House of Eratosthenes

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Paleofeminism II

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

On the last day of last year, I said…

I hope 2008 sees the end of this brand of feminism, I really do. The subject of the link in question is Page 8 of possible reasons Home Improvement jumped the shark, and “Guest” writes in with…

The show jumped with the “sandwich episode” where Jill really started to assert her own special brand of aggressive feminism. It was angering to watch Jill call her son a sexist because his girlfriend did his housework; the problem couldn’t possibly be on the girlfriend’s end, it must be the EVIL MISOGYNIST BRAD at fault because he LET her do his housework. In the end, everything was resolved, of course, when Jill converted everyone over to her point of view, aka the right one, including dimwitted Tim, who, of course, buckled under his wife’s demands yet again. Was there ever a single episode where Tim said, “Tough crap, Jill, this time it’s my way”?

I was watching this episode with my ten-year-old son, and found myself answering some complicated questions.

I went on to point out the flaw in Jill’s logic. I was garrulous, so let me sum it up in a single short paragraph here:

It’s the knight who is drawing this tangible benefit from the lady’s attentions. What, exactly, is he supposed to do according to this moral code handed down on high from matriarch paleofeminist Jill? The answer according to the script of the episode was — STOP the thoughtful girlfriend from making him sandwiches. Yeah that’s right. Snatch the peanut butter and jelly right outta her hands. That’s the scripted answer; the answer, in spirit, was “I don’t know.” That’s the trouble with paleofeminism. Paleofeminists won’t admit that their goal is really to get rid of men — but the elephant comes lumbering into full view in the middle of the room, when they are observed spraying instructions and orders at everyone in earshot, like some fully automatic rapid-fire trebuchet — or to invent a metaphor more functionally fitting, a claymore — and at the same time don’t know what to tell the men to do. We’re sexist pigs if our girlfriends make us sandwiches…how, then, do we remedy the situation and stop being sexist pigs? Catch the samrich-makin’ bitch in a full nelson and force her to drop the mayonnaise? It just doesn’t make any sense.

Sardo So I had good reason for wishing 2008 would see the end of paleofeminism. Very good reason. I like it when pretty ladies make me samriches. That’s because I’m sane.

Good reason…but not high hopes. And rightly so. For the frost is nearly upon the pumpkin, and what did blogger friend Cassy Fiano find for us. That’s right, another screeching screed at Feministing.

Check out this 1970 ad for bath oil (via Found in Mom’s Basement):

The text reads:

Sure. You live with him and take care of him and hang up his clothes. But just because you do the things a wife’s supposed to do, don’t forget you’re still a woman.

One of the nicest things you can do for a man is take care of your skin. That means Sardo. No other bath oil or bead has Sardo’s unique dry skin formula. It’s pure bath oil. The richest. The best. 3 out of 4 women saw and felt and loved the difference after just one Sardo bath.

How about you? Why don’t you do something soft and young and special for him. Feel wonderful all over with Sardo.

Wow, this is really taking some early-nineties Bryan Adams to its sexist extreme. I wonder if, when she wipes her ass, she’s also doing that for her husband?

Cassy unloads. And as usual, it’s pretty priceless:

What’s hilarious is how offensive the feminists say this ad is, but the commenters have zero problem whatsoever insulting and deriding the man for the hair on his arms. So it’s OK to criticize men for their looks but not women? What if a bunch of men were making fun of a woman because of something beyond her control, like her arms being hairier than normal, these same women would be shrieking with outrage.

It’s stories like these that make modern feminism so out-of-touch with reality and the average woman. When you’re worried about trivial bullshit like an ad from thirty years ago, or a Bryan Adams video that’s over fifteen years old, and make abortion the holy cow of your entire movement, and then call it fighting for women’s rights, it makes people not really take you very seriously. The thing is, there is real sexism in the world, and real women who are fighting real oppression. Most of this does not take place in the Middle East, but modern American feminism finds things like thirty-year-old bath oil ads and abortion more important than, oh, say three girls being buried alive for the “crime” of choosing their own husbands.

What motivates these bitter women? It obviously is not the “rights” of the modern woman. If it was about that issue, the girls being buried alive would at least register as a blip on the radar, one would hope. In fact, the samrich issue would not — Brad’s girlfriend wants to make him a samrich, she can go ahead and make him a samrich…the “choice” is hers, you see.

*sniff* *sniff* Smells like…some sort of collective bargaining.

Yes, that’s exactly what I think it is. Start out slow, and slack off. You get hired on to the team, which pumps out eight widgets per man per hour — you start cranking out twenty widgets an hour, boss gives you a big atta-boy, life will be all wonderful. Until you go home from work that day. It’s your co-workers, you see. You’re making ’em look bad.

This is exactly the same principle. You’re a woman, taking baths in oils to make your skin soft for that man o’ yours, make him a samrich or two…you know how those uppity men are, sooner or later they’ll start talking! And this puts pressure on the other jealous wrinkled up old gals. Can’t have that.

Perhaps this is why the feminists aren’t too interested in the teenage girls being buried alive, Cassy. See, not being murdered is an individual right. Forcing one amongst your peerage to start out slow & slack off, so that mediocrity can continue to be confused with excellence, that is a group right. A collective-bargaining right. Don’t do good works as an individual person, because you’re making the group-collective look bad.

Lower the expectations. For the good of the collective.

Just as union management demands to step into the role of the “real” boss…the wrinkled up old paleofeminist harpies are demanding to become the “real” husband. That hairy ape you’re living with, he’s just in the way. Don’t do anything to please him, or we’ll make you sorry.

Okay that explains everything — except one thing. With all this Sarah Palin news floating around, we’re already getting a crash-course that the feminist movement is pulling a bait-n-switch on us. They’ve been pissing and moaning that not enough women are winning high offices because not enough women are seeking those high offices…and that must have something to do with us grubby, awful, icky sexist men. Along comes Gov. Palin. To a rational mindset, she would appear to be the fulfillment of everything the feminists had been demanding all these years. Well, the feminists don’t like her, which proves the “womens’ rights” movement never had anything to do with women, and most certainly didn’t have much to do with their rights. It was all about a political agenda. Putting pressure on people to vote for unqualified angry women, was just a tactic for enacting that agenda.

What’s really awful for the feminist movement, is that Sarah Palin and the attacks against her don’t clearly state this for the understanding of whacky bloggers like myself. These events make all this plain to the average, Main Street voter. It’s the kind of damage only self-evident truth can do.

So why now for the attack on the Sardo ad? Why choose right here-and-now to really solidify that message to us…that feminism is all about marginalizing men, and driving a wedge between the sexes — that it has little or nothing to do with womens’ rights? It’s as if Feministing is terrified someone out here was not quite clear on things, and wanted to make sure the message was really spelled out for everyone.

Heyyyyyyy, here’s an idea. Let’s make the 2008 elections all about this. Vote McCain/Palin if you want men and women to get along, vote Obama/Biden if you think whenever a lady is softening up her skin or making samriches for her man, someone should jump in and force her to stop, whether she wants to stop or not. In the name of womens’ choice.

Meanwhile, if any nice-lookin’ ladies come along and start making me hot juicy pies and fetching me cold beers, I fully intend to support womens’ rights. I intend to let them. Sorry if that offends anyone.

Posted in Elections, Flogs, Is It Really a Man's World?, Mediocrity/Excellence Confusion, Poisoning Masculinity, VPILF | 1 Comment »

Best Sentence XXXIX

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Lileks, commenting on Heather Mallick’s screed, funded by the Canadian treasury. Let’s set it up first. You saw our link to it here. Our neighbors to the North, of all political stripes, whether they like it or not, get to pay out of their own pockets for such well thought-out wisdom as this:

I assume John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential partner in a fit of pique because the Republican money men refused to let him have the stuffed male shirt he really wanted. She added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up, the white trash vote, the demographic that sullies America’s name inside and outside its borders yet has such a curious appeal for the right.

So why do it?

It’s possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she’s a woman. They’re unfamiliar with our true natures. Do they think vaginas call out to each other in the jungle night? I mean, I know men have their secret meetings at which they pledge to do manly things, like being irresponsible with their semen and postponing household repairs with glue and used matches. Guys will be guys, obviously.

But do they not know that women have been trained to resent other women and that they only learn to suppress this by constantly berating themselves and reading columns like this one? I’m a feminist who understands that women can nurse terrible and delicate woman hatred.

I’m a blogger who understands that from that point onward, the Mallick bitch-fest heads downhill. Fast.

Whipped So is James Lileks.

Consider the joy that would reign if someone wrote that “Democrats, racial guilt-mongers that they are, really believe that African-Americans will vote for an African-American just because he’s an African-American.” Of course Republican men don’t believe that women will vote for her just because she’s a woman. It’s surely a factor, but there’s the possibility that they will vote for her because she is not a woman like Heather Mallick.

Then he lays the smackdown. Yes, it’s more than one sentence; it’s an entire paragraph.

But how glorious it is. Richly deserving of the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award.

You have to love the “Sexual inadequates that they are” line as well; if there’s one thing that’s amused me in the last two weeks, it’s the screechy distaste of Ms. Palin coming from men who embodied the Modern Alda Paradigm of masculinity, which is to say they are nervous around cars, think guns are icky, had their own Snugli, have wives in corporate jobs who make more money than they do, and still get dissed behind their backs because they can’t figure out how to make the bed. The Lost Boys, if you will. Now, some women can’t stand Sarah Palin for their own reasons, personal or ideological; same with men. Some men, however, are made deeply uneasy by her, because she’s the one who ignored the sensitive poet-guys in high school for the jocks, and didn’t seem to grasp the essential high-school truth that it’s cool to be a loser. But that’s rank psychoanalysis, and we won’t stoop to that.

And then…drum roll…he does. Well, not really. But he goes chasin’ after this meme that has been the elephant in the room, for a generation plus — some men aspire to become real men, other men go into politics. We haven’t been allowed to talk about it, and now we are. Lileks makes full use of the opportunity.

H/T: Buck, who adds:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is world-class snark. Good snark. Great snark. Biting and oh-so-on-point snark. No one, and I mean NO ONE on Planet Gaia gets on a roll quite like Mr. Lileks. You’re truly missing something if you don’t read the whole thing.

Yeah…gonna have to go ahead and agree with you on that one.

Posted in Flogs, Is It Really a Man's World?, VPILF | 2 Comments »

Feminist Definition

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Becky brings to our attention yet another screed at Feministing. Highlights:

1. People are referring to Sarah Palin as a feminist and/or as a liberated woman.
2. This is distressing to Jessica Valenti, CEO of Feministing, because Sarah Palin is not a feminist.
3. It is even more distressing to her that the mainstream media is referring to Gov. Palin this way.

It’s become rather typical for the feminist blog, or flog, to fail to define for us why we should join the flogger in being outraged at something. But it’s a little unusual for the flogger to fail to intone why she is outraged at something. The crux of the complaint seems to be that there are attributes of definition for someone who seeks to be known as (or is proffered by others as) a feminist, and Sarah Palin is missing some of those. But even though the comment thread has grown to 57 items as of this writing, Valenti refuses to disclose what those items are or should be.

Seems to have something to do with abortion.

Can someone clue me in on how & when abortion came to be a feminist thing? Yeah women get pregnant and guys don’t, I get that…but abortion itself can be an anti-woman thing, you know. All it takes to stand the whole juxtaposition on its head is to start discussing societies in which babies are aborted because they’re girls — and suddenly abortion is related to womens’ rights in a whole different way.

Commenter nestra (#1) pointed things out more articulately than I think I could’ve…

So using a constructed title such as “feminist” requires that the person holds to every single one of a set list of beliefs (as defined by who?), but identifying as a male doesn’t require a y chromosome.

That’s an interesting way of changing the rules to fit your own ideals, Jessica.

But it wasn’t nearly articulate enough to penetrate Jessica’s bulletproof bubble of selective attention deficit disorder —

Huh? Nestra, I’m not sure what you’re saying here…

Yup, I’ve met my share of these folks. Selectively clueless. “I don’t see how what you just said, is related to my goal of forcing more people to agree with me!” Freakin’ timewasters. CBTA.

The question that remains is, is there some “set list of beliefs” for feminists? Jessica is on record as saying both yes and no, from where I sit, depending on what answer she can give that’s most convenient to the point she’d like to be making.

Maybe she should go think this out a little bit better. Some people do better thinking when they’re given something to do. Like, for example, go get me a cold beer and make me a samrich.

Posted in Flogs | 6 Comments »

On Strong Female Characters

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Via Miss Cellania we learn that now, after decades of cardboard-flat Strong Willed Woman (SWW) characters having been pumped out in cinema to placate the anger of our feminists who demanded them, and we’ve gone so many revolutions on that silly merry-go-’round that it’s long ago become a parody of itself…it turns out the feminists wanted something completely different. Or want something completely different now. Or something.

I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.

So the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”

Mmm, hmm. I think I get it. Methinks the problem might not have been so much with the goal, as with the tactic. Write the characters this way…otherwise, we shall become very angry, and boycott your movie. Sticks instead of carrots.

Punishment-over-reward doesn’t work too well when your objective has something to do with precision. It works for ball-park stuff. Puppy should be housebroken, but isn’t, so he gets a whack. The point is, once the trainee puts some effort into meeting expectations, the punishment has to stop, because if it doesn’t the feeling of futility sets in right away. So does a feeling of confusion. A flawed female character? Like a female version of William Macy’s character in Fargo? Yeah. Find me a woman who likes that, I’ll find you two that hate it. Probably more than that. Literature already gives us MacBeth’s wife. Where are all the feminists slobbering all over this, wondering wistfully why she can’t appear in modern film? So I call bull doots on this.

Good luck on it though.

Meanwhile, anybody who wants to get extra-jaded on this whole “we have strong women because feminists demanded them” thing can just go watch an old Superman episode, and feast their eyes on what sort of Lois Lane Superman was saving. Thought that “tough enough to make it in a man’s world” storyline started with Teri Hatcher, didntcha? Nope, not even. Women who know their stuff, who are capable of making their own decisions, have been intoxicating — to both sexes — for a very long time now. An extraordinarily long time. It’s the way we’re built. Men don’t make all the decisions; they make all the decisions in some settings, women make all the decisions in others. Men do things that haven’t been done before. It’s quite silly to say “hold my beer and watch this” just before you do something someone else already did. Women, on the other hand, establish, maintain and enforce protocol.

That’s why feminism doesn’t work. It’s a mutation of womens’ instincts to establish, maintain and enforce protocol — but it deals with a protocol that experiments with relegating men to complete uselessness. And women, with very few exceptions, don’t want that. And, it promises to make things unpleasant for people if they don’t meet certain conditions; but promises nothing about the unpleasantness coming to an end, if & when the conditions are met.

Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

Posted in Flogs, TIK 52 | No Comments »

Watcher of Weasels

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Terry Trippany, editor, CEO, chief cook and bottle-washer of our parent site Webloggin, has been voted in as the new Watcher in Watcher of Weasels.

It’s neither a democracy nor a dictatorship. WoW is a council-vote driven enterprise. It’s an unapologetic star-chamber. The voting is done on a weekly basis, with the nominations right out in the open, for the view of everyone. It ends up being an exceptionally informative site.

Do keep an eye out.

Posted in My Blogger Friends | No Comments »

Pam in San Bernardino Has Never Seen High Noon

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Via Rick, a discussion taking place on Desperate Preacher, kicked off by Pam with some comments that are truly ~~asinine~~ noteworthy:

In John McCain’s recent commercials, he calls himself the Original Maverick. In our household, we’ve had some different responses to this. I’d like to know how you hear it and what you think he’s trying to communicate.

First time we heard the commercial, both my husband and son started yelling “Goose!”, much to my amazement. I didn’t understand it at all. They said it was a reference to Top Gun, and that Maverick was a character in the movie, as was Goose.

I pictures guns and cowboy hats, and a swagger down a dusty street.

Neither of these images work for me as an appeal for Presidential Character.

Any thoughts?

My comment at Rick’s place speaks for itself. (DP, by banning Rick, has indicated that the place desires to be an echo chamber above all other things, so I’ll keep my silence there out of respect for their wishes.)

Rev Pam wishes to broadcast to the world wide web that she has never seen High Noon before.

Very well. Noted.

You remember High Noon, don’t you. It’s a movie where the bad guy is coming to Hadleyville on the noon train, and the Sheriff understands a confrontation is in order. All the citizens of Hadleyville go hiding behind doors and shutters, leaving him to face the evil alone. The “consensus” of the town seems to be that evil, in fact, doesn’t really exist — or if it does, it’ll just go away if it’s ignored. Only the Sheriff understands this is wrong, and in his solitude he is not deterred.

Arguably, if this is not the best western movie ever made, it could very well be the western movie with the strongest connection to the unsettling conundrums that surface from time to time in real life.

In fact, I would argue that this is what makes a western movie. Clarity of moral definition…coupled with ambiguity about what to do. Personal safety placed in the corner directly opposite from the “make sure good prevails over evil” corner.

That’s why our leftists hate cowboys so much. Well, it’s true. High time someone said so.

Fuquod, being a keyboard-building fool, chimes in with the discredited chickenhawk argument:

…and rick…did you even attempt to serve?

We call them “keyboard builders” here because their argument is predicated on the notion that if you aren’t personally doing something then you have no business thinking positive thoughts about anybody else who is doing it, nor are you permitted to so much as to acknowledge, audibly or in silence, that what they do needs doing.

The argument they seek to make, depends completely on this nonsensical premise. Not just a little bit. Completely.

So I figure every time I read this argument, and it was typed into a computer somewhere, whoever said it must build keyboards for a living. I mean, the accusation they’re leveling is one of hypocrisy, so I know no way could those guys be hypocrites. They have to be building keyboards.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Posted in Keyboard builders, My Blogger Friends, Noble Warriors, Poisoning Masculinity, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

On Feminists, and NeW

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

Some afterthoughts about Cassy‘s profile of Network of Enlightened Women (NeW), and feminist complaint-blog Feministing‘s critique of same. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to call them “late thoughts” compared to “afterthoughts” because I never did opine in any way on this. What inspires my late thoughts is the comment section under Feministing’s original post; it has been growing, at least throughout the balance of last week, and I think this gives us some valuable and educational insight into the feminist mind.

I’m not referring, here, to what we said about feminists when we invented the word Flog as a portmanteau of “feminist blog”:

Check out masthead after masthead after masthead on some feminist blogs if you have trouble envisioning this. You’ll see what I mean. The “author” is represented by silhouette, or by avatar, or by an actual photograph. There is no smile…not unless it’s been made up into some misshapen sneer. Read the actual posts — and the problem is more pronounced still. Time after time, the theme is left intact, unshaken, unwrinkled, unmoved.

It is this: Somewhere, something is, and it ought not be. That’s it. Overall, it seems the fem-blog hasn’t much else to say. Sensors have detected something somewhere that exists, that we think should be banished to oblivion. Can we get an “Amen” here?

No, not that thing. The other thing. The control freak thing. The control they seek to exert over objects that may be kept around…if only they change. They want to customize what they own; what they only partially own; what they don’t own; what is, really, none of their damn business. Every little thing they find done, contrary to the way they’d do it if they were the person doing it, is a battle cry — no exceptions.

They seem positively eager, lately, to prove what Cassy said, lest there have been any doubt:

With feminism, women don’t have a choice. It’s follow blindly, and agree with everything we tell you. Don’t think for yourself. Don’t think that men aren’t the enemy. We know all, and don’t you dare get a second opinion…[F]eminists seem to think that if anyone, anywhere disagrees with anything they decree, it automatically makes them sexist and woman-haters. They fail to realize that debate can be and is healthy, and constantly trying to stifle opposing viewpoints only serves to strengthen those opposing viewpoints.

There are now several posts under the Feministing comment section, making the point that conservatism as used by NeW is underdefined or undefined.

This is a worthwhile point, I think. I don’t believe it applies to NeW. I read posts like this one, and the values and principles are crystal clear:

It is the liberal tendency today for some Americans to criticize the nation’s status in the world. Instead of recognizing America for what it is: a beacon of hope, liberty, freedom, democracy, and principles; some look to the rest of the world to measure our success. How far have we fallen? We are a nation of independence, with every citizen possessing equal opportunity. With such an amazing reality, why should we ever be ashamed of our country? The President’s comments indicate his belief that America is a strong nation, and we must never forget this great truth.

Reminds me of sf4’s suggestion that I jot down my own conservative platform and let liberals comment on it. I’m still giving it some thought.

But getting back to the subject at hand…

It occurs to me that feminists have an awful lot of antipathy in store for an organization they claim stands for something they don’t understand. I mean, I know the feeling. I’ve had people try to draft me into things like Amway, L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, Mormonism, etc., going on and on about some kind of wonderfulness without expounding too much on what exactly it was they were trying to say. Yes, I find it a little irritating. No, it doesn’t make me want to lash out with those kinds of feelings the feminists seem to have; indeed, seem eager to showcase. So I call bull-dookey.

It also reminds me of something Larry Elder said once:

Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

And in addition to that, it reminds me of something I said; specifically, Thing I Know #217:

Populism, according to the hard evidence that has managed to come my way, has a tough time staying positive. It seems there has to be a dirty so-and-so who’s due for a come-uppins, behind every energized populist movement. That might be because populism seeks to decide issues according to the satisfaction of the majority, and most of us like to feel our way to a decision rather than think our way through. Naturally, laying the smack down on an enemy feels a whole lot better than actually solving a problem.

The NeW/Feminist back-and-forth is explained completely, I think, by Elder’s observation. Or nearly so. I read comments on NeW and the worst they think about their feminist sistren, is that the feminists have either been hoodwinked or are hoodwinkers. The feminists think this about the NeW ladies — that, or much, much worse.

And they say so over and over again.

I wonder if “middle-of-the-road” people are as leery as I am, of people who have to show off over and over again what good people they are. Now there is something I’d like to see the whole country talking about — and it’s a much bigger issue than conservatism versus liberalism or NeW ladies versus feminists. If you’re a good person who does good things, and you damn well know it…you just…keep on keepin’ on, right?

On the other hand, if you’re a bad person and you know that, or you try to be a good person but you don’t feel very good about your success in being good, what do you do? You call yourself a “feminist” and make tedious and repetitious comments about what a bad person someone else is, who doesn’t believe in the same things you do.

Posted in Classy Women, Flogs | No Comments »

Holtie’s House

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Peter says he’s going away.

This is a terrible loss, as Holtie’s House has been a great place to go when you need that pick-me-up — after work, not during. Never been anything too heavy, just some cool funny stuff…like this, for example:

And this…

And bits of humor like this…

Thought for the day:

I am passing this on to you because it definitely worked for me and we all could use more calm in our lives. By following the simple advice I heard on a Medical TV show, I have finally found inner peace. A Doctor proclaimed the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started. So I looked around my house to see things I’d started and hadn’t finished and, before leaving the house this morning, I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a bottle of shhhardonay, a bodle of Baileys, a butle of vocka, a pockage of Prunglies, tha mainder of bot Prozic and Valum scriptins, the res of the Chesescke an a box a chocolets. Yu haf no idr who fkin gud I fel.Peas sen dis orn to dem yu fee AR in Aned ov inr pece.

…and this…

Jim decided to propose to Sandy, but prior to her acceptance Sandy had to confess to her man about her childhood illness. She informed Jim that she suffered a disease that left her breasts at maturity of a 12 year old. He stated that it was OK because he loved her soooo much.

However, Jim felt this was also the time for him to open up and admit that he also had a deformity too. Jim looked Sandy in the eyes and said…. “I too have a problem. My penis is the same size as an infant and I hope you could deal with that once we are married.”

She said, “Yes I will marry you and learn to live with your infant size penis.”

Sandy and Jim got married and they could not wait for the Honeymoon. Jim whisked Sandy off to their hotel suite and they started touching, teasing, holding one another…As Sandy put her hands in Jim’s pants she began to scream and ran out of the room! Jim ran after her to find out what was wrong. “You told me you penis was the size of an infant!”, she said.

“Yes it is….. 8 pounds, 7 ounces, 19 inches long!!”

Farewell, Peter. You’ll be missed.

Posted in Glad I Learned About This, My Blogger Friends | No Comments »

Sister Toldjah

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

Our thoughts and hopes for the best possible outcome are with Sister Toldjah. May her visits to the doctor become shorter and shorter, and more and more boring.

Why don’t you head on over if the spirit moves you, and offer a kind word or two.

Posted in My Blogger Friends | No Comments »

When Do We Start Battling Our Ugly Stereotypes, As Opposed to Substantiating Them?

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

Your defense is well-suited to any social meme that has developed a rugged exo- or endoskeleton. Feminism has neither. It’s been using a jellyfish-like form to wiggle out of trouble for quite awhile now with this “nailing jello to a tree” deflection-of-criticism approach.

That’s metaphorical for what some of our most prejudiced male chauvinists sometimes say about women overall, I would add: Women insisting on having everything their way, and then refusing to take responsibility for it. So if that’s a stereotype feminism wants to fight, it seems to me feminism could be doing a more efficient job of fighting it. From what I can see, feminism has almost been working to perpetuate it, and your “Not Our Fault” posting continues the trend.

My constructive criticism for this blogger — bloggrix, I guess — as she fisks away about supposed female privilege. The nearly-uniform spirit in each and every nugget is that any unintended consequence of the feminist movement is to be laid at the feet of something called “the patriarchy.” There is nothing bad about feminism and nothing good about patriarchy; everything about feminism is good, and everything bad that seems to result from it is that guy’s fault.

The truth is that feminists are individuals. And their movement is chock full of double standards — a relic of classic chivalry benefits men and diminishes women, it surely must be abjured from our polite society. But when another relic diminishes men and benefits women, the ambition within the feminist movement to polish that sucker off suddenly does a pratfall. Including women in selective service? Oh, we can certainly have a debate about that…as long as nothing ever comes of it.

There is a kernel of truth in what she’s saying. A lot of feminists will say “Yes! We want the responsibilities as well as the benefits!” This margin of legitimacy to the point she wants to make, ironically, is the very weakness of it. Feminism has done such a poor job of defining itself with regard to any conundrum that arises, within the “middle ages have actually been pretty good to us” family of conundrums, that it now benefits from an oozing, amoeba-like shape with neither form nor substance. What is the “feminist” take on women being required to register for selective service? We can go out looking for feminists who say one thing about it, and other feminists who say another thing about it. We’ll find plenty of both. The movement itself is agnostic about it.

Except it isn’t. Because here’s where the argument really breaks down. A feminist advocate retires from a position of leadership, and if she has two possible successors, the more militant one will win the spot. We’ve seen that happen for decades now, during which time feminism has become at certain times visceral and nasty. It shouldn’t have happened that way. To insist on equal pay for equal worth, is actually a pretty benevolent motive. But now we have feminist advocates pushing to get commercials taken off the air so that none of us dimwit men ever get the ideas in our heads that maybe our wives and girlfriends can bring us a beer from the fridge now and then.

And as I’ve pointed out garrulously, to excess, refusing to do nice things for someone, someone with whom you’re supposed to be sharing a life, is mean. Especially if you’re refusing just because he’s a guy.

But getting back to the subject at hand: The stereotype of a woman, in the mind of a true male sexist, is someone who insists on having everything her way and then when there are unintended consequences for this, she doesn’t take responsibility for it. If any individual wants to entertain that notion, he’ll have to figure out whether it holds water based on his history of the women he’s met. But what of the feminist movement itself, as presented by this fisking bloggress? The refusal to take responsibility for unintended consequences…

Again, this is the result of the patriarchy. The feminist does not see this as a privilege, but rather a ridiculous sexism, particularly because society deems the display of emotion to be bad. We are not privileged; we are ridiculed and dismissed as irrational for displays of emotions. Feminists believe that the expression of emotion is healthy, regardless of gender.

Again, patriarchy. Blame it.

Again with the patriarchy. Feminists do not believe that men should be measured by their violence, either. This is the pressure of the patriarchy.

Blame the patriarchal Abrahamic religions. Women did not come up with the idea of circumcision, and we certainly didn’t invent clitorectemies. This isn’t a privilege; it’s yet another demented result of the patriarchy.

Again! Blame the patriarchy, my male friends. It’s not the feminists that are holding you back.

Again, patriarchy. Women are expected to serve as the primary caretakers of children. If we didn’t, then fathers would have to work less, take care of children more, and then they’d have more of a role.

I wonder what happens when very young males, who are bright but far too inexperienced to have an opinion about feminism one way or the other, trip across such neurotic excuse-making. The natural and reasoned human instinct is going to be to say “well, if when all’s said and done anything that turns to crap is automatically my fault just because I’m a guy and part of this ‘patriarchy’…I don’t think I want to be around anyone like this.” Or, of course, if you do have to be around someone you anticipate won’t take responsibility for unintended consequences, you’re going to have to go nuts with insisting that everyone be done your way.

It reminds me of a broadcast of the Tom Leykis program I heard back when Braveheart came out. There was that scene where King Edward shoved his son’s boyfriend out of a third-story window, and Mr. Leykis had a guest in his studio who was organizing some kind of protest against this scene among homosexual advocacy groups.

A caller called in and posed a rhetorical question for which the guest could not come up with an answer. He said, (paraphrasing)

Isn’t this the stereotype about you people already? You go into these movies with your spiral notebooks, you probably don’t even know what the movie’s about and you don’t care, you just jot down some thing you can protest. And here you are bearing that out.

The devastating thing about that point is that you can demonize the guy making it to your heart’s content, expressing theatrical indignation about “you people” or hypothesizing about warped and bigoted intentions in some other way — but the point still stands. The advocate’s stated purpose is to enact cultural reform, toward a more tolerant society. And yet by choosing the tactics he’s chosen, even if he ultimately succeeds it’ll be two-steps-back-and-three-forward, because his first move is to organize, protest, point, condemn, mock, scold…and, generally, insist on having everything his way with no compromises.

Dictate how some other guy he’s never met and never will meet, is supposed to make a movie. If I was a gay man who was concerned about how the homosexual community is perceived within society overall, I’d have been very pissed about it.

Just as, if I was a woman or a feminist, I wouldn’t find this bloggress’ “defense” to be terribly helpful.

Thing I Know #8. It is hard to get people to argue about private matters, but easy if you can somehow turn them into public matters.

Posted in Flogs | 1 Comment »

Memo For File LXXII

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Three Bitter Beers, Pretty Good! It’s Friday night and that means it’s time to find something worth discussing that doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with him.

So how’s this…

Two weekends ago I showed up at a “company” picnic with some of the folks who used to be my work colleagues. My old boss’ boss is a big fan of fancy beers. Takes tours around Germany, drives down to San Francisco to buy up the imports and the indie domestics…always has interesting stories to tell. Loves to talk about it.

This isn’t the boss who died at home a few months ago. His boss.

Anyway…I brought over a 750ml wine bottle of my famous homemade barbeque sauce, and bartered it away for three of his best, which were ice-cold. That July day was especially hot, and I gulped down all three the minute I got home. All three had that bitter, Bite You In The Back Of The Tongue taste.

It was a good outing, including some folks who hadn’t been in the office in years. Gathered before 11:00, didn’t say our good-byes until almost three in the afternoon. As for the beer brands, they’re plenty good enough to jot down for future shopping excursions, at my local spot as well as online.

Now you know too. And tomorrow’s Saturday.

You’re welcome.

Update: You know, there’s an interesting segue on this theme of beer, because earlier this evening I was screwin’ around on Google looking for beer-related things…and what did I find? Yet another “Can I Get An Amen Here” screed at feministing. What are we being directed by our feminist matriarchs to find reprehensible this time? (This time, it should be noted, was eleven months ago…but…)

DRUM ROLL, PLEASE…

(Cymbals clash!)

A commercial about a mechanized women producing ice cold frosty delicious beer. Presumably, for a guy. Grrrr! Outrage!

You’ll be pleased to know there’s a thread under it with fifty-plus comments, mostly from slave-feminist, ass-kissing toadies. Oh, yes! We’ll be writing to Heineken right away, using out very angriest e-stationery!

I don’t know. I was single and available a few years back, at a fairly seasoned age for being in the market, and I had a sudden revelation about women, or rather, my feelings about them: After all I’d been through I wasn’t that interested in what I’d be able to catch, as what I’d be able to avoid. I didn’t want to filter out any quality material, but somehow I just knew if I could ask exactly the right questions, I’d make a much more successful match than most single people in their late thirties. And that’s exactly what happened.

My scoring system wasn’t exactly a simple thing, but basically it distilled down to this:

WE ARE AT HOME AND I ASK YOU TO BRING ME A BEER. You…

A. Bring it. Max points!
B. Bring it, provided I say “please.” Just as many points as A.
C. Bring it, but expect me to bring you things when you ask me too. Yes, just as many points as A and B. Really. Yeah, what a chauvinist knuckle-dragger, huh?
D. Bring it, but only if it’s your “turn,” after keeping careful track of who owes what to who. MAJOR loss of points. Down to almost zero. No interest, whatsoever, in being in a relationship like that ever again.
E. Don’t bring it, because your identity has come to be attached to not doing things like that. Negative points. Sure you’ll make some other dude happy. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

Feminism, to me, has come to be a bunch of women who are “E.” People keep telling me I’m wrong about that, and then I see fifty comments in a row like what you’ll find under that post.

Who’s the target market for this ad? Really, really misogynistic futurists?

How much beer does Heineken think Newt Gingrich is going to buy?

Yep, and this commercial is supposed to appeal to women too. Because it is, after all, all about the menz. If you drink this beer, it shows that you are willing to put up with this shit, and maybe a little of the sexxxay robotness will rub off on you. Hooray, instant approval from men! Just what you always wanted.

The robot is clearly designed to look like a woman in order to play into the stereotype that the primary female role is to be a server/hostess, both in the household and out. That is why it’s misogyny.

There, see what I mean? They’re talking in circles about “sexxxay robotness” but the robot got herself in trouble simply by doing something for a man; something about a “primary female role.”

That’s how you make the leap. From Do Not Establish An Identity That Has To Do With Helping A Man — to — Establish An Identity That Has To Do With Not Helping A Man. They set out in their feminist endeavors to cleave down a single silk hair the long way, and the intellectual tool they use to do it is not a scalpel, or a butter knife, but a sledge hammer. Naturally — they fail. Before you can say “Can I Have A Beer?” they’re chiding each other for even thinking about getting a man a beer, never mind if he just rescued them from a bad part of town with a flat tire, opened that darn pickle jar for them that just wouldn’t budge, adopted their half-dozen whelps they had by some long-forgotten high school scumbucket, saved their favorite kitty from a starving pit bull, or…said “please.” None of that matters; you’re simply not supposed to do nice things for a man, period.

Supposedly, it’s more complicated than that. I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. There is no surgical precision here. Any & all enthusiasm along the lines of pitching in and helping out, to live life in a spirit of true partnership with one another…is out the window. Pitched overboard. Tossed into the wood-chipper. And along with any true commitment to living life together, as a twosome, you can forget about anything that really matters to you. Domestic tranquility. Being a father to your kids. Buying groceries fewer than four times a week. Vacations you really enjoy. Hanging on to your money.

Hey Princess And having a cold beer. It’s an unpleasant truth of life: A woman who refuses to bring you a beer, probably won’t be that crazy about you grabbing one for yourself either. “Get your own damn beer” doesn’t mean what you might think it does.

I hope no one gets the idea, from comments like this, that I place a lot of priority in judging a woman’s character on whether she’ll bring me a beer or not. That would be barbaric and primitive.

But, I certainly do appreciate a woman who is inclined to go ahead and do it for me. Or for any man. I get the distinct impression that the number of years I have left on the planet, is derived rather rigidly from how many minutes I spend around women like that, in whatever capacity, versus how many minutes I spend around those “E” types. “Can You Get Me A Beer?” has become a reasonably accurate litmus test to figure out if a prospective long-term enchantment has a problem with her goddamn attitude, and Lord knows how much money and grief it can save a younger stud approaching the age ripe for dating seriously. It’s very much like what young ladies do with us, when they keep an eye out for how much we tip the waiter — you know, that timeless advice handed down from mother to daughter, however we treat “The Help” is probably how we’ll treat our wives. I think that’s a fair test, and an accurate one too. So is the “ask for a beer” test. Be classy and polite as you can possibly manage, but toss the question out, keep your butt anchored to that chair, and see what happens.

How different things would be, if I tried that with my ex-wife.

Update 7/26/08: This one definitely goes in, because…

1. It’s loaded with nostalgia. The pull tabs, the “wet look,” the sideburns, etc.
2. Her knights rescue her from the dragon, and she does what a decent princess does. Fits right in with our theme.
3. It’s my old stomping grounds.
4. She’s a product of the feminist movement’s “growth spurt” phase, right after it got going. When it was feelin’ it’s oats, so to speak. And yet, she’s just a sweetie. LESSON…LESSON…for certain people who need it…but might not absorb it…
5. Cross-eyed cat??

Let’s just stop beating around the bush: As it’s been pointed out before around these parts, beer is a wonderful beverage for human companionship — even if it’s substandard beer that tastes like deer piss. It is the ultimate social drink. The taste is not the point. The point is getting together and appreciating each other, when we would otherwise have not.

And there really is no more pathetic creature than a woman who resents a man who’d like a beer brought to him. These fragile biddies, the trouble with them is — the guy who demands that it be brought to him, versus the fellow who’d simply appreciate it, they can’t tell ’em apart. Those two dudes are exactly the same, in their eyes.

And that’s a very sad thing to see in a woman. It’s like a guy who can’t drive a stick-shift. Men should know how to work a clutch, and a woman should know how to recognize grace and good manners when they’re right in front of her. Now, the guy who can’t tell who’s being nice to him and who’s being something of a dick, or the woman who grinds gears, I can cut them both some slack. But each one of the sexes has an area in which mastery is to be expected, and I think what’s above in this paragraph, nails that down pretty well.

If she doesn’t, and if she acts like those sourpusses over on feministing, snarking away when she catches wind of guys who like to have beer brought to them…you know what? She is being (wait for it, here comes the ultimate insult) — economically foolish. Really. That’s the unsung wonderful thing about us guys. A beer is an adequate, I say abundant, almost excessive, thank you. No matter what. This is what our less enlightened and less pleasant females can’t grasp about us. They, for their own advantage, really should figure it out, sooner rather than later.

We buy you a beer, you buy us a beer.

We hold the door open for you, you buy us a beer.

We throw our fine suit jackets in the mud puddle so you can walk across ’em without dirtying your precious feet, you buy us a beer.

We haul your five tons of crap and your cross-eyed cat up two flights of stairs, you buy us a beer.

We rescue your five children from a burning building at three in the morning, and then adopt them and pay their way through college, you buy us a beer.

In all those situations, and many more, the beer is more-than-adequate payment. It isn’t even payment, it’s gratuity. You’ve just surpassed all our expectations. Guys are so easy that way. Black men, white men, red men, yellow men, Republican men, democrat men, redneck men, urban men, old men, young men — you’ll never hear any one of us, ever, say “oh, a beer, what else are ya gonna do for me?”

You bring us a beer, and it’s all good. More than all good. We’re like the puppy you just fed. Friends for life.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Flogs, Is It Really a Man's World? | 6 Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XIX

Friday, July 25th, 2008

…but I hope I can send some attention to the Folds of Honor Foundation.

It began with the death of 28-year-old Brock Bucklin, an Army specialist from Caledonia. He was killed May 31, 2006 in Iraq when fellow soldiers were lifting heavy equipment and a hoist broke.

His sacrifice was etched on the hearts of the passengers on the flight that returned his body home.

When the plane landed, Bucklin’s 4-year-old son, Jacob, rushed to the casket carrying his hero’s body. That image stuck with Capt. Dan Rooney who was on that flight and has been on several tours in the Middle East.

“I was on a United Airlines flight, 664. You don’t remember the numbers of many flights in your life, but this was a night that my life changed,” Rooney told 24 Hour News 8. “For me, being an F-16 pilot, I’ve seen combat, I’ve seen death and destruction in Iraq. But I’d never seen that side of it. And having three daughters of my own, it was something that really struck me.”

Rooney decided to combine his two passions – patriotism and golf – and started the Folds of Honor Foundation, a scholarship to help pay for school for some of the 187,000 dependents left behind by war.

We were following a trackback and ended up at looking at a Linkfest Haven page at Elections Blog. We get lots of trackbacks that are just plain spam, and this one aroused our curiosity because it had some spamtastic attributes but was missing others. We picked up some unmistakably human-authored English and decided to investigate. From that, we found The Blog That Nobody Reads was already participating passively, and we decided to participate actively, and from that decision we wrote ‘er up.

Makes a lot more sense for that foundation to get attention from us, than the other way ’round.

Cassy with gun Also, we’re going to be putting up some “guest blog” pages over at Cassy Fiano’s spot next week while she’s out of town, and she’s specifically asked us to toot our own horn while we’re over there…or strongly suggested we do so, repeatedly. Not so much that, but kind of left the door open — in a “nudge, nudge” sort of a way. We appreciate the offer and we’ll probably take her up on it…during which time, we expect the Writer’s Block to set in thicker than usual. “Horn-tooting” is a little out of character for us. Some of you nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, have been not stopping by and not reading it for awhile by now…and you know we’re a scrapbook, not a billboard. In other words, the central theme here is something like NOTE TO SELF: What is up with that chucklehead Barack Obama? You wouldn’t believe the wombat crazy bollywonkers crazy thing he did today…

…and whoever sees it, sees it, and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t. WHATEVER. Yes, we’re pleased with the e-friends we’ve made since our go-live date following the 2004 elections. Yes, we’re as addicted to Sitemeter as the next guy. But “Hey Innernets! Guess what I think about THIS” is not our primary objective; and I doubt we’re alone here, I think this is a myth that has been started about the blogging community as a whole. We’re not attention whores. The driving force behind our having a blog in the first place is that some folks have thoughts that make a lot more sense in the written medium, than in the verbal one. Sometimes.

Anyway. We’ll be following a cross-posting format so in theory, you won’t see much over at Cassy’s place that you won’t see here. But that’s theory, there are bound to be exceptions. Besides, there are a lot more commenters over there than here, and some of ’em will be worth meeting, so do head on over. Not to say anything against the nobodies here…you’re worth meeting too.

But in the final analysis, Cassy has a much prettier face than I do, and a decent brain behind it. Stop on by and say a hello on her way out of town.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Glad I Learned About This, My Blogger Friends, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Explicit Threat of Rape

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Jessica at Feministing is none to fond of the newest Goodyear ad…

My mistake. She’s actually searching ancient dusty archives in an effort to get herself pissed off. And succeed she does…

Is it just me, or…

*Sigh* When people who call themselves “feminists” begin a sentence that way, I just know this will end well.

Is it just me, or is this commercial telling women that they might get raped if they don’t buy Goodyear tires? (I know there’s no explicit rape threat, but the woman walking alone in a scary dark alleyway says it all to me.)

The makers of a product are demonstrating the advantage of their product and using visuals to illustrate why said advantage is desirable. A good chunk of the household budget can be justifiably spent on keeping the females within it warm, safe, comfortable and dry, and cannot be justifiably spent to keep the gentlemen that way, because that would be silly.

It’s called “having a good thing going on here.” And feminists are known for not appreciating it.

Let’s give Jessica some credit, though. Things don’t spike on the absurd-o-meter, until you get into the comments, at which time the ad is torn to shreds for failing to prop up the late seventies stereotype of the ass-kicking woman who knows how to kick ass, ride motorcycles, and change a tire as well as any man.

This is a classic illustration of how feminism died. We men didn’t do it. These brittle biddies would never admit it, but the way they’re applying their movement, it stands for — among other things — the notion that a woman’s place is down on the ground reefing on rusty, corroded lug nuts with a tire iron, scraping her knuckles on the pavement. Like I said, they’ll never admit that; but the ad dares to say otherwise, and look at all the rotten vegetables they’re throwing.

Could someone let the feminists know we didn’t have cell phones yet in the 1960s. And, back then, yes a lot of women appreciated having “a man around.” In fact, some women do today. Deal. Also, it looks like sexism of all kinds has been permanently resolved, since feminists need to go digging through 45-year-old archives, imposing their modern-day social mores on what they find beneath the dust and cardboard, in order to reach the emotional state most desirable to them: PISSED OFF.

Just like vampires that have run out of humans and are forced to dine on rats.

I tremble for the seismic activity that shall ensue when the feminists discover Shakespeare.

Posted in Flogs | 5 Comments »

Umbrage

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Jonathan Alter is blaming bloggers and other entities of the innernets for “umbrage”:

All Umbrage All the Time

After a decade of waiting for the first “Internet election,” it’s finally here, and we’re adrift from all the old-media moorings. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” the great critic A. J. Liebling wrote more than half a century ago. Today, of course, we’re all press lords, or can be. But the “crowd-sourcing” of news cuts both ways. Like democracy itself, it can cleanse, correct and ennoble. Or it can coarsen, spread lies and degrade the national conversation.
:
Like senior citizens suffering from dementia, Web users often fall prey to “disinhibition”—the lack of a filter for their most brutal thoughts. In the campaign, this takes the form of an umbrage explosion, where a day rarely passes without someone’s taking grave offense over something.

In the pre-Web era, this was less of a problem. The New Yorker cover satirically depicting Obama as a flag-burning Muslim and Michelle as a gun-toting radical would have been seen by only a few hundred thousand subscribers, almost all of whom would have gotten the joke. Instead, in today’s 24/7 news cycle, it was seen by tens of millions of people. It was the knowledge of such a big audience for the cartoon—other Americans who “wouldn’t understand”—that fueled the over-the-top fury of the Obama supporters.

Meanwhile, as I make my way through this, the guys on the radio are talking about one of Alter’s cool-headed, reasonable old-media moorings, and how they refused to run John McCain’s editorial.

New York Times op-ed editor David Shipley dropped a courteous line to the McCain campaign on why their editorial wouldn’t appear…said editorial written specifically to respond to Obama’s note, which the Times had cheerfully dropped right on in.

Darn those impetuous bloggers, eh Jonathan?.

From: David Shipley/NYT/NYTIMES [mailto:XXXXXXX]
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 8:31 PM
To: XXXXXXX
Cc: XXXXXXX
Subject: Re: JSM Op-Ed

Dear Mr. XXXXXX,

Thank you for sending me Senator McCain’s essay.

I’d be very eager to publish the Senator on the Op-Ed page.

However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.

I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft.

Let me suggest an approach.

The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.

It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan.

I’m just lovin’ what came next…

I am going to be out of the office next week. If you decide to re-work the draft, please be in touch with Mary Duenwald, the Op-Ed deputy. Her email is XXXXXXXX; her phone is 212-XXXXXXX.

Now look what we have here. We have “reporting” upheld on high as the classical solution to all the world’s problems, but once it’s engaged it could more properly be described as “screening.” Not the conveying of information, but the blocking of it. Oh, goodness, I’m so glad we have David Shipley and Mary Duenwald vigilantly standing guard to make sure I don’t hear anything that isn’t articulate, concrete and laying out a clear plan. I feel so well-informed having all that sub-par chaff kept away from me!

Is that off topic from what Mr. Alter was writing about? I don’t think so; he specifically comes out and says the New Yorker cartoon generated the flap it did, not because it was drawn up, but because too many people found out about it.

So I guess, in his world, there’s less umbrage because information is kept in silos. And these trusted individuals stand watch over it all, making sure this guy over here, doesn’t get hold of that nugget over there.

Yeah. I feel so much better informed now. And, six hundred years ago, I would have felt so much more spiritual after a good blood-letting.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM | 4 Comments »

Newspapers Run Out of Anti-Bush Headlines

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Now, here is some good satire. The Peoples’ Cube, via Gerard.

“There are only so many words one can string together while remaining impartial and objective – even if it’s such a fertile topic as our dumb and evil dictator President who is bent on bombing caribou herds back into the Stone Age in Alaska,” says Susan Stein, editor of The Village Voice, a mainstream New York newspaper. “Our paper is getting thinner with every issue. We are now considering running blank pages; we call it a “fill in the blanks” approach. Our readers are extremely educated and knowledgeable; they’ll get the point anyway.”

See how that works? You do not have to be of a certain mindset to get it; you do not have to have certain pre-formed prejudices in order to understand how it emulates reality, and once it does, how it is ridiculous and absurd. It was not created for the purpose of injecting absurdity into where it did not previously exist — it simply points out that the absurdity is there.

It visits itself upon what was strange, surreal, and weird — but subtle. It changes the degree of subtlety without changing the degree of strangeness, surreality or weirdness. As to whether the subject matter was strange or surreal or weird it allows the reader to come to his or her own conclusions…but only after backing the reader into a corner about it. That is good satire. It is not schmatire.

So, a sympathetic sorry-’bout-that to Mr. Pitts, and better luck next time to Ms. Churchwell. Nice try, folks. Satire is not that tricky. You just have to show some cleverness. Find a way to point out what makes sense in things that really do make sense, and point out what’s laughable in things that really are laughable.

Sure you can pump out some stuff designed to switch those two around.

But that’s called “propaganda,” not satire. There’s a difference.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Bush Derangement Syndrome | 1 Comment »

Question For Feminists

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

What does having sex with lots of people have to do with promoting equal rights for women?

Posted in Flogs | 3 Comments »

Privilege

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Wow, talk about link spaghetti. Let’s try to keep it all straight.

Male privilege came first — compiled by, among others, Amp at Alas who explains:

In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.

As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.

Due to my own limitations, this list is unavoidably U.S. centric. I hope that writers from other cultures will create new lists, or modify this one, to reflect their own experiences.

Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted many times on internet discussion groups. Very helpfully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too – being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things – but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes.

And so the list of male privileges commences, and what a Pandoras’ Box it has become.

Some folks like me will tactfully suggest that there, lies a lesson for us all. Anyway, here are the first five:

The Male Privilege Checklist

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true.

3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.

ballgame at Feminist Critics points to a creative destruction, and then responds with more than a few articles of Female Privilege.

His first five…

As a woman …

1. I have a much lower chance of being murdered than a man.
2. I have a much lower chance of being driven to successfully commit suicide than a man.
3. I have a lower chance of being a victim of a violent assault than a man.
4. I have probably been taught that it is acceptable to cry.
5. I will probably live longer than the average man.

This is then cited and linked by David Thompson, who points to a couple more interesting tidbits. An unbelievable article linking violence with maleness; yet another feminist take on male privilege; and, a hodge-podge of more bullet points for the female-privilege list:

Brandon Berg offers a few further points to mull, including:

If I marry, there is a very good chance that I will be given the option to quit my job and live off my husband’s income without having my femininity questioned.

If I become pregnant, I and I alone choose whether to terminate the pregnancy or have the baby. As a result, I can be reasonably certain that I will never be held financially responsible for a child I didn’t want to have, and that I will never have my unborn child aborted without my consent.

Because I am not expected to be my family’s primary breadwinner, I have the luxury of prioritising factors other than salary when choosing a career path.

Although I am every bit as likely as a man to allow my sex drive to compromise my judgment, I will never be accused of thinking with my clitoris.

Sweating Through Fog also shares some checklist possibilities:

I’m entitled to the benefits of a safe, orderly society, but no one expects me to risk my personal safety to maintain it.

When I find myself with others in a terrifying, life-threatening situation, I have the right to be evacuated first, once the children are safe. Others can wait.

If I see someone else being attacked, I’m not expected to risk my own safety to defend them. It’s okay for me to wait for others to intervene, and it’s also okay for me to criticise others if they don’t.

And this is linked by Ace, who is then linked by Maggie’s Farm, where I found it.

As an intellectual exercise, each side of this list-building is only useful to me insofar as it helps to peg down how much jealousy and resentment there is out there. That, and once again the feminist movement has been nailed the same way it usually is: It organizes for the purpose of calling attention to what females are supposedly missing, never once pausing to contemplate the surpluses that are packaged with those deficits. The unmistakable moral, which I ordinarily would not deign to repeat, is the one from John Badham’s War Games (2003) — but since that’s from twenty-five years ago I suppose I should go ahead and pop it up.

Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

The one from Teddy Roosevelt seems even more relevant…

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

Posted in Flogs, TIK 52 | No Comments »

Memo For File LXIX

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Item!

Former work colleague Deanna Troi (not her real name) writes in with a triple-threat of an idea:

Three world problems solved……your thoughts and hey maybe info for your blog

Ok here goes ~~

1. The plastic floating in the ocean

2. The melting Polar Ice Cap

3. The increasing unemployment

MY PLAN….WELL………..of course you know its a combination of all three…….

Take all the plastic garbage and recycle it into a large plastic blanket…….in sections………..put it over the ice, melting ice, former ice at the Artic Pole…….this would create a large pool cover, blocking the sun from melting by insulating it .

This would generate jobs to gather it, create/manufacture it, and maintain it.

Ok….I know it sound silly and simple but……it “could” work……don’t you think…..?

Later Gator

Well, my initial thought had to do with something I’d been noticing for a long time: People in positions of authority, at some time or another, tell just about everyone you care to name to (to be polite about it) FECK OFF. John McCain’s said it to conservatives plenty of times, and Barack Obama just did it to our buddy Glenn Greenwald, to Greenwald’s great annoyance. But never environmentalists. Nope, environmentalists, who exist for the purpose of stopping things and making nothing go (except environmental movements), pretty much get every little thing they want, all the time. Big things, little things, in between things. Nobody in a position of authority ever tells a tree hugger to FECK OFF. With gas up toward five bones a gallon, there is more pressure now to show ’em the heave-ho than there ever has been…it might happen…but it hasn’t just yet.

And so it occurred to me that ignoring environmentalists would, directly or indirectly, address all three of these. Like Samuel L. Jackson said in The Incredibles, why don’t we do what we told our wives we were gonna do, just to shake things up a bit? — Why don’t we tell environmentalists to stick it where the sun don’t shine, just for a change of pace?

Another Item!

Gerard saw the clip we linked of that extraordinarily impressive montage of “I’m Not Here To Make Friends”…and he had an idea very much like Counselor Troi’s…

Could somebody please raise the money and gather the will to put all of these pathetic assholes in one single location and call in an overwhelming napalm strike on it? Please?

We’ll keep that one in mind.

Yet another Item!

Jessica over at Feministing, long an advocate of the hyper-populist “Can I Get An Amen Here” brand of feminism, which is nothing but a long procession of bitter hostile trial balloons sent up by feminist individuals for the endorsement of feminist groups along the lines of “I think this should be screeched at, can I get some help???”

Well. Jessica would like to let loose the dogs of “Can I Get An Amen Here?” feminism, upon some of those who practice it. Especially the ones who have been drinking before appearing on live and televised interviews.

For those of you who haven’t already been following it, here’s what went down.

Moe and Tracie appeared on Lizz’s show drunk. Very drunk, it seems. You can watch the whole video here, and the more controversial clips here and here. I was pretty much appalled by the whole interview. But it was the commentary about rape, abortion and birth control that have garnered the most criticism…The gist of it is Moe and Tracie said some extremely offensive and uninformed things – especially about rape – that they’re now being taken to task for. (They were later said to be jokes, but no one in the audience laughed.)
:
Here’s the short version for those who don’t feel like reading this monster of a post: 1) Whether or not you say you represent feminism, when you write about the subject to a ridiculously large audience, openly identify as a feminist, and make appearances to talk about feminism – you are taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed. 2) It’s awesome to use irony and humor as a tool – but if you’re not using it in a way that hurts women, is it really worth it?

This ties in, because I think Counselor Troi’s concerns about the floating plastic are an apt metaphor for the feminist movement. In the same way you can’t viably entertain any sort of plan that involves sticking a sort of giant pool-cleaner tool into the Pacific Ocean and bundle up all those tiny bits of plastic, you can’t nail down what the feminist movement is all about either. You find a feminist who gets caught unabashedly, unapologetically and unashamedly hating men…you raise the concerns this gives you about the feminist movement to another feminist…and you get back this doe-eyed innocent look, Oh no, I’m not all about that, I just want equal pay for equal worth!

And it is this kind of nail-jello-to-tree-ism that has given the feminist movement enormous benefit throughout the decades. They have been able to advocate the most hardcore, borderline-insane nonsense — like, for example, we need to believe Anita Hill over Clarence Thomas because “women don’t lie about this stuff” (That’s one of the worst examples, but there are others). Patently absurd positions like that one, are owned when it is convenient, and then jettisoned when convenient. The feminist movement ends up being a rather hodge-podge, disjointed, undefined pastiche of floating debris, just like the Great Plastic Soup out in the ocean. It can’t be criticized because it can’t be defined.

And now poor young Jessica has realized it is this lack of a endo- or exo-skeleton that has landed the feminist movement in trouble, so she seeks to lay down some rules about “taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed.” Sorry, sweetie. You’re trying to close the barn door long after the horse has left. Feminism, in 2008, is about intellectual lawlessness. It is about extending the indestructible umbrella of political cover of “Equal Pay For Equal Worth” over the rigid, hardcore extremist types who don’t deserve such cover…the “All Men Are Potential Rapists” brand of feminists. They are, by design, all part of the Great Plastic Amoeba of feminism that has no shape, has no structure, has no rules, and therefore cannot be faulted. What dear Jessica is trying to do, is roughly akin to making a pet out of the world’s largest jellyfish, and trying to saddle it up.

Another Bear on a Pipeline So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.

1. Scoop up the Great Plastic Soup for those bits, as best you’re able;
2. Make a giant plastic bulls-eye out of it;
3. Take it to the Arctic where all the ice is supposed to be melting down;
4. Put our drunk feminists on the bulls-eye along with the environmentalists who won’t let us build any power plants or drill for oil;
5. Add to those, all the reality show contestants who “aren’t here to make friends”;
6. Like Gerard said. Napalm the sucker. That takes care of the plastic, the drunk feminists, the enviro-Nazis, and the vapid silly contestants.
7. And the ice.
8. Jessica will be much less stressed-out, too.
9. Plus, the contestants won’t make any friends, which they didn’t want to do anyway.
10. Check back in a year, I’ll betcha there’s plenty of ice, and plenty of polar bears to go with.
11. I got a feeling our population of brain-dead cliche-spouting reality show contestants will also have replenished (although I’m not sure about that).
12. And jobs galore. Especially if we make an annual habit out of it.

I just love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Posted in Abortion, Everyday Dimwits, Flogs, ManBearPig, Oil & Gas, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Sacrifice!

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Carl at Simply Left Behind (which is a lefty blog) is opining on what’s wrong with us nowadays and sounding…very conservative…

You get hit by a car. You sue the other driver. He hires a lawyer and sues you back to try to prove that, indeed, it was your fault for stepping in front of his car.
:
You see a woman in an emergency room collapse. She lays there for 24 hours and dies. No one does a thing. Why? Because someone else should have handled it.

You walk down a street and a piece of newspaper blows across and wraps around your ankle. You stand next to a garbage can, yet rather than reach down, pluck the paper and toss it in the bin, you shake your foot and off it flies to litter again. Serial litter, I like to call this.

We fight a war in a far-off land, and the only sacrifice we’re asked to make is to load up on debt and shop some more. Arguably, given what has happened, this might turn into the ultimate sacrifice for many of us, but that’s a different story.

And I would add to that, the story of Sergio Casian Aguiar curb-stomping his own son to death for a full seven minutes. While bystanders watched.

A spectacle that shocked and horrified conservatives, while liberals made excuses:

“I would not condemn these people,” said John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has studied how bystanders react in emergency situations. “Ordinary people aren’t going to tackle a psychotic.

“What we have here,” Darley said, “is a group of family and friends who are not pre-organized to deal with this stuff. They don’t know who should do what. … If you had five volunteer firefighters pull up, you would expect them to have planned responses and a division of labor. But that’s not what we had here.”

Carl’s cognitive dissonance on the virtue of sacrifice is a source of endless fascination to me, in part because he represents so many millions besides himself. And while parts of his thesis make sense, together as a whole it is a baffling tangled mess of contradictions.

When the newspaper attaches itself to your ankle you’re supposed to bend down, pick it up, and throw it away!

Okay, with Saddam Hussein that is exactly what we did. Carl doesn’t like that…

But it makes sense! Because there was no sacrifice!

Yeah, well, we sacrificed plenty. That’s the point of all these war protests…supposedly we’re drafting our innocent doe-eyed children, boxing ’em up, hauling ’em to Iraq where they get blown up by the thousands. And that’s wrong! But that’s a sacrifice if ever there was one. So…your point?

It’s only the sacrifice of a few! It doesn’t affect everyone, so it doesn’t count!

We-ell, as I pointed out in my comment, in a lot of other areas a financial sacrifice is supposed to count, and supposedly, the Iraq war is responsible for crude oil that costs $149 a barrel. When we pull in to a gas station and have to part with $50 to fill a twelve-gallon tank, that seems to me to be a sacrifice, especially when by Tuesday of next week we’ll have to do it again.

Unless financial sacrifices don’t count, in which case Carl just nullified every speech made by every tax-and-spend liberal who ever wanted to “roll back the Bush tax cuts” for the virtue of sacrifice.

I think liberals like Carl are confused on the concept of sacrifice. There are two definitions to it: There is the outcome-based sacrifice, in which the “sacrifice” itself is just a negligible and unpleasant side effect in the process of upholding what truly matters. The narrower definition, in which the pain is the point, is what John Galt was talking about in that monstrously long speech of his:

Sacrifice is the surrender of value — of a higher value to a lower one, or of the good to the evil.

The code is impossible to practice because it would lead to death, and thus moral perfection is impossible to man.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice cannot provide man with an interest in being good.

Since man is in fact an indivisible unity of matter and consciousness, the sacrifice of “merely” material values necessarily means the sacrifice of spiritual ones.

The self is the mind, and the most selfish act is the exercise of one’s independent judgment. In attacking selfishness, the Doctrine of Sacrifice seeks to make you surrender your mind.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice commands that you act for the good of others but provides no standard of the good. And it requires only that you intend to benefit others, not that you succeed.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice makes you the servant and others your masters –and adds insult to injury by saying you should find happiness through sacrifice.

Somewhere in there Galt made a mention of the mother who went without eating so that her infant could eat; that would not be a sacrifice, according to Galt who was using the pain-based definition of “sacrifice.” That mother would be upholding an ideal important to her system of values, simply paying a price necessary to acquire it. Sacrifice, Galt said, would have been giving up her child for the sake of something not important to her. (Update: It actually had to do with sacrificing the child for a nice hat. See below. My memory managed to “sacrifice” the finer details to retain the overall picture; cut me some slack, it’s a freakin’ thirty-five thousand word speech.) That is what is meant by surrender “of a higher value to a lower one.” It entails a net loss, because the pain is the point of the exercise.

My thinking is, the people who agree with Carl, also agree with John Galt. Sacrifice is not about principles. Sacrifice is identifying what is important to you, and then getting rid of it.

Our liberals do not feel the conflict of this dissonance when they talk about raising taxes on rich people. Money is supposed to be important to rich people, right? And so we force them to get rid of it through higher taxes. When we talk about meeting the objectives, we already begin the process of losing the interest of our liberals; their eyes glaze over, and they yearn to spend their precious moments on a rerun of The Daily Show or watching another one of Keith Olbermann’s recycled rants. But we complete that process of alienating them when we talk about meeting the objectives through private charities.

This is because in the more specific, liberal-and-Galt definition of “sacrifice,” private charities don’t meet the criteria. They are voluntary. The donors are exchanging an inferior value, which is the cash that is donated, for a greater one which is the beneficial effect of the charity. They choose this. In so doing, they are upholding their own systems of belief and therefore are not “sacrificing.”

I suspect that is the real reason why so many of our liberals can hold their protests about the latest handy round body-count in our “illegal and unjust war,” on the one hand — and on the other, decry the lack of “sacrifice” that has been made in the war. Real people like you and me who have red blood in our veins and are from Planet Earth, look at that and say “how can you protest both?” The answer to that is easy.

Liberals are like the girlfriend who is unhappy with her engagement ring if the prospective groom still has money left after he bought it — the size of the ring isn’t the point, how good it looks isn’t the point, how much did it cost isn’t really the point; the point is, did it cost enough that it hurt him.

This is why their ideas are unfit for implementation in the real world. Out here, if you have a job to do, and you get it done but it didn’t cause you pain, that’s a success. If it was such a painful experience that it injured you, it’s still a failure if you didn’t meet the stated objectives. Reality says it’s all about getting the job done, not what you give up to do it. Our liberals don’t agree. They think, if you’re suitably diminished that you can’t do anything else, and your intentions were noble, then that’s all that matters. Whether the job got done, is just a side bunny-trail to them.

This is provable. Saddam Hussein is that newspaper flying about the ankles if ever there was one. One President kicked him aside to be blown further down the sidewalk, and another President picked him up and stuck him in the trash bin. Our liberals are furious at the President who chucked him in the trash bin. They won’t say why.

Update: John Galt’s comments on sacrifice, whittled down to the bare bone, heavily edited from the state in which they exist starting on p. 940:

The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.

‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
:
If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself – that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
:
A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted…
:
If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty.
:
Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice – no values, no standards, no judgment – those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.

The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral – a morality that declares its won bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment. [emphasis mine]

Now, I have not heard a single lefty-leaning Bush-bashing blue-blooder — not once! — seek to assert that the war in Iraq, oh dear if only it entailed “sacrifice” from us all the way that noble effort by FDR that was World War II demanded rationing of rubber, steel, wood, et al…why, then the War On Terror would be an equally heroic deed and then they’d be able to get behind it. I have not heard ’em say that one single time.

But I’ve heard ’em, many-a-time, throw out some platitudes designed to bully the casual thinker into believing that’s where they were coming from. That glittery, glistening heroic sheen of “sacrifice,” yesiree! That’s what Bush’s unjust and immoral war is missing. We aren’t sacrificing enough!

But John Galt’s words put that into a whole different light, don’t they. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t. It is therefore morality for the immoral; it is a moral code for those who cannot appreciate having one.

Not that asphalt rationing would bring any of these nattering nabobs on board. It wouldn’t. If you parse Carl’s words very carefully, and listen to the other nattering nabobs very carefully, you’ll see they are promising no such thing. The universality of our sacrifices has nothing to do with it — the country is engaged in an intensive effort, there’s still a Republican in the White House, and that is all it takes to inspire their impassioned opposition to what we’re doing.

All the bitching about “sacrifice” is just a red herring — and that’s the best part about it.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Justification for Invasion, Mediocrity/Excellence Confusion, My Blogger Friends, The Split, Vision for Victory | 3 Comments »

Defending Feminism…Lamely

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Via Kate:

Unambiguously Ambidextrous raises some issues (Part 2) with the historical record of feminism, and what it has done. Which, of course, is the same as attacking it because feminism is sort of an “endangered species” in the world of the politically correct. What you might call a “sacred cow.”

The result of the rise of feminism in western civilization has been a double-edged sword, affording Canadians the luxuries of an increase in income and wealth, at the expense of outsourcing population growth and rapid demographic shifts from the mainly European settlement population. Added to this is the destruction of the nuclear family, high divorce rates, leading to psychological problems, increased crime, and higher rates of poverty. As the economy evolves to reflect the status quo of one man and one woman working all the time simultaneously, it becomes more and more difficult for Canadians to live in the traditional role where the woman stays at home and has children.

Canadian Cynic defends feminism. Kinda. Not really. Actually, Canadian Cynic attacks Unambiguously Ambidextrous with sarcasm, which is an effective technique of derogating something without putting forth an actual position of what it is you’re trying to say.

Feminism is the cause of everything bad that has ever happened since men made the monumental mistake of giving women the vote.

And when I say something like this:

My article was written in good faith in an attempt not to gain recognition, but to engage in a dialogue about feminism.

I actually mean that I’m right, you’re wrong and things would be so much more civil if you just admitted it and then shut up.

Broadsides attacks the entire topic. Actually, she Godwins it, saying that anybody who attacks feminism is a Nazi. I think. Actually, Broadsides is using sarcasm too, so it’s difficult to impossible (by design) to try to figure out what it is she’s trying to say.

Which is maybe a good move. The one time Broadsides veers her broad side away from sarcasm, is the one time she makes the least sense:

Never mind that, for many women, the nuclear family where the wife/mother stayed at home was a psychological, if not physical, prison which led to, among other things, depression and prescription drug abuse.

Uh…so staying home and taking care of your kids is a sure path to prescription drug abuse?

+++blink+++

Wow. So many problems with that, I don’t know where to begin. Why bother.

But I’m more than fascinated to learn of this debating technique used by Broadsides. If you want to attack someone’s lifestyle, all you have to do is come up with some stories about someone tripping out on prescription drugs…or just one. Ah screw it, just make it up if you have to.

Come to think on it, I think Broadsides herself is living in a “psychological, if not physical, prison.” Let’s watch her closely.

Posted in Flogs | 1 Comment »

She Doesn’t Like Rush Limbaugh

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Language Advisory Amazingly, you have to wait a MINUTE AND A HALF before this “feminist” unloads on Rush Limbaugh with any specifics. Up until then, the main point of her video is that Limbaugh — and by extension, anybody else who says “irresponsible” things — needs to check with her first before being allowed to communicate with any significant numbers of people.

What’s irresponsible? Whatever she doesn’t like. As I said…you have to wait a minute and a half before she goes into detail. The detail in question…that bit about feminism being started so ugly women could get dates. (“Access to the mainstream of society,” Undeniable Truth of Life #24.)

Wow, how ineffective. If Rush was wrong, you could simply debate the point and squish him like a bug. This feminist chose not to do that…opting, instead, to argue as persuasively as she could that Rush must not be allowed to say what he says, or that others must not be allowed to listen to him. So there must be something to it.

That’s the problem with basing your WHOLE argument around “I don’t like this, can I get an amen here?” — opining away, then moving on to the next issue, lather, rinse, repeat. It atrophies aggressive thinking, and in some measure it validates the opposition. But that’s just stating the obvious. I feel a little silly even having to jot it down. But tragically, “feminist” is coming to be a word that describes people who somehow can’t catch on to this. Especially in colleges, which is where young people are supposed to go to learn how to noodle this stuff out.

Just saw a nice fireworks display, for a great price. Free. So I’m feelin’ all big & into free speech. Let’s take a minute or two to study someone who wants to take it away. They’re definitely out there.

P.S.: What’s up with the snotty overlay messages? This clip was linked directly from Feministing, and apparently someone there didn’t realize there are all these subtitles that don’t seem to have been inserted by anyone terribly sympathetic with the feminist’s message. Oh well, that’s their problem not mine.

Posted in Flogs | 2 Comments »

So Let’s Talk About What’s Good

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Via Obi’s Sister…

What’s right about the US of A. You get to both read and write.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Retired Marine Shoots Crooks

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Yay, retired marine.

Two armed men barged into a Subway Sandwich shop shortly after 11 p.m., demanding money from the employee, behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell – the lone customer, age 71, into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.

Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.

Lovell, 71. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit. Retired US Marine.

But the grandmother of the hoodlum who survived the (hoodlum-initiated) incident, has a beef with the way the media has been portraying this. I dunno what she’s talking about; as far as I know, the most prominent example of how “the media” has portrayed the (hoodlum-initiated) incident is the one I read over here.

I found it to be friendly to the pro-hoodlum side of things, that is, the pro-chaos anti-respect-for-property side, to the point of self-parody. It’s the one that put Grandma’s favorite sound bite right in the freakin’ headline.

Family Of Subway Robbery Suspect Says Customer Shouldn’t Have Pulled Trigger

The family of one of the men who was shot by a retired United States Marine while they attempted to rob a Subway sandwich shop said the customer shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

According to Plantation police, two armed men barged into the Subway at 1949 Pine Island Road shortly after 11 p.m. Wednesday, demanding money from the employee behind the counter. When they tried to force John Lovell into the bathroom, he pulled out a gun and shot both men, police said.

Donicio Arrindell, 22, was shot in the head and later died at the hospital. Fredrick Gadson, 21, was shot in the chest and ran from the Subway, but police found him in hiding in some bushes on the property of a nearby BankAtlantic.

Lovell, 71, was the lone customer at the time. Police said he had a concealed weapons permit.

Gadson’s grandparents told Local 10 on Thursday that Lovell was wrong for pulling the trigger.

“He should not have taken the law in his hands,” said Rosa Jones, Gadson’s grandmother.

Her husband, Ivory Jones, also condemned the media for its portrayal of Lovell’s actions.

“I don’t condone what they did, (but) I definitely don’t condone the news people making him out to seem like they’re making a hero out of this man because he shot somebody down,” he said.

Ah yes — as Maxwell Smart would say, THE OL’ “He Shouldn’ta Done It BUT” ploy…oldest one in the book.

He shouldn’ta shot your grandson because the way things are, your poor grandson never knows when he’s going to get shot next? I got a great suggestion. Don’t rob stores.

As Blogger Cap’n opines further…

As stated in the SCOTUS decision – a gun levels the playing field – a victim has a chance against their aggressors. Where else does a 71 year old have a chance against two gun wielding 20 year old? How much imagination does it take to imagine reversing this narrative – an employee and 71 year old customer are found dead in a Subway bathroom? Not much, right?

And how about the criminal being the “victim” here? That sickens me. John Lovell isn’t a vigilante. He defended his life. Now he’s alive. Simple.

And yes, I have rewritten this story, because the first time I read it – it was very anti John Lovell. The fact John is alive was on the bottom of the story, and the Grandma statement was on the masthead of the story. Totally bogus.

Well done, Cap’n. And this is a “Why We Have Blogs” moment if ever there was one.

I do not trust these “shouldn’ta” people. What’s she talking about — and to be more precise about it, why isn’t she getting asked? Is she saying there are two different levels of “shouldn’ta” here, with her grandson violating the lesser one and Mr. Lovell transgressing against the greater one?

If that is the case — add looming injustice to the list of reasons why you shouldn’t rob stores.

If that is not what she is trying to say — what’s the freakin’ problem? Her grandson did something wrong, and found out why you shouldn’t do that.

Either way, in my book she’s been exposed as a proponent of lawlessness. But I know how these things work. She’d deny this in nothing flat and the whole exchange would turn into a “nailing jello to a tree” exercise, as her intended meaning is buried behind thick veils of deceit and obfuscation. I know this because she’s not alone. There are millions of people just like her; they want what they want when they want it, hell with everybody else, and they act like anyone who stands up to them has the same problems they do.

If she’s raising any other grandchildren, I hope they’re taken away. In a sane world, she’d be under investigation for encouraging exactly the anarchy and lawlessness I know she is. One powder-puff press conference and she gets to put John Lovell on the defensive, for doing what he had to do to stay alive. And she takes the opportunity to do it. Good Lord, what a nasty, vile woman.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Gun Control, Phony Crime Solutions | 1 Comment »

Imagine This…

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Thomas Jefferson once said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” On this Fourth, I’m thinking about something a little bit different. Suppose somewhere there is a nation in which each citizen has the precious and inalienable right to be smart, but is wholly deprived of the right to be stupid.

Where I’m going with this, is that I strongly suspect such a nation is something that never was and never will be. For a number of reasons. Starting with, someone would have to sit in judgment of what’s smart and what’s dumb. The truth of the matter is, “smart” people haven’t done a great deal for us because what’s usually thought of as something smart, is thought of that way because it’s orthodox. It’s same-ol’ same-ol’. The car you drive, the light bulb you turn on, the cell phone into which you do your chattering, they were all invented by someone whom someone else thought was doing something abysmally stupid.

And then we have those things that really are stupid, like the mutterings of Matthew Rothschild and Chris Satullo, along with the usual gang of nitwits…M. Moore, K. Olbermann, N. Chomsky…along with the ones who just tone down the anti-USA rhetoric a little bit, because after all they’re competing for a position in which they would run it. Clinton, Kerry, Obama, Dean.

What I think is really great about this country, is that these chuckleheads are running around, advertising by their blatherings what is wonderful about it without even knowing they’re doing it.

Abu Ghraib, you say? Abu Ghraib was a bunch of rotten stuff done to rotten people by ignorant stupid Americans…who were then caught by other Americans, and tried by other Americans and sentenced by other Americans while yet other Americans observed the whole process and reported to the whole world what was going on. Moral of Abu Ghraib: Americans do stupid things just like people all the world over. And then Americans tattle on other Americans. We are not perfect, nor have we ever claimed to be. But where we can be transparent and still defend ourselves, we make ourselves visible to general audiences. Our government is split — the executive, the legislative, the judicial, none of the three beholden to any of the others.

We fall for a lot of bullshit, like that the planet is in danger and if we all just unplug our waffle irons when they’re not in use, maybe we can save it. That’s the price of free speech.

Like I said, if you want to recognize the right people have to come up with smart things, you have to recognize the companion right people to fall for stupid nonsense.

We have a lot of weapons, but it isn’t the stockpile of weapons that makes us great. It is the difference between what we have, and what we use.

When we were attacked, we flew over Afghanistan, the country from which the attack came, and out of the bellies of our airplanes dropped — food and money.

Our worst critics prefer to stay.

Our poor people are fat.

Happy Independence Day.

Update: I see Gerard is also pointing to the “worst critics prefer to stay” slogan that is mutually enjoyed by us both, along with others.

Happy Fourth! Speaking of Gerard, he’s taking apart another America-hating halfwit and his performance in this regard exceeds all expectations, even if you’re accustomed to his wonderful work. He’s pretending it’s some kind of dreary chore but I’m not buying it for a second, as the old boy seems to be enjoying himself immensely…

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter — in the commenter’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad — a mindset in which “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange, almost masochistic, pleasure.

Faced with such a deeply-rooted but deeply wrong mindset, we find ourselves eavesdropping on Macbeth as he discusses his wife’s madness with a doctor:

Macbeth
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

That is a random sample, not creme de la creme. It’s all that good. Head on over.

Also, Locomotive Breath has graciously pointed to our home page as a place you should go if it’s taking awhile for the sun to set and you’re sittin’ there in your lawn chair all bored, wireless laptop in one hand, sparklers in the other, beer in the other. He also has others. I stole his pinup because he probably stole it from somewhere else (most likely here), and there’s many others along with lots of good stuff. So hit both places if you have the time.

Posted in My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

Now THAT is Scary

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

In fact, I don’t think you’ve seen anything as scary as this in quite some time. (H/T to Rick, who linked it differently.)

Kind of makes you look at the When I Start Running This Place page in a whole new light, huh?

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Glad I Learned About This, My Blogger Friends | 1 Comment »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XVIII

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Two great-lookin’ babes with wonderful minds. Should I mention them both in the same post? They’re not exactly of the same mind, and there’s a chance someone will get offended, I suppose…but it’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission.

Becky, the Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, registered and entered a few words after I picked on her rather mercilessly. Her anti-war passions are misguided, but she has a lot of synapses firing per millisecond upstairs and we’re plum pleased to see her stopping by. Legs ‘n all. And we still think she’s right a lot more often than she’s wrong — just puts a lot more thought into how to win, than what’s going to happen after she does so win. Oh well. She’ll come around someday.

Becky is pro-gun? I know she will, because she’s not one of these pure-bred small-l libertarians who obsess over legalizing pot and heroin and crystal meth — and beyond that, their concerns over individual rights come to a screeching halt. You know the type. Becky isn’t like that at all. She thinks for herself; I mean, she really does. She’s a feminist, Catholic, gay, conservative in her own way…I think pro-gun…the girl just isn’t that anxious to fit into any kind of cookie-cutter.

She’s not that eager to play on a level field, either. If I wrote up some stuff that as hurriedly presumed nasty things about gay people, as some of the stuff she’s written about straight white guys…whew. But oh well. When she applies her mental horsepower, it’s considerable and she makes a lot of good points about things you don’t see made anywhere else. Well worth reading.

Speaking of which. Hawkins put out his list of favorite blogs for the quarter and no, we didn’t make the cut. Hey, remember this is The Blog That Nobody Reads.

However, #10 was blogger pal and uber-cutie Cassy Fiano…whose bikini pics make us feel all dirty inside because of the yawning gap of an age difference. And she was kind enough to put in a good word for us. A very, very good word.

My Favorite Blogs
:
House of Eratosthenes: Smart commentary with interesting stories you can’t find anywhere else.

Holy guacamole…

While we’re wiping that lipstick off our face, you know you can take a couple of eggs and fry ’em up on those big red ears of ours. This one made our day.

Thanks Cas!

For the first two years after we registered with Sitemeter, a “good” day for this blog would have been anything north of a hundred hits — which is pathetically low. For the last three months or so we’re averaging well above double that, and the pattern is not at all consistent with “flash in the pan” stuff. These seem to be brand new nobodies not coming by to not read the Blog That Nobody Reads — and they’re not coming by each and every single day. Actually, the last time we fell short of our old hundred-hit target was over a month ago, for one day, when Sitemeter had an outage and all the hits that would’ve been logged instead went in the phantom zone.

In short — the evidence seems to indicate we’ve made a lot of new friends. We’re happy you’re here. Look around, kick off the shoes, have a cold one, drop a note.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, My Blogger Friends, Women in Skimpy Clothes | 1 Comment »

It’s Not Always About Me

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

The Blog That Nobody Reads has been tagged by blogger friend Judy Ann.

The rules:
1. Post the rules at the beginning.
2. Answer the questions only about yourself.
3. At the end of the post, tag five people and post their names, then go to their blogs and leave them a comment so they know they’ve been tagged. Ask them to read the sender’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?
June 2003 — Lots and lots of traveling.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?
1. Wash the car.
2. Go to the bank to cash a check.
3. Make some important phone calls.
4. Put away some laundry.
5. Make love, and yes I have someone picked out.

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. Pineapple
2. Jamba Juice
3. A plain bowl of cold cereal
4. Ice cream drumstick
5. Nuts ‘n bolts with Chex cereal and creamy peanut butter

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?
1. Build my dream house, and it would put Frank Lloyd Wright to shame
2. Make a big donation to Wounded Warriors
3. Buy a Harley-Davidson with all the accessories and get out of the house for a whole month
4. Check out Westminster Abbey
5. Get a Steyr-Mannlicher HS .50, go to Montana, and start splitting boulders in half from two miles away.

What are five of your bad habits?
1. Blogging, what I’m doing right this very second.
2. Complicating things that perhaps do not need to be.
3. Filing taxes late.
4. Believing people. I have a tendency to forget that just because intent-to-deceive is absent, doesn’t necessarily mean what’s being said is a hundred percent true.
5. Going too long without checking up on things outside of my comfort-circle. But then I guess we all do that to some extent, don’t we?

What are five places where you have lived?
1. Sacramento, California
2. Detroit, Michigan
3. Everett, Washington
4. Bellingham, Washington
5. Tempe, Arizona

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. Project Manager
2. Senior Network Engineer
3. Consultant
4. Application Development Engineer
5. LAN Administrator

Five people I tag:
1. Misha
2. Rick
3. Gerard, who’s supposed to be sleeping right now, so I’ll make it optional for him and up it to six
4. Duffy
5. Cas
6. Karol

Posted in About Me and My Blog, My Blogger Friends | 6 Comments »

Helping to Highlight JohnJ’s Point

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

…JohnJ being one of my blogger friends trying to persuade me to go toward the light, Carol Anne, and support McCain this fall.

It’s a good thing I never said this point was entirely lacking in merit, for it certainly is not so lacking. Searching around for an editorial I saw last week in Sacramento Bee, I found it under Paul Greenberg’s name and Mr. Greenberg states a powerful case.

Nothing so well illustrates the essential asymmetry of this country’s worldwide struggle against terrorism than last week’s 5-to-4 opinion out of the U.S. Supreme Court. The enemy is fighting a war; we are litigating a plea.

Throughout the sleepy Nineties, we dealt with two – two! – earlier and incomplete attacks on the World Trade Center not as the barbaric acts of war they were, but as isolated matters for the criminal justice system to deal with when and if it could. While we slept, the enemy plotted. We paid the bloody price for our obtuseness – in thousands of innocent lives – on September 11, 2001.

Now we’re proceeding with great deliberation down the same blind alley.

How to describe this latest opinion from the high court? It’s not easy to get a handle on this decision for, against or maybe just vaguely about the exercise (or paralysis) of the president’s wartime powers. Here is how His Honor Anthony M. Kennedy – heir to the equally vacuous Sandra Day O’Connor’s swing vote on the high court – “explained” what his majority opinion means, or rather doesn’t mean: “Our opinion does not undermine the executive’s powers as commander in chief. On the contrary, the exercise of those powers is vindicated, not eroded, when confirmed by the judicial branch.”

This whole issue shouldn’t be an issue, of course. Supreme Court Justices are sworn in with an oath to defend the Constitution. Not to twist it around to make people happy, who in turn don’t even live in this country. They’re supposed to read the Constitution, look at some lesser law, and say “I don’t see any conflict here” or “yeah, that’s messed up, you’re not supposed to do that and it says so right here.”

What Kennedy is doing is ratcheting up the standard of constitutionality in such a way that it has little to nothing to do with the actual Constitution. He’s an authority doing exactly what authorities aren’t supposed to do when they wield authority: Try to use it to make himself popular.

…this is the third time in four years that the high court has left the question of how or if to try enemy combatants up in the cloudy air. What are the other branches of government, or even the lower courts, let alone our troops in the field, now to do with these detainees and future ones? The weightless burden of the court’s confused and confusing guidance on this subject might be summed up as: To be determined.

Each time the Supreme Court has ruled against this system of trying enemy combatants, lawful or unlawful, Congress and the executive – at the court’s explicit behest – have moved to meet its objections, only to be told once again that the tribunals still don’t pass constitutional muster.

In matters of civil and criminal law, you don’t want anything to happen unless all the tumblers are lined up. Outside of the military, government has a way of doing things like that naturally: Everyone has to agree something’s a go, but the lowliest mail clerk has the authority to stop it. Great way to prosecute a case. Lousy way to fight a war.

Greenberg closes by echoing John’s point, almost word-for-word:

The one thing that this latest example of law at its least vigilant does make clear is the importance of this year’s presidential election. Sen. John McCain, who knows something about war and being a prisoner thereof, says he would appoint judges who are committed to judicial restraint; he’s criticized this decision. Sen. Barack Obama has praised it. However confused and confusing this latest decision, it does clarify the decision facing the American voter this November.

It certainly does. What it actually means, I’ll leave to each reader to decide for him- or herself.

I know McCain isn’t speaking from the heart, though; I know this beyond the shadow of any doubt. His schtick is that he understands Guantanamo has to be closed down, that we need to recapture some of our global popularity by gelding ourselves in our treatment of these terrorists. He also clings to the tired old song that if we continue with our harsh interrogation techniques, it just puts the men and women serving on our behalf in danger, in case they are captured by the enemy.

The facts don’t square with this sales pitch. When John McCain was captured by the North ~~Koreans~~ Vietnamese, the United States was a signing party to the Geneva Conventions. That’s just a fact. The VC brutalized him at the Hanoi Hilton, and that, too, is an inconvenient fact. No getting around it.

So if anything, McCain is in a great position to know — beyond any doubt whatsoever — that a nation’s determination to behave in a “civilized” manner either by treaty or by deed, does nothing, zilch, zip, zero, nada, bubkes, as far as ensuring that nation’s troops will be subjected to kinder treatment by an enemy once they are captured.

He knows this. He knows it personally. And he’s playing up propaganda that is meaningful only to those who are too ignorant of the facts to understand what’s really going on here.

So do I think McCain’s rhetoric is right on the money about these nominees to the Supreme Court? Yeah, pretty much. Do I think a President McCain is likely to nominate better judges to the Supreme Court than a President Obama? Mmmm…maybe. There’s the slimmest of chances. Would I put a lot of money on it? No. I’d put very, very little. McCain is the very picture of a Republican nominee for President who’ll screw the conservatives over that way once he gets in.

Do I admire him for his service? Hell yes. Do I admire him for his character? Not one bit. I think he has serious issues in that department. Do I think he’s better than a democrat? Uh…maybe I would, if it weren’t for the history of Bush Pere. Or Nixon. I have my reasons to be jaded.

Am I optimistic about how things are going to turn out this year, if only the Republicans unite on this candidate, and thus reassure the candidate that we’re all with him, and consider the job of team-building to be behind him?

Hell no.

He’s the presumptive nominee. He doesn’t have the track record of sticking with principled positions on things…which means both sides will get a benefit out of him if they lean on him.

And those “moderates” are going to lean on him 24×7 all the way to election day.

Those who understand the wisdom of what Greenberg has had to say, should lean on him too. Which means, necessarily, that he can’t count on us. Not until he’s made some commitments that he hasn’t even bothered to make just yet.

Update: As Buck points out, I got my countries mixed up. It’s tough to keep straight in one’s mind all those wars the democrats started.

Posted in Elections, My Blogger Friends, Poisoning Justice, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not, Vision for Victory | 5 Comments »

A Blue State Columnist Comments on Our Gun Culture

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

My goodness, that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, is getting a good workout. Let’s start with the headline of the column:

Walsh: Time to grow up and put your guns away

Christ on a cracker, are we in a competition for the “snooty condescending prick” award here?

I understand the thrill of firing a Glock (I’ve done it), the euphoria of hitting the center of a target (and that, too), generations of family deer-hunting weekends and the legitimate self-preservation instincts of Utah’s elected concealed weapon carriers.

But the OpenCarry movement is a mystery to me. What kind of psychology – overcompensation, paranoia, antisocial personality – is behind that thinking?

Uh…how about taking real responsibility for something, as in, “I’ll pack the equipment to do it myself if everything else fails”? And since that is a far bigger issue than just the conceal-carry situation, you, Ms. Walsh, have just revealed yourself to be a stranger to that line of thinking. Good. Now I know you’re one of those “I done my bit and if it goes to crap it’s not my fault” people.

Hope nobody’s depending on you for protection.

“Second Amendment questions aside,” says [Anthropologist Charles] Springwood, a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, “the real debate seems to me a cultural and social one: Do we want a society in which it is an unconscious emblem of everyday life that folks move about with ‘portable killing machines’ strapped to their bodies?”

Well I dunno. I was born well after the days of the Old West, so I haven’t lived in “a society in which it was an unconscious emblem” blah blah blah. But I was born in the sixties. So I’ve lived in a society in which violent criminals got arrested for damaging property and hurting people, and released on technicalities, and then when men women and children were chopped down like cattle marching to slaughter the law rolled it’s eyes and sighed and said “ah, well.”

Ms. Walsh, I recommend you just think of it as the mark of a civilized society — people living here have the right to defend themselves. That means, if they anticipate something bad might happen to them they can prepare for it, and it’s not the business of you or the busybody lawyers and anthropologists in your rolodex to second-guess ’em about it. Nerdy little boys, getting beaten up by bullies on the playground, can hit back. All that good stuff.

Mark of a civilized society. As opposed to one that requires the people living within it to just sit around waiting to be victimized…which would be the mark of a primitive society.

Oh, and that thing I know about people that nobody told me when I was a child, that’s getting such a good workout lately? That would be #27:

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Nanny State Crap, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Poisoning Western Civilization | 1 Comment »

Happy Birthday American Digest

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Five Hot Pants One set of hot pants per year, for Gerard Van der Leun, our competition in collecting such photographic mementos, who is commemorating his fifth blogger-birthday today with the following observation:

5 years
3,806 Entries
15,148 Comments
4,664,000 Visits

Whew!

I’ll be republishing a few things underneath this that are not quite so topical over the next few days.

Then I’m going to take a nap here for about three months, unless something or someone very rude wakes me:

Happy to oblige, sleepyhead.

Do take the time to check out some of my personal favorites from that corner:

The Name in the Stone
The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land
Peggy Noonan: Prophet Ahead of…and Still Ahead of…Her Time
The Wind in the Heights
The Web Above Us

That leaves 3,801 others. Stop by, bookmark, look around, make a point to go back again.

Here’s to ya, Gerard. Looking forward to five more.

Posted in My Blogger Friends | No Comments »

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Archive for the ‘Innernets’ Category

Paleofeminism II

Best Sentence XXXIX

Feminist Definition

On Strong Female Characters

Watcher of Weasels

Pam in San Bernardino Has Never Seen High Noon

On Feminists, and NeW

Holtie’s House

Sister Toldjah

When Do We Start Battling Our Ugly Stereotypes, As Opposed to Substantiating Them?

Memo For File LXXII

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XIX

Explicit Threat of Rape

Umbrage

Newspapers Run Out of Anti-Bush Headlines

Question For Feminists

Privilege

Memo For File LXIX

Sacrifice!

Defending Feminism…Lamely

She Doesn’t Like Rush Limbaugh

So Let’s Talk About What’s Good

Retired Marine Shoots Crooks

Imagine This…

Now THAT is Scary

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XVIII

It’s Not Always About Me

Helping to Highlight JohnJ’s Point

A Blue State Columnist Comments on Our Gun Culture

Happy Birthday American Digest