Kids today are a tough nut to crack for corporate media pimps with a plutocrat-friendly political agenda to sell. My generation was easy — an improbably large portion of our cohort voluntarily read Ayn Rand’s master-race bodice-rippers. And those of us who came of age in the Gipper’s America and grew up to be politicians like Paul Ryan then wove those crackpot principles into public policy, exponentially enriching greed-heads like the Koch Bros. and hedge fund managers while despoiling the American dream for tens of millions.
But try getting 140 character-consuming Tweeters to read one of Rand’s turgid, 10K-page doorstops. Nope. So the e-ville new media marketing execs gathered ‘round the conference table, twirled their pointy aging-hipster mustaches and brainstormed strategies to corrupt a new generation of impressionable yoots. And because they are morons, they came up with libertarian cats:
So much wrong. For one thing, the premise is an outright lie. Show me a domestic house cat, and I’ll show you a dole-accepting layabout. Pets are goddamn moochers!
Anyway, fuck you, BuzzFeed Politics. If you want to conscript animals under Rand Paul’s banner and bamboozle millennials into voting against their own interests, at least have the decency to annotate cutesy anaconda pictures.
Villago Delenda Est
So are “libertarians”. They’re all freeloading assholes, totally unaware that fucking generations worked to provide the society the fuckhead motherfuckers take for granted. None are more oblivious to this than the IT glibertarians, who seem to imagine that the entire fucking internet just fell out of the sky one day, so they could surf it and bitch that brown people are lazy.
Betty Cracker
@Villago Delenda Est: Excellent point. The libertarian cat meme might be accurate in ways its propagators did not intend.
Ben Cisco
Hmmm….unintentional irony AND epic fail. Sounds like glibertarians to me.
Another Holocene Human
Okay, quick update to the discussion yesterday about freight coming into Port of Miami via Panama Canal.
Florida East Coast Railway stated in an Op-Ed that they were sending a lot of empty cars northbound and would be happy to take on double stack intermodals on their existing freight capacity. So I guess they are expecting some uptick in container shiploads following the canal upgrade, either that or they’re kissing Republican ass.
The reason for the letter was to disclaim the conspiracy theory going around that All Aboard Florida is a false flag to get govt monies/cooperation/land swaps/considerations for FECR’s freight operation. They wrote some confusing stuff about how AAF and FECR are separate corporations that use the same assets and, oh, have the same ownership, lol. I am pretty sympathetic to them and their enemies are pretty ridiculous, like Treasure Coast communities pissed the express train won’t stop in their town. Like jeez you had this freight line here all along and no passenger trains stopped here so what have you lost? Nothing! Except some pollution off I-95. That’s gratitude for ya!
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: I hate IT people who snigger about Al Gore and inventing the internet and then derp about Tim Berners-Lee. No, you incredible fuckups, your preshuss internets would not be if not for Gore and others in the Senate. And WWW is not internets, [sic] apparently bigshot IT guyzzz do not know how to computer.
I will comma splice for great justice!
me + 1/2
Ben Cisco
@Villago Delenda Est: @Another Holocene Human: I suppose I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career – the only IT co-worker I’ve ever had that identified as a (small L) libertarian went full Obot after the Neo-Confederates went Full Metal Wingnut back in ’08. The transformation was…breathtaking.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Holocene Human: And there was DARPA.
JGabriel
@Villago Delenda Est:
Libertarian Cats = Conservative Cats who think catnip and getting paid to give affection should be legal.
Keith G
If not covered in previous threads here is a series of clips from President Obama’s turn on the Kimmel show. The guy has such great person to person chops. I will always wonder why during his presidency these amazing skills were not put to more use as a “Teacher-in-Chief”.
Here
BillinGlendaleCA
The 11pm news sez the Kenyan’s in town, we turned up the towns thermostat to make him feel at home.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Average high/low temperatures in Nairobi in March: 77/57 °F.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Cervantes: Ah, damn, guess we didn’t need to adjust it all that much.
raven
Stop the presses, Joe has an African American woman on!
OzarkHillbilly
Cats….
Baud
Libertarian cat will say any fool thing for some catnip.
Can I haz freedum?
Baud
@raven: In what capacity?
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: No worry, she’s more conservative than Joe.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Is he telling her all about the Negro?
raven
@Baud: She seems to be a commentator, whip ass smart and she defended her sorority! “Princeton University and Theta, by the way”! I’m trying to catch her name.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Amy Holmes. She’s bright, but a conservative commentator.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Well, maybe he’s from Mombasa. I’m not sure.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Ah, well, sorry.
Baud
Still not gonna watch.
raven
@Cervantes: In a barroom drinking gin. . .
BillinGlendaleCA
@Cervantes: If we only had the “real birth certificate with the raised seal”.
It’s probably on Hillary’s email server.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Well, I ‘ve paid for seals to be raised. Does that help?
Mustang Bobby
@BillinGlendaleCA: I tried raising seals, but they never come when you call them.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Cervantes: Maybe if they’re trained seals.
BruceFromOhio
That would totally shave the cats ass.
The seals could be trained only so far, I could never get them to put the seat back down and flush after using the potty.
Matt McIrvin
I never signed a contract saying I couldn’t push this glass off the edge of the table. And I EARNED the kibble that appears in that bowl twice a day. I pooped in your shoe because incentives matter.
JGabriel
@Matt McIrvin: Kudos. A flawless glibertarian cat imitation.
Mustang Bobby
Seen in numerous places, including the Hemingway House in Key West, home to the famous six-toed cats:
Baud
@Mustang Bobby: Libertarian cat thinks you’re overpaid staff.
WereBear
Under the Law of Reciprocity, cats have a particular interest in equality. So I’d classify them as natural liberals… unless they experienced an authoritarian upbringing.
ThresherK
The Catholic idiots in Connecticut are making their mark.
Keep it classy, AmericanJihadis!
(If you have a better word for them, please let me know. “Talibangelicals” doesn’t apply to Catholics, right?)
GregB
The big libertarian I know lives in the family home that was left to him by his father who was a career military man.
Inheritance is hard work.
WereBear
@GregB: This so matches what I’ve seen that I’ve come to see Libertarianism as more of a defense mechanism than a political stance.
Baud
@WereBear: Libertarianism is a marketing ploy to lure in young white makes before they get married, buy a house in the burbs, become socially isolated, and become full fledged conservatives.
tl;dr: it’s a gateway ideology.
Mike E
@Baud: And seems perfectly reasonable for the first 5 minutes.
Baud
Speaking of libertarian dogma (via LGM)
Baud
@Mike E:
I lose interest after “Once upon a time…”
Sherparick
Cats are not libertarians. They are aristocratic predators who have staff.
Kay
My favorite Obama hire, well, him and Cordray:
Yes, which is why he should run for governor.
MattF
@Kay: I’ve always liked Perez, all the way back to early days. Just a good guy.
Cervantes
@MattF:
Thirded.
Baud
@Kay: I haven’t paid as much attention to him as I wish I had.
msdc
@Villago Delenda Est: First comment wins the thread.
Betty Cracker
Damn it. I just found out that my sister’s father-in-law, who was a sweet man, died in his sleep last night. He’d had some recent and ongoing health problems, but no one thought he’d be gone so soon.
Still, if you have to go, he went out the right way — no hospital, needles, doctors or tubes. He had a big fat slice of chocolate cake last night, went to bed next to his wife of nearly 50 years and just never woke up.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Villago Delenda Est:
Generations, how about the here and now. I have never meet a self employed Libertarian, most are government employes in one form or another. The biggest loud mouth glibertarian I ever meet is a IT worker for the FDA who bitches about government intrusion into his job on line when he isn’t playing WoW at work.
Mike in NC
In 20+ years in the DC area, working for assorted Beltway Bandits on government IT projects, I encountered far fewer Libertarians than far-right shitheads who spent much of the day listening to Limbaugh, reading Coulter online, and generally denouncing the hated federal government.
But they loved getting paid for the work they didn’t do.
Betty Cracker
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: True dat. Glenn Reynolds hoovers up tax dollars in the form of a state university paycheck, and I’m pretty sure the entire Reason staff subsist on wingnut welfare; that outfit can’t be a profitable concern.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Koch and Scaife.
Germy Shoemangler
@Mike in NC: Just about every RW troll I’ve ever encountered has either collected social security, been in a union (but didn’t like to talk about it) or inherited enough from grandpa to not have to do much in the way of work.
Germy Shoemangler
@GregB: Conservative libertarian I used to work with lived in a house left to him by his grandpa, spouted racist bullshit in the office about lazy blacks, but spent eight hours a day basically delegating every last task and then sitting at his desk cracking his knuckles.
At lunchtime, he’d disappear for two hours. He’d take long hikes in the woods behind the building. A few years later, when the layoffs came, it took the owner an hour just to find him (he’d been gone for hours during lunch).
Germy Shoemangler
“Ayn Rand For Dummies” from dangerousminds.net
—————————-
“If one writes anything mean/true about Ayn Rand on the Internet, invariably the author will receive a litany of howling complaints from her fans (people who seem to have an awful lot of time of their hands for some… strange reason) in the comments. It’s absurd and hilarious to field dumb invective hurled at you by people that you have no intellectual respect for and that you will never, ever meet in real life, but dumping on Rand is a predictable impetus for attracting this sort of thing. Scroll down, I’m sure without looking that they’ll start to pile up like poorly punctuated turds under a rabbit cage before too long.
The Randroids behave as if they’re defending the honor of a saint or a great literary or philosophical genius and not a complete lunatic who wrote the most turgid prose of any best-selling author of the 20th century. I understand their psychology well, for I myself was once a teenaged Ayn Rand true believer. Oh yes, I’ve probably read 99% of every word she wrote or that was publicly uttered by her during her lifetime. Not only did I have every Ayn Rand book, I owned every single copy of The Objectivist and The Ayn Rand Letter, kept in green leather binders. I owned all of her Ford Foundation speeches in pamphlets and on cassette tapes. In the 8th grade, I managed to track down her Playboy interview. This unlikely childhood collection, mind you, was amassed by mail order in the 1970s on money earned from mowing lawns. I was really into it, I’m ashamed to say. Could quote her chapter and verse… Then I discovered drugs, punk rock and girls and promptly forget all about Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand fanboys and girls are a unique bunch, and one trait that many of them—not all, but many—share is that by and large they are not… er… very literate people and Atlas Shrugged is quite often one of the few books they’ve ever read, so it shares an outsized place in their affections.”
Kay
@Baud:
He was great on voting rights and he took tons of shit for it from Republicans when he was at the Department of Justice.
I listened to him when he made trips to Ohio in the 2014 campaign and he seems to have the ability to sell his Labor Dept training programs for displaced or under-employed workers without sounding like he’s a pissed-off CEO scolding the lazy and unskilled workforce, which. sadly, is how too many on the Dem side sound. Blaming working class people for the decline of working class fortunes is not a smart political approach. It’s also NOT TRUE, which should count for something.
msdc
@Germy Shoemangler: Cue the obligatory John Rogers quote:
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
He had his priorities straight. Condolences to all who knew this wise, sensible man.
xenos
@Cervantes: the Luo are from Kiaumu, which is at least as hot as Mombasa.
Captain C
@Baud: Forget it, Baud, it’s
ChinatownArizona.Cervantes
@xenos:
Perhaps you mean Kisumu, and I’m not sure I’d say they are from there, exactly — and no, given the elevation, it’s relatively cool there.