Over at The League, newly minted Gentlemen, Barrett Brown, has a little fun with National Review’s Joel Rosenberg. To see how a good fisking is properly undertaken, read the whole thing.
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by E.D. Kain| 34 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
Over at The League, newly minted Gentlemen, Barrett Brown, has a little fun with National Review’s Joel Rosenberg. To see how a good fisking is properly undertaken, read the whole thing.
Comments are closed.
ricky
Oh, boy. Just what the world needs. Another smart ass boy from Texas without a real, steady job.
morzer
It’s a shame that Bob Cheeks continues to play resident racist ass-hole on the LOOG, and that your front-pagers don’t call him out. If they did, LOOG would have more credibility. But I guess they find those cute little racist dog-whistles too hilarious for words.
Carnacki
That Barrett Brown post was teh awesome.
Sly
Making vague predictions that can be construed as having been fulfilled so long as you squint your eyes, turn your head sixty degrees clockwise, and hum the theme song to The Flying Nun backwards is sort of Rosenberg’s kink. Unsurprising, since he’s got a major chubby for the Book of Revelation, the grandfather of prophecies so generalized as to be ultimately rendered meaningless.
Corner Stone
OT but, could there be a better name than “Dickie Arbiter” for a press officer in the UK?
Roger Moore
@Sly:
I think that’s more or less standard practice for prophets of all stripes. It’s much, much easier to predict a whole bunch of stuff and then point to the parts that kind of match reality if you ignore all the details while ignoring all the things that didn’t come true (yet) than it is to make accurate predictions. It’s rather like the Wall Street bears who have predicted 8 of the last 2 recessions.
Steve
I was relieved to learn that Joel Rosenberg, author of apocalyptic fiction, is not the same person as Joel Rosenberg, author of harmless fantasy novels.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Mmm, I do love a Death of 1,000 Cuts. Thanks, that was lovely.
Glad I’m not the only one who watched the show.
Brian J
Looks like I will need to make that blog a regular stop. It’s nice to see a blog that can tear apart the right in a slightly more intellectual way than Sadly, No!
Linda Featheringill
@Sly:
The Book of R might have been quite relevant for the people and time it was written for.
The really puzzling question for me is why anyone would think that John [author of Book of R] really cared about the US in the present time. I haven’t found any evidence that he was concerned about anyone who didn’t occupy the region around the Mediterranean. I’m not sure that he even knew about the residents of present-day Europe. And since Judgment Day was just around the corner, why would he be concerned about something happening a couple of millenia in the future?
In other words, John didn’t care about me and he didn’t care about you.
So the Book of Revelations really doesn’t apply to us today.
geg6
Heh. Good addition to the League, Erik.
Now I’m going to have a cigarette.
Ash Can
LULZ! I agree with the first poster that going after National Review writers is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the results are entertaining regardless. And what a well-written piece, and by quite the accomplished writer. Only 29 years old? I could slap him. Thanks for the link.
DBrown
Just a great read! That was funny (but really shows how bad our media has become with socalled (rather self called) experts.)
Mnemosyne
@Linda Featheringill:
IIRC, the Book of R is about the Romans and how much Emperor Nero sucks and how Jews/Christians shouldn’t let themselves get seduced by Roman society.
As with so many “prophecies,” it’s been re-interpreted to conform with current events pretty much since the day the Roman Empire fell, but historians say it’s pretty clear what it all refers to, and it’s not 21st century America.
The Republic of Stupidity
I’d say Barrett Brown delivered more than just a ‘good fisking’ there… although the more appropriate gerund also begins w/ an ‘f’…
If ONLY the rest of the media were that honest and straight forward… and cheeky… too.. also…
Dennis SGMM
That was refreshing. Despite Rosenberg’s lack of qualifications and credibility it’s probably a matter of days until he shows up on the WaPo editorial page.
aimai
I loved the part about predicting Arafat’s death. Brave and prescient indeed compared to those who thought he’d live forever.
aimai
The Republic of Stupidity
Well, that does it!
I hereby declare myself to be an expert on the Middle East too!
(Ohio… Michigan… Indiana… western PA…)
Socraticsilence
Man, I read the opening paragraph of his intro and I’m starting to feel inadequate. Seriously, though nice pickup to the blog.
TooManyJens
@kommrade reproductive vigor: In my personal canon, “Jump the Shark” (and, for that matter, the entire 8th and 9th seasons of the X-Files) never happened. I mean really, what a stupid way to go out.
Roger Moore
@Dennis SGMM:
FTFY.
catclub
@Brian J:
“Looks like I will need to make that blog a regular stop. It’s nice to see a blog that can tear apart the right in a slightly more intellectual way than Sadly, No! ”
Them’s fightin words!
Bill Murray
@Mnemosyne: surely it must have been reinterpreted when Constantine made the church the official Roman church?
Brian J
@catclub:
Oh, don’t get me wrong. Sadly, No! is awesome and I like it a lot. But not everything merits the same style of response.
Cain
@Steve:
Haha, I was thinking the same thing. I used to know Joel personally back when I used to go to Science Fiction conventions. (yes, and I probably was the only indian there.. SF folks are probably more white as a whole than tea party folks) Great folks. They were heavily into the opus BBS stuff which is how I got to know him. Basically we were all doing internet lite back in the late 80s, early 90s.
cain
Cain
@Steve:
Looks like ED knows who Joel is too considering the title!
cain
Mnemosyne
@Bill Murray:
It’s been re-interpreted about a bajillion times to try and make it fit into whatever the current need for it is, but that doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t originally meant to be a prophecy about events almost 2,000 years in the future. John was talking about current events at the time that he wrote it but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, he wrote about them in a sufficiently metaphorical way that it was able to be re-used and re-applied to other time periods later on. If he hadn’t, Revelation would be just another book that got dropped from the Bible when they were regularizing it in the 13th century.
Sentient Puddle
Man, and I was wondering what the references to magic in both titles were all about…
Joseph Nobles
Ye gods.
Christine O’Donnell was doubling down on the stupid last night. When Coons mentioned the separation of church and state, she asked him where it was in the Constitution. People laughed at her. She insisted. Coons said the First Amendment, no establishment of religion. O’Donnell continued: “You’re telling me that the separation of church and state is in the First Amendment? The First Amendment?” like she was nailing him down to devastate him later.
Meanwhile, Stephen Breyer was on C-Span’s Q&A on Sunday, and Brian Lamb asked him about right wingers saying he was in favor of incorporating Sharia law into American legal code. Breyer was completely clueless. Lamb couldn’t provide the quote, and Breyer just blankly said, “We have a separation of church and state.”
See, this is what happens when homeschooling isn’t required to meet actual standards of knowledge.
monkeyboy
I’ve noticed that some in the right wing can not distinguish spy thriller novels and films from reality.
If they don’t think that James Bond was real they think he should be.
Any situation can be solved by ruthlessly competent people.
Amir_Khalid
@TooManyJens: As a dedicated X-Phile, I concur. David Duchovny wanted out after seven years. But the Fox network had a shitty few seasons in the ratings around that time, and out of desperation they ordered Chris Carter to keep the show going even though the main storyline was over. Had he been born in a movie rather than on TV, Mulder and Scully might have gotten to keep their son.
As for The Lone Gunmen, they should have kept it on the air. That was a better, more inventively absurd show in its half-season run than most shows ever get over three or four seasons. Given enough time, it would have become a cult classic for sure.
Gina
I love Barrett Brown’s work – his book “Flock of Dodos” is a great takedown of creationism, devastatingly funny. Dare I hope we see him over here at BJ too?
morzer
@Amir_Khalid:
The Lone Gunmen were great fun. It’s a shame that they didn’t get more time.
Brian J
@Joseph Nobles:
I wouldn’t laugh if I were you. According to noted legal expert Sharon Angle, who unlike Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Kagan understands the Constitution, Sharia law is overtaking American law so quickly, it’s doing so in cities that don’t yet exist.
Clearly, you do understand the magnitude of the threat.