only a single British regular at King’s Mountain. It was more of a family squabble. The redcoats who got shot up at Cowpens were marching north from Charleston (on their way to Yorktown, I’m pleased to say).

  31. 31.

    Cervantes

    The great Scot and poet Robert Burns would be two hundred and fifty-five years old today.

    Two hundred and fifty-six.

    Thanks for the video.

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