With anticipation high and climbing with each image and trailer for the release of Tron Legacy (and it ranked first on our round-up of films to look forward to in the link below), the next best thing to do before the film is out was to have another look at the 1982 film, which was just as exciting on its release 28 years ago.
Since we had the Collector’s Edition on our shelves, we actually made two return trips to a film that pioneered filmmaking techniques because what the filmmakers wanted to accomplish had never been attempted before.
We were quite surprised to learn that most of the effects, which we’d ashamedly assumed were computer-generated accomplishments, were actually painstakingly hand-drawn animations, in a process that, even having heard how it was done, we still don’t quite understand!
What a great excuse to embed the legendary Tron Girl video.
1. Any participant in a cooperative or collaborative process who seeks to assume dictatorial control over that process, by means of faking a withdrawal from it, usually with an effort to maximize the theatrical effect of the withdrawal. Everyone left behind is supposed to feel shamed, and begin a process of introspection that will culminate in getting rid of something in their protocols that is offensive to the person who is supposed to not give a fig one way or the other anymore.
2. More specifically, any of those qualifying for definition 1 who, soon thereafter, re-enter the process they just exited; this is typically because they were left unsatisfied by the results of the theatrical exit. If they’re emotionally disturbed they may do this several times in rapid succession, which causes proxy embarrassment in those watching them. It builds and builds and builds until someone grows a pair and latches the revolving door shut, while they’re still outside.
3. The term could also be applied to those who were never really part of the process in the first place, so long as they falsely represent their membership in order to exert this dictatorial influence over those who are genuinely part of it.
4. Also, to violators of the “Ann Landers Wedding Invitation Rule.” Yes, you’ve heard of it already and you know what this means. “I’m not coming if so-and-so is coming” is to be met by — and no exceptions, no matter what — “That’s too bad, we’ll save you some cake.” Bottom-lining it all: Someone who places so much importance in their own moral code…or something that’s supposed to be a moral code…that they’re willing to sacrifice something that’s important to other people. But they have no respect for anybody else’s moral code. Just their own.
Related: Yes, in case there is any doubt among those who care, I do find Anne Rice to be an utterly contemptible person. Liberal douchebag, homely unappealing nutty goth chick, control freak and drama queen. She’s managed to hit all the low points.
Let’s just ignore the merits & demerits of this guy’s argument. His comment-posters are already handing him his own ass, and this is a road we’ve been down before many times.
One more phony-baloney Frum-like lamentation:
These days it’s getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.
These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They’re dumb and crazy.
:
Let’s tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement:
1. A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a — if not the — leading prospect for the GOP’s 2012 Presidential nomination.
2. Tom Tancredo calling President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today” and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies–however misguided–is an impeachable offense is just nuts.
3. Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, who IBD column was, as Doug Marconis observed, “a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama’s record in office.” Actually, it’s more foaming at the mouth.
:
They keep popping up, like zits. These David Weigel wanna-bes; it’s as if they want to be caught in the same scam. Donkeys wading into the elephant party, with their cheap paper-mache elephant masks strapped to their donkey heads, “Huh huh! I wish so many of ‘our people’ weren’t racists, huh huh!”
Who’s the left-wing counterpart? Where’s the recovering liberal suddenly realizing our modern leftists are whacked in the head? There were signs being waved around during “war protests” comparing Bush to Hitler…signs saying “we support the troops when they shoot their commanders,” and such. Smiles, smiles and more smiles at these “vigils” that were supposed to “mark” the thousandth, or two thousandth, or four thousandth troop death in Iraq.
And let’s not even start with the “Bush Knew” conspiracy theories. These “conservatives” are really embarrassed about other conservatives? Really?
Pardon me, but I’m concerned about whether my children & grandchildren will have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. I don’t think that’s nuts or racist. Anyway. I said let’s not explore merits & demerits, and here I am doing it.
His mask is slipping. Because, to me, if you’re in the six-in-ten who think the country is heading in the wrong direction, you don’t have to defend anything about your personality or psychological profile. This is the reaction a rational person has.
You know what’s scary about liberals nowadays? They know how they want to hate, so much better than they know who to hate. Hate, as in…anger that is not provoked by any specific act. Anger directed at people for what they are, rather than for what they do.
They know how they want to hate, well before they know what the target is. In November of 2008, it was anybody who voted for anybody besides Barack Obama, because these were people who tried to obstruct the Glorious Agenda. But it was a muted hate, because that was a minority and thus ineffectual.
Now it’s six in ten. And now it’s a hate that can melt steel. They’ve got all these well-rehearsed speeches defining what exactly the enemy is…but they don’t know who it is, and they don’t care.
These people are the reason we cannot discuss politics in the workplace. Their plans have been given a more than fair shot, the plans have failed, they’re feeling sensitive about it and they’re looking for an outlet for their rage. All ready to marginalize the other side as fringe, knowing full well they are far more deserving of this.
Do conservatives really have hate? I’m sure there is an individual here & there that is hateful…but for the movement overall, “anger” fits so much better. We’ve got our taxes being ratcheted up at the end of the year, as a panacea for an economic malaise that didn’t start until the democrats took over Congress back in ’07. Our President doesn’t know what He’s doing, and He was supposed to know everything. We were obliged to hand all the controls and power tools off to grown-up children, and we see the wreckage that results today.
Now we’re supposed to blame it all on the people who didn’t want to see it happen, and did all they could to prevent it.
A rational, reasonable person gets angry.
But anger is nothing like hate, especially liberal hate.
And a professor should know, this universe runs on facts that are indisputable…two and two are four…arctangent of 1 is 45 degrees…therefore, on principles. If you care about the principles you really don’t care who is representing them — ya phony.
To the best I can figure out, Neal Boortz’s words are accurate…and I have no time at the moment to massage them further, so I’ll just lift ’em.
In terms of honesty, that ancient question beckons: Do we rank used car salesmen beneath politicians, or the other way ’round? I believe the question has just been answered.
Apologies to used car salesmen.
Now you have to love this bit of nonsense. Once again we’re seeing how valuable our system of government education is to the Democrats. After all, you could never pull this off with an educated electorate.
You know, don’t you, that taxes are going up at the end of the year. At the beginning of the Bush presidency the Republicans simply didn’t have enough votes to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. The Democrats insisted on an expiration date of December 31st, 2010. Now … since those tax cuts will expire and taxes are going up .. The Democrats have decided it might be a good political ploy to start referring to this as a “Republican Tax Increase.
Nope … not kidding: House majority leader Steny Hoyer says that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a “Republican tax increase” for “working Americans” and the Democrats have “no intention” of allowing it to go into effect. Hoyer says, “We have no intention of allowing the Republican tax increase — that their policies would lead to — to go into effect for working Americans. Period …. We’re going to act and make sure that the Republican phase out and increase in taxes does not end as they provided for in the laws they passed.”
This is just amazing. Now we have a lot of economists telling the Democrats that if they don’t extend the Bush tax cuts our economic recovery will be damaged. Democrats don’t want to cut the taxes on the top producers. They know that their base constituency loves taxing the rich … but they also don’t want to be seen as increasing taxes during a recovery. After all … what if the experts are right? What if increasing taxes on the very people who we’re depending on for job growth stalls our recovery? Well, that’s easy! We’ll just call them “Republican tax increases” and let them take the heat!
Again .. not to belabor the point … but you can’t get away with this if the voters are truly educated and informed.
The ninety-third award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to commenter lowerleavell who is trying to talk some sense into progressive blog proprietor Ed Darrell. I can’t fault LL for this because I’ve been using up a few minutes here & there in the same futile endeavor.
From out of the stream of paragraphs and words, like Venus emerging from the ocean waves, steps this gem:
The auto industry is a great example of what happens when liberalism succeeds – it just gets bigger and bigger until everything falls apart.
S/he did say “a great example,” not “the best example.” It might be a fun mental exercise to come up with some other great examples. I live in California, so the first thing to put on the list is just a gimme for me. The Golden State, where everything’s getting bigger and bigger until it all falls apart.
And then there’s the health insurance industry. We need to add on to that “Whenever something goes wrong, all the politicians say the problem is not enough liberalism in the situation yet.” Which, come to think of it, applies to the auto industry, and California, just as well.
Teaches’ unions. Socialist countries. Just about any agency in the federal government…and the governments of most of the fifty states.
They’re all like cheap party balloons. Just get bigger and bigger, and you know sooner or later — probably sooner — there’s going to be a loud bang followed by sounds of despair from whoever owned the balloon, mixed in with some plaintive begging for another balloon.
Anne Rice, founder of the sparkly-vampire craze of the naughty-aughties, is no longer Christian.
The “Interview With The Vampire” author, who in recent years has spoken publicly about her faith and written a series of novels tracing the life of Jesus, wrote on her Facebook page Wednesday that she was finished with organized Christianity.
For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outside. My conscience will allow nothing else.
She followed that post a few minutes later with more details:
As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
As far as I’m concerned, she can believe what she likes. But there are two things about this that cheese me off…outside of the ugly, false slander against Christianity.
One, she’s a revolving-door-slammer. And I think you know perfectly well what I mean by that. “I’m out” means a cessation of interest, and I would expect so accomplished a writer to string together some words more in keeping with her true sentiment. She’s not out. She seeks to use shame to shape and mold something into her way of thinking.
Our world would be a much more tranquil place if everyone who applied the rhetorical flourish of the Grand Exit, could be somehow required to adhere to it. And stay out.
The other thing I don’t like is that it reminds me of Meghan McCain. Yes, I’m comparing a literary giant to a bubble head. Because it fits. Anne Rice is doing to Christianity precisely what McCain has been doing to the Republican party.
Just think this out: You have an institution. Someone like Anne Rice or Meghan McCain wants to join it…maybe they do and maybe they don’t…and a situation develops because you have already figured out your institution relies on A, and A cannot exist with B. Therefore, your continuing existence relies on an intolerance toward B.
Now, that is almost certainly a matter of opinion. And your tradition of excluding B might even be wrong, if your premise that A and B are mutually exclusive, happens to be incorrect.
But my point is, whether this interloper acts consciously as a destructive agent or not, they are still destructive. It is a destructive thing to say “I love this thing over here and want to be part of it…I think it’s just adorable…and so it disappoints me when it doesn’t tolerate everything like I think it should.” To require an object to tolerate everything, even things that are injurious to it, is destructive to that object. It really doesn’t matter if the destruction is intended or not. Everything cannot tolerate everything. That’s just the way the universe works.
I see my Rice/McCain analogy continues to work when one considers what exactly the point of contention is: Homosexuality. The author and the socialite pipsqueek, both desperately want to be part of something, but their consciences will not permit it because they want more tolerance shown to homosexuals.
Well in Anne Rice’s case, the logical error is the one committed by the blind men feeling up the elephant. She’s ticked at some guy named Bradlee Dean, and has decided his views are representative of all of Christianity.
So working from the same logic, I could say all homosexuals and their sympathizers want to arrest and imprison anyone who will not support their agenda, as they did with Dale McAlpine. That is not the case, of course. The world’s a big place. There are homosexuals, and homosexual-rights advocates, who aren’t going to support the hate speech laws; and even the ones who do, will typically acknowledge something is terribly wrong when you can be arrested for providing your opinion, or your interpretation of scripture, to someone who specifically asked. In short, my extrapolation would be bigoted. It would be ignorant. It would be precisely what Anne Rice did here.
To dictate to an institution what it should tolerate, and deny it the God-given right to figure out for itself what is & is not compatible with it, is to ultimately destroy it. I don’t think Rice’s intention is to destroy Christianity; not on purpose. But she does intend to re-shape it to her liking.
She doesn’t intend to leave it. That’s just a dramatic license, to give more punch to her message. If there was substance to it, she would have done it more quietly.
See what I mean? Even when she was flubbing her lines, there was something about her. I can’t think of the word for it and there’s no use flailing around for it, since I already have my own “Script Girl” who has loads of this whatever it is. But the new girl, up top, doesn’t have it.
She’s too generic. Like she was pulled out of a big warehouse full of pretty things, each one just as suitable for the task at hand as the next. Not much personality there.
Oh well. Keep watching the space. Maybe the old one will come back.
Man, this really isn’t good. Wonder Woman in long pants, Script Girl becomes a generic perky weather girl.
Something tells me this afternoon’s entertainment is going to involve fresh air, shooting something with a gun, and lunch at a Hooter’s restaurant.
Dennis Prager. This one has a couple of weeks of dust on it, just got it in the e-mails today.
If every school principal gave this speech at the beginning of the next school year, America would be a better place.
To the students and faculty of our high school:
I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people.
I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country.
First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships.
The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity — your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American. This is an American public school, and American public schools were created to make better Americans.
If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race- and non-American nationality-based celebrations. They undermine the motto of America, one of its three central values — e pluribus unum, “from many, one.” And this school will be guided by America’s values.
Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly took aim at “unmarried women” at a recent fundraiser and in an interview with TPM, saying that they overwhelmingly support President Obama and are all on welfare. Democrats aim to exploit the comments to pressure the more than 60 Republican candidates who have earned Schlafly’s endorsement.
“Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have big brother government to be your provider,” said Schlafly, president of Eagle Forum and infamous for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.
It is revealed in the audio, although not in TPM’s article, that Schlafly had a coherent point to make about this. Side note: Hey TPM, do you realize that under our new Shirley Sherrod standard, this means you can be sued?
Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Schlafly’s point is just one that intelligent and observant people have been noticing for a very long time now.
The democrat party has positioned itself as a savior for people who are in desperate situations. And so — as you might logically expect — their strategies have evolved into ways to make people more desperate…and to make more people that desperate.
Yes, Schlafly should apologize. She should say “I’m sorry I ‘singled out’ — no pun intended — the single moms. They are, as I noted at the time, most statistically significant to Obama’s victory, but the problem is so much bigger than them. Other people on welfare, for starters. The illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in the first place. All those people who would rather be gainfully employed who had their jobs taken away by Obama’s policies. Even the banks! The banks who now depend on government largess to keep from folding, the automakers, the car dealers. The dependency, the addiction to paternalistic government, it’s everywhere. Our country decided two years ago it wanted hope and change, and now we see what that is and there’s nothing hopeful about it.”
Something like that.
So let me get this straight democrats. You want to stigmatize and scandalize the Republicans for putting forward the appearance of making a plan to stop this? This is going to make all of America really angry with them, huh?
Mike Grimm, a G.O.P challenger for Mike McMahon’s Congressional seat, took in over $200,000 in his last filing.
But in an effort to show that Grimm lacks support among voters in the district, which covers Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, the McMahon campaign compiled a list of Jewish donors to Grimm and provided it to The Politicker.
The file, labeled “Grimm Jewish Money Q2,” for the second quarter fundraising period, shows a list of over 80 names, a half-dozen of which in fact do hail from Staten Island, and a handful of others that list Brooklyn as home.
“Where is Grimm’s money coming from,” said Jennifer Nelson, McMahon’s campaign spokeman. “There is a lot of Jewish money, a lot of money from people in Florida and Manhattan, retirees.”
As a point of comparison, the campaign also provided in-district and out-of-district fundraising totals from McMahon and Grimm’s G.O.P primary opponent, Michael Allegretti. However, they did not provide an out-of-district campaign filing from Grimm, but only a file of Jewish donors to him.
Nelson said that the list was compiled by the campaign’s finance director, Debra Solomon and that she did not know exactly how the finance team knew who was Jewish and who was not.
“She herself is Jewish so she knows a lot of people in that community,” Nelson said.
++ BLINK ++
Whoah.
Not to worry, Jennifer Nelson has been fired. I’m sure that’s Andrew Breitbart’s fault.
“These comments were entirely inappropriate and there is no place for this kind of behavior. I was outraged by these unfortunate remarks which were unauthorized and are in no way indicative of my beliefs or of my campaign,” said Congressman Michael E. McMahon. “I am proud to represent an incredibly diverse community and to enjoy an incredibly diverse base of support. Any comments that could serve to divide our community along religious or ethnic lines have no place in our community or my campaign. I sincerely apologize for her comments, and as she has since been terminated from our campaign, there will be no such incidents in the future.”
I’m still not sure which political party it is from which McMahon hails; I’ll try to find that out. Whichever one it is, I call upon them to work to purge the ugly anti-Semitic nastiness in their midst.
Greg Plum has gotten hold of a memo from the DCCC leadership that says no. No matter how bad our product is, there’s no revolution coming.
Republicans will need to win 39 seats to take back the House. Democrats will win at least four Republican seats (the best opportunities include: LA-02, HI-01, IL-10, DE-AL, FL-25). As a result, the real number of seats Republicans will have to pick up to win a majority is at least 43. To win 43 seats, the NRCC would need to put 70 to 80 seats in play. The NRCC have simply not put that many Republicans seats in play and do not have the resources or caliber of candidates to do so.
They still have a lot to worry about, IMO. Exhibit A: They’re worried! Now, why are they worried? Supposedly we had a revolution back in ’08, and put some wise, benevolent spiritual leaders in place who have been toppling the old ways and erecting a government that works for “everybody.” The Death Star is all exploded and there’s nothing left to do but dance with the Ewoks on the Endor forest moon.
How could we ever back away from that? Who’d want to? If the policies are the best ones that work “for everybody.”
Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem. The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects. Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion. The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion. The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.
Unemployment is 9.5 per cent and forecast to stay there for the time being. There are three million more jobless than when Mr Obama came to power, and unemployment among teenagers is around 25 per cent. The very constituencies to which he made his greatest appeal – the young and the disadvantaged – still suffer. This is despite the $787 billion stimulus programme last year, much of which was sucked into America’s corrupt and inefficient local government system, or did favours for congressmen and senators, or provided wonderful pay days for trade unionists, or in some cases all three at once. The President sought the stimulus on the grounds that it would stop unemployment rising above 8 per cent; so that has been an expensive failure. All Mr Obama appears to have done is wave the money goodbye. Last week, trying not to sound provoked, Mr Bernanke announced that there was “unusual uncertainty” about economic recovery. The dollar fell against sterling and even the euro.
Mr Bernanke wants a renewal of Bush-era tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 a year, which are due to expire on December 31. So do many Democrats, who fear that removing incentives and purchasing power from the better-off will harm recovery by reducing consumption and employment. These are arguments familiar from Britain, about the equally damaging and pointless 50 per cent rate. The response, by Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is familiar too – the “rich” must take their share of the burden. It is equally specious here; the political importance of bashing the (presumably Republican) wealthy plainly exceeds what is good for the US economy.
What we’re seeing is not so much a discredit to liberal politics, or Mr. Obama, or Keynesian economics — but rather to the idea that government needs to be in the equalization business. Remember the comments to Joe the Plumber? “I just think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”?
Government cannot do this because government doesn’t have an off switch. It inherently lacks the ability to say “Okay that’s it, you’re not a bad dude anymore because you’ve paid your fair share. You’re not rich anymore, you’re no longer evil, we’ve hired enough women that men no longer enjoy an opprobrious statistical advantage, we can stop subtracting test points from Asian students now.”
The task of equalizing something carries with it an implicit expectation of the ability to monitor; to measure. The story of “civilized” governments identifying specific demographics for a run of gettin’-even-with-em-ism, is much older than the American republic herself. This monitoring, spotting, declaring the equalization to be all fine & good mission-accomplished, is something that has never taken place. In short: All we’ve seen these governments do is identify good guys and bad guys. Assume a comfortable position and let the pummeling begin.
I remember from thirty-two years ago that this is how Carter lost his job. It wasn’t a fiery rage, and it isn’t that in the here & now, against Obama. At least, the feelings are not nearly as inflamed as they were four years ago against George Bush, on the other side.
Rather, there’s just a muted, but palpable, feeling of what can best be described as fatigue. The shopping spree is over. We can’t afford any more of it. And maybe the reason we can’t afford any more of it isn’t quite so much that it’s an overindulgence of a good thing…but that it was just a stupid idea from the very start. We’re waking up. Believing in ourselves. It’s always the first step to really solving a problem, you know.
And you can’t support Obama if you believe in yourself. He’s worked hard for a long time to make Himself the perfect walking incarnation of paternalistic government, the feeling of co-dependency that goes with it, helplessness, and truckloads and truckloads of guilt.
Blogger friend Phil relates a tale about the Thriller From Wasiller:
Had a conversation with a woman at work today. Apparently she forgot my answer the first time she asked several months ago, but she asked “why is there a picture of Sarah Palin on your wall?”
:
I’m a supporter, I told her. She couldn’t believe it…[She] says she’s not into politics at all and she never voted before she got married…but now she does…get this…to cancel her husband’s vote.
She said “I won’t send you my cartoon of her then. You wouldn’t appreciate it.” Then she described it to me. It said something about we didn’t go through X number of years of women’s suffrage to put Sarah Palin in the White House.
I said “I don’t get it, anyway. Is it because if she doesn’t agree with you then she’s not a real woman?” She looked puzzled for a second and replied “Let me think of another way to put it.” and fumbled around for a few seconds.
I said “You can’t, because that’s exactly what they meant.”
What it really, of course, boils down [to] is that [Palin] doesn’t believe in abortion as birth control, she doesn’t sound like most people they know, and she’s way too pretty — and she’s everything women’s suffrage was really about (she was the Governor of a State for crying out loud!) and that pisses them off. She’s supposed to be agnostic…demand a woman’s right to kill her baby at any point during a pregnancy, think that being a wife and a mother is somehow a form of slavery…oh, and she’s supposed to look like Helen Thomas.
I’ve had my own experience dealing with these bitter, crusty females. who are part of the Palin Hater Brigade. And my experiences lead me to believe that last item in Phil’s list is the most important one.
It isn’t political ideology. Not quite so much. Think about it…a man who is aspiring for high public office, or has maybe achieved it, holds opinions about things that do not like. How do they feel about this? If that man is George W. Bush and they happen to be really excited about liberal politics, maybe they’ll launch their blood pressure into the stratosphere at the mention of his name, just as they do at the mention of Palin’s. But other than that, no. If they’re not that much into politics, just leaning left, receiving the newsletters from the DNC at home, feeling somewhat strongly about “woman’s right to choose” but regretting that abortion has to happen anyway…just another white straight conservative Christian male isn’t going to launch them into a frenzy. He’ll just be a dick, as far as they’re concerned. He will be a mild irritation. He won’t turn their faces purple. He won’t make veins stick out of their necks. He won’t send them into a sputtering fit.
Not like Sarah Palin.
In fact, I venture to guess given enough time, I can find a few conservative, Christian, Republican people who agree with Sarah Palin…I’m talking here about women, mind you…who are just as angry with her as the Birkenstock-wearing liberal hippie flower-child women. Angry over nothing. Political opinions have very little to do with this.
Power & Pulchritude: What’s Allowed
There is a large, and perhaps still growing, contingent of mostly females who believe it’s quite alright for some among their sisters to be prettier than they are. And more powerful. Just not both.
Our current President has had an opportunity to nominate replacements for, what, two Supreme Court vacancies now? And both nominees are ugly toad-like women. You only have to analyze the statistics so long before there is an ugly truth revealed to you: Someone is being satisfied with this unbroken trend. It has to be the case. If you sent me out to find women this homely and unappealing, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t know how to start. Two out of two of our vacant seats on the Supreme Court have to go to homely women? This is what “best qualified” looks like, huh. Yeah. Tell me another.
It shouldn’t come as news to anybody who’s been around the block, that women are jealous creatures. My theory about this is that there is a curvalinear relationship. It’s rather like children pushing miniaturized shopper-in-training grocery carts when you run in to the store to buy a gallon of milk: Two unattended children pushing these wagons from hell into your ankles, are together four times as obnoxious as just one. Three such children would leave your ankles nine times as bruised.
My thinking is that among women reviewing the situation, another woman who possesses both authority and beauty is like mixing the rocket fuel and liquid oxygen together. The situation becomes much more explosive than it would be if she had one of these qualities but was missing the other.
There’s a code-of-honor taking place to reinforce this, which Palin is violating it seems. And for better or for worse, it seems this leaves me without other data points I can use to test my theory — I don’t know of any other women accepting or pursuiing positions of real authority, who are gorgeous and strutting around. So I cannot make a comparison there. But I can make a comparison to men. There is something going on with the fellas.
They have a different curve. Like I said over at Phil’s place:
Males, on the liberal side of the fence, can be as pretty or as homely as they like. It does seem that if you want to run for President, you have to be somewhat pleasing to the eye. Henry Waxman won’t be running for President.
So with real power, among liberals, men have to be at least as handsome as John Kerry, and women have to be at least as homely looking as Hillary. Outside of that, you need to accept some constraints on your power, as must we all really. Unless you are in a position to provide indeterminate benefit to the progressive cause, like Barry & His pals. Then, you can be a sultan, with a nation assembled solely for your pleasure. Tell the lesser mortals to conserve on their carbon emissions and vacation in the gulf, then take off for Maine, with your family dog in a separate jet. The sky’s the limit. It’s all good.
Now let’s just get one thing clear here: I cannot explain any of this. I’m just making observations, gathering data, plotting points, trying to make sense of it all. You’ll have to look to our collectivist-minded and our left-wingers to figure out what’s really going on here.
But I do think we should get it straight who’s keeping women under a “glass ceiling” here. It isn’t the political right. And it isn’t men, for the most part.
There are currently only 232 million IP addresses left — enough for about 340 days — thanks to the explosion in smartphones and other web-enabled devices.
“When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses,” carrier relations manager at Australian internet service provider (ISP) Internode John Lindsay told the Herald.
“Bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn’t really exist, the idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn’t occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn’t been invented [and] the idea that air-conditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous.”
We all have stories to tell, hers are peculiarly Southern and like most of our mixed racial tales told south of the Maxon-Dixon line, they’re tinged with a streak regrettable sadness. Black people didn’t get anywhere near a fair shake under Southern skies before the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, admitting that fact means nothing more than acknowledging the truth of the times.
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I think Andrew Breitbart is a self-aggrandizing, corner cutting, race baiting, money chasing, media whore. Jeffrey Lord is an illiterate asshole and Shirley Sherrod doesn’t deserve a single day she’s spent under this ugly conservative sun.
I’m vaguely aware that there’s a controversy surrounding some government employee named Sherrod who was fired because she’s a racist but then she turned out to be not. But I didn’t know the details so I decided to Wiki it.
Reading about the controversy itself, it does seem as if this particular rap against her was unfair.
However, reading about the rest of Shirley Sherrod’s “career”, I think there are much worse things to charge her with:
She and her husband lost their farm when they were unable to secure USDA loans. Sherrod along with other activists sued the USDA in Pigford v. Glickman in order to protect the remaining black farms which were in danger of becoming shut down. The Department agreed to compensation which was to be paid between January 1, 1981 and December 31, 1999. The event was considered as “the largest civil rights settlement in history, with nearly $1 billion being paid to more than 16,000 victims.”
Translation: She wanted the taxpayers to chip in to give her a below-market-rate loan to buy her and her husband a farm. They didn’t. So she sued the taxpayers. She won and got the money from taxpayers. $1 billion distributed among 16,000 people (oh sorry “victims”) equals some $60k per person. Although what do you want to bet that her share was more than the arithmetic mean?
I’m seeing things more Sonic’s way than Daphne’s. Partly because of things like this video (h/t Riehl World View)…
…and partly because I’m sick of being told what to think about people. I’m sick of the sophistry. Yes, Ms. Sherrod’s speech was the polar opposite of what it appeared to be, and her boss Mr. Vilsack — not Andrew Breitbart, not Fox News, but the Secretary himself — overreacted.
Does this mean Shirley Sherrod is a decent person? No. It means Tom Vilsack is a spineless jerk.
More and more, it looks to me like this: Shirley Sherrod spent 43 minutes lying about her motives and what she’s been learning on the job, and Brietbart unfairly played a few bits out of context, the ones where she told the truth about herself.
I’m tired of the duplicity. I’m tired of being told Sarah Palin is malicious because some stalking pervert moved in next door to her. I’m tired of being told just because someone can be called a victim of something and she happens to have dark skin, and a chestless jackal for a former boss, that her motives must be pure.
In fact, there are other crackpots and nutjobs in the mix as well. I’ve had it to here with the “because”-es. I’m fed up with being told Elena Kagan will be a great Associate Justice because she’s funny. Rush Limbaugh is evil because he’s rich. Dick Cheney deserves to die because he ran Halliburton. The Gulf oil spill is in good hands because Stephen Chu has a Nobel prize.
I’m at the Popeye stage with the sophistry; I’ve had all me can stands, and me can’t stands no more.
You put something out there that’s incorrect, or misleading, and there are only two possibilities after that’s found out: You were hoodwinked by someone, or you’re a liar yourself. Well, Brietbart has an iron-clad alibi about the edited video he received. If he was lying about that — if he was in fact the person responsible for whittling this thing down, and giving it an appearance so strikingly at odds with the real intent of Sherrod’s speech — there’s been plenty enough time for that to have been borne out. It hasn’t happened. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Breitbart was complicit in this.
Sherrod, meanwhile, has been helping to spread the word around that Fox News deliberately brought about her dismissal, and she knows better.
She was treated unfairly.
Only those who are withholding the intellectual vigor, or are coming up empty in an attempt to supply it, would infer from that that she’s a nice person. Just because you get the shaft, doesn’t make you a sweetie-pie.
I’ll keep an open mind, but this woman is really setting off a lot of alarms in my head. She fits a profile, and it’s not a skin-color profile. It’s one I would call “Play Dirty But Act Like You’re Playing Nice.”
Because, above all, I’m sick to death of liberals getting caught doing sneaky underhanded things, and then claiming someone conservative was responsible for making them do it. Enough of this. Obama and Vilsack overreacted, Obama and Vilsack can own the problem. For once. Even if Sherrod wants it to work out some other way. It’s their fuck-up.
Wow, don’t go feeling sorry for Marina Orlova. Girl’s got it made.
So much eye candy. Lady in the bikini…boat…lady…boat…lady…boat. I was trying to figure out if this was a private yacht or some kind of small cruise ship she had to share. Doesn’t look to me like she’s sharing it in any way. So she’s doing alright, or else has a sugar daddy in which case she’s doing alright.
This looks exactly like the beginning of Tomb Raider: Underworld. Except I think Lara Croft’s boat was diminutive by comparison.
And is that a picture of Bowser stuck on a Mac PowerBook?
In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg makes the point that the word “fascism” is actually credited with very little by way of useful definition, and when one seeks to imbue the word with such a useful definition one runs into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — the object of study changes in its properties, either in reality or in measurement, as it is studied.
Nevertheless, on page 23 he offers a definition so that the discussion can commence:
Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.
As I continued onward with the book, I thought back on this definition exactly as Goldberg intended, but I had another thought that he perhaps did not intend for me to have. The definition is slightly inadequate.
I see a mostly uninterrupted pattern, in which each fascist movement is an offering by one particular charismatic individual, usually a male. His wit, speechifying, masculinity, drive and flair are thrown in to every discussion about his ideas, as replacements for any logical demonstration that his ideas might make sense. To put it another way — nobody can construct a rational argument that his ideas have potential to bring about the desired results, and so wherever his apologists enjoy any representation at all, the discourse dissolves into a sloppy, childish exchange of observations about how good he is at talking to large numbers of people. This seems to be a constant in all fascist governments, the charisma of the dictator.
Rhetorical defense of a dumbass idea, offered by subtly re-directing the discourse from the merits and weaknesses of the idea itself, toward the appealing but meaningless attributes of the personality most prominently associated with it.
As Goldberg points out, as this particular subject is poked and prodded a little bit more, it loses composition and becomes more difficult to define. But like I said, I wish he covered this part of it since it seems to be an integral component. Fascist leaders, generally, are not boring & dull. To achieve the minimal requirements of the dictator gig, they must demonstrate an ability to sell things contrary to the long-term interests of the buyer.
It seems almost medieval. King’s counselors rush up to him and say, Your Majesty! The royal coffers are nearly empty! Whaddya talking about, says the King, my country is very wealthy. All those farms with all those crops…they’re mine. I Am The State.
You know, I thought we had some kind of a revolution to do away with that kind of thinking.
I find it rather ominous: The one sequence of words you can string together to prove to your kids and grandkids that you’re senile, and have probably been batshit crazy for a good long time, is the one truth that has become more and more obvious to me as I get older: The commies are takin’ over. I’m now reaching the point where it is becoming undeniable, so maybe the time has come to check into assisted living facilities. Because from my point of view it seems the evidence is rock-hard and accumulating all around us.
That would be a good bumper sticker slogan. The motto in Washington already seems to be Rahm Emmanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” — if it’s gotta go that way, might as well operate from a real crisis instead of a made-up one.
Greece brought down the Euro. Now, just ponder that. The European Union was chartered and they came up with a currency so they could compete against the dollar as a foreign investment vehicle. (Any kind of a “union” always has a central target in mind, which the union desires to surround horseshoe-style, and destroy; in this case it was us.) The EU achieved a competitive foothold against our currency, with much better results than any single country within could have netted by itself. It worked great, and then Greece tripped it up. That’s our future if we don’t change something. All of the evidence says so.
It’s a powerful argument.
Another thing: Congressman Ryan makes reference to our nation’s founding principles, our founding documents. If you read through Article I of the Constitution where it lays out the responsibilities and authorities of Congress, what you see there is an essay on what a legislative body is supposed to do. From a thirty-thousand-foot level, it is to pass laws and disburse money.
You’ve probably done this yourself. You might sit on some non-profit organization, maybe a band or orchestra for your kids’ school, the PTA…if you haven’t had such an experience, there is your own household. A new expense comes up and if it’s a low priority you’ll probably smack it down. If it’s a high priority, then you go back to these other places where you’ve allocated money, and you change the plans.
And then if someone comes up with more places to spend money, you start to get pissed. You go, waitaminnit…you saw what we just got done doing with this other thing over here. How come you didn’t say a single word about this new thing, then? We could have prioritized it.
And then they do it three more times. Each time waiting for the fancy new plans to be laid in, and then dong their cute little ambush…eventually you have enough and there’s some smack-down. You lay down a moratorium. Something to the effect of, if it isn’t mentioned right here right now, you don’t care enough about it so why should we. There’s no point trying to figure out what has priority over what, if your list isn’t complete.
Now look how this Congress has been operating. It’s going to go down in history in disgrace…and it’s going to go down that way, compared to other congresses, which really says something. Every new expense isn’t greeted with “Goddammit, why didn’t you say something while we were funding Cash for Clunkers? Or Recovery & Reinvestment? Or S&L Bailout?” Nobody has to face the music on any of that…it’s just “Ooh! There’s a way we can pick up some more voters!”
This isn’t going to fly, and it’s not the way the country was set up. Congress is supposed to make decisions on allocating money. That means they are supposed to prioritize, and that means they need to do this in big batches, not one little sales pitch at a time shouting “yes yes yes” at the tops of their lungs like Meg Ryan in the diner scene.
And that is a point that should resonate on both the left and the right. If you see value in some of what the Congress has been funding, you, too, should want it to work this way. Congress should be saying no to some things so that they can say yes to other things.
Very magnanimous and thoughtful of this punkweasel to give that little nod to the First Amendment, as he waxes lyrically about this “gatekeeper” idea.
You knew it was coming, folks. Shirley Sherrod is a perfect wonderful human being now, don’t dare say a word against her — call her “Saint Shirley” — and now that this horrible, dreadful nightmare has descended upon her, we need to go back and do something about these bad, bad bloggers. The “Internet is like this giant bathroom wall” upon which anybody can write anything about anybody. Something must be done! Need a “gatekeeper”!
I’m putting it in that growing file, because Architects…and we are not a fringe group, we are a goodly sized half of humanity or something approaching half…see it as people doing things, and those things having an effect on other things. Like, DUH. That’s the way the entire universe works.
Just because someone’s late catching on to this, is that a necessity for creating more rules? Well, Architects see it like this; it’s a pretty short discourse. If you’re out-and-out lying you can bring someone some harm, and that is troubling — but we have libel laws, we have slander laws. Okay then. We already have laws. Conversation over.
Medicators, on the other hand, have this primal urge toward more and more regulation and they don’t really care who’s doing the regulating. I’ve often thought maybe they care a lot about not knowing. They want it done by a stranger. There has to be this system of elites and commoners, and most of the Medicators want to be on a first-name basis only with the commoners. They don’t want the responsibility.
So they want all of human activity to go into a great big bell housing, and then everything in the bell housing is affected by some magical focusing lens…which is someone they’ll never actually meet. They’re constantly doing this. All of humankind needs to be arranged into a giant “V”, like a big flock of birds.
We go ahead and do it and the results aren’t any better than they were before — the Medicator does not care.
They just want the ranking system. They care about the process, not about the results. So now I expect they’ll all rally behind this “gatekeeper” idea or something like it. Regulated is better. Until it isn’t. And then, somehow, it still is.
So that’s how I see it. There are people who will support this idea, not because they care about bloggers slandering people but because they absolutely loathe the idea of ordinary people being allowed to influence things. They aren’t terrified of ordinary flawed people like themselves making things worse; they’re terrified of their peers and compatriots of equal stature & rank making things better. That absolutely fills them with dread.
The character of the Medicator really comes out after some massive regulation scheme or social program has already been passed, and its deleterious effects on our lives begins to be felt. And then they invite you in on the massive bitch-fest. We’re sharing an experience, so let’s bitch about it. That’s how they do the medicating. Bitch about the weather, bitch about social security, bitch about the bus not showing up on time.
Mark Steyn commented once about a new slang that has developed in the UK: “It’s health-n-safety gone mad, mate; health-n-safety gone mad!” This is how it works. A new bureaucracy extends its tendrils into our lives, we’re all affected in the same way, life becomes less joyous and we get together and start medicating/bitching. Then come up with some new ideas about the next thing that has to be regulated.
The truth is, these people don’t care about progress, or damage for that matter. All they care about is escape, and what they’re trying to escape is a sense of identity. They want to be part of a comfortably large mass, each man within indistinguishable from the next one, and everything anybody does anywhere is attributable to some all-knowing regulatory busybody that is managed by magical strangers whom they don’t know.
This is not to say we will not find anybody who wants to be the gatekeeper. We will. We’ll find someone just chomping at the bit to become the gatekeeper. That’s the most frightening part of it.
It was with considerable reservation that I conceded the point the 43-minute version of Sherrod’s “unedited” speech (which was in fact edited) delivered a completely different sentiment from the much shorter one that was aired earlier. In view of that, and some other things, I came down hard on Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture who fired her.
I stopped short of saying anything good about her character though, and this video makes me glad of that.
Somewhere out there is a democrat talking point that says this: Talk these things up at your heart’s content, make money on your book deals, that’s all fine & good — but make sure at the end of the day that the character of conservatives is impugned. In fact, make sure that’s the case every time you end a sentence and come to a (.) dot.
Had Sherrod taken the time to think this thing out…or if she wasn’t making an effort to talk to morons…she would have seen the strategy runs into some real problems here. Andrew Breitbart received a video. The NAACP saw the same video. They both came to the same conclusion, as did Vilsack. This makes Breitbart a terrible person and the other two parties innocent pawns. How’s that work? Breitbart has gone on the record to say the video was whittled down before it got to him, and I know of no evidence to suggest anything different.
A blogger jumped to a conclusion. A cabinet-level official jumped to the same conclusion, as did an organized advocacy group. Only the blogger is a reprehensible monster. He fooled everybody.
I saw this before, recently. Yes, a number of democrat legislators voted for the AUMF, the Authorization of Use of Military Force in Iraq, so they could look all tough. And then, as if someone said “go!” it was time to be all dovish and anti-war. (Maybe someone really did say it.) Suddenly, it was George W. Bush’s war. He fooled us all. We’re still saying “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot,” but the idiot fooled us. Those right-wingers. So stupid, and yet successfully fooling everybody. And they never get fooled, oh no. They’re just evil.
Liberals would be able to connect with people so much better if they’d just allow us to make up our own minds about who’s a monster. They must have figured out somewhere they cannot afford to do this.
I took Sherrod’s side in this thing…at least, so far as agreeing the context is changed when you watch the entire video, which is true. Her speech had a point to it, and the point was that we’re all in the same boat when it comes to issues like losing farms and livelihoods, regardless of the color of our skin. Her speech had this point from beginning to end, so in that sense I think she got a raw deal. It’s really undeniable.
However, from about Wednesday on there has arisen a sense that Sherrod, personally, doesn’t really feel this way. She really does see issues as race-based even if they don’t need to be. She’s as racist as anybody else. From that point in time two days ago, I would have characterized this as likely-but-irrelevant. I left it unaddressed because it was not germane to the point, and it was idle speculation. Granting it the benefit of the doubt — Shirley Sherrod is giving a speech saying when we help people we should be race-blind, and she doesn’t personally believe this so she’s standing up there lying. Then her comments are taken out of context and she’s fired. Alright, you may say that’s poetic justice. But it’s still a raw deal, and not just for Sherrod. The people who saw the chopped-down version should still understand what was in the longer version.
But if that’s part of the story, it’s also part of the story that the woman is a liar and a manipulator. To me, we can’t even make it to the question of whether she’s a racist or not. We don’t make it that far, because she’s a democrat party activist and she’s read & chosen to practice this talking point about make-all-conservatives-look-like-monsters. Because her mouth moves faster than her brain, it’s extraordinarily blatant in this case.
One other thing. If you listen to her speech from beginning to end, it is a classic parable. Which means, among other things, there is some learning going on and the learning is worked into the story by having the protagonist practice values at the end diametrically opposed from what was practiced at the beginning. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge. Or Return of the Jedi. It is a tale of redemption.
Well, here is a problem encountered by the faithful left-wingers when they practice their “we’re wonderful because we’re liberals, conservatives are terrible monsters, even if the facts say we all did exactly the same thing” snake-oil. They don’t even know they ran into it, but they ran into it hard.
For forty years or more, they have used this cudgel called “political correctness” to transform our office workplaces into battle fields. During this time, it has been quite accepted, even tragically commonplace, to “Sherrod” innocent people whose remarks really were taken out of context. Breitbart, or whoever edited the video, was working entirely according to these rules. And I believe that was Breitbart’s original point. The underlying premise that validates this is, and I am turning on the bold font here on purpose, that bigotry in any form, even in appearance without substance, is a sin beyond any possible redemption.
I call it the impossible-to-achieve “Could Be Construed As” standard.
Sherrod told a tale of redemption. And it was about real bigotry. Even according to her own words, granting her every benefit of the doubt, it was ancient bigotry but just as real as the screen upon which you’re reading these words.
Is it possible to be redeemed after committing such a sin? This is not a question that can be settled on a case-by-case basis. There has to be a single unified answer handed down that applies equally to everybody.
And if the answer is a yes…or even just a possible yes…then the “Could Be Construed As” standard has to die. Right. Now. If a lucrative legal profession has to die with it, then that’s just too bad but it’s going to have to happen.
Immediately. Everywhere. In the offices, on the campaign trails, in the newsrooms…and in Don Imus’ recording studio. Sorry, Al. You’ll have to go get yourself a real job now.
“Could Be Construed As” has to be taken out. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I insist on it. We may civilly disagree about what Shirley Sherrod does & does not deserve, but we should all agree, without any reservation or any need for additional discussion, that she doesn’t deserve her own set of rules.
When liberals start to think about those who would oppose their agenda, they start to illustrate for the rest of us the things they say about conservatives.
Revolving Door Slammer (n.)