House of Eratosthenes

This is very old by now but it’s worth watching. Joy Behar is increasingly likely, with each passing week, to be the most important television personality in our time. Although, as you can tell from the video, she has been the way she is for quite awhile.

She doesn’t present herself as a mouthpiece for the democrat party, but she is one anyway — even has these pre-canned, pre-digested talking points to present that have little-to-nothing to do with the topic she chose as the host of the program. Close to the end, you’ll notice, Coulter needs to remind her of the question she asked.

But Joy would like to concentrate on what this-or-that personality likes. Or wants. All in service of proving what terrible people those other folks are — so she doesn’t have to discuss policy decisions or their consequences. She claims to be interested in politics but she demonstrates very little actual knowledge about anything.

Let’s see if I can summarize. George Bush inherited a surplus and spent trillions of dollars on a war against a country that did not directly attack us…and put together a massive deficit that he handed off to Barack Obama. With a bow tied on top. Near as I can figure, this is the extent of Joy Behar’s knowledge about all public policy in this country, foreign and domestic.

You can get that out of watching just the trailer of a Michael Moore movie.

There are lots of people walking around like this. Claiming to be independent and fair, when they’re really about as centrist, enlightened and fair-minded as the Unabomber. Thanksgiving is coming. Maybe in a little over a month you’ll be sitting across the table from someone like this, asking them to pass you the gravy.

My sympathies.

It has become a widespread problem in our modern culture. Joy Behar is, certainly, a very important celebrity; her viewpoint, such as it is, represents many.

Sadly, so does her intellectual drive and natural curiosity. What little there is of such things.

Behar is an American icon, demonstrating in luminous style how easily an addled mind can be bamboozled into becoming precisely what it initially loathes, or presents itself as loathing. She’s supposed to be for facts, truth, and free expression of those; you can see from the clip, above, how little regard she has for all this. She’s supposed to be for equal rights and equal freedoms. You don’t have to listen to her for long to figure out she has some kind of hierarchy in mind: Homosexuals and Muslims on top…women somewhere in the middle, but liberal women deserving of far better treatment than their conservative counterparts…and then down on the bottom, Republicans like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and then the unborn babies come in underneath them.

Behar has lots of company here. Someday, someone should put that chart together and publish it, with a nice lamination. The “Joy Behar Some More Equal Than Others” chart, they could call it.

Me loose mush IQ when watch joy.
- D-train | 10/17/2010 @ 19:17
This interview w/ Coulter apparently ran back in 2008. Any reason I am just now seeing it here, Morgan?
- cylarz | 10/17/2010 @ 23:12
Behar is a bitch.
- cylarz | 10/17/2010 @ 23:20
Bigot: Someone winning an argument with a liberal.
- cylarz | 10/17/2010 @ 23:23
This interview w/ Coulter apparently ran back in 2008. Any reason I am just now seeing it here, Morgan?

As I said, she is important…by which I mean, resembling a great many, who have the power to shape and re-direct the natural course of human events. They’ve done it.

It is necessary to go back into the archives, to demonstrate how much time you can allow to slip by without learning a goddamn thing. If you think out your thinking the Joy Behar way, that is.
- mkfreeberg | 10/18/2010 @ 05:59
[…] Stand Winners” “El Socialismo es Contra la Prosperidad” Where’s Steele? Coulter Versus Behar “Let Him Finish or I’m Gonna Deck You!” It’s No Longer Racist to Call Him […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/18/2010 @ 07:48
“Let me break this to you. 70% of Americans don’t want that mosque down there.” – O’Reilly

Audience erupts into enthusiastic applause.

Where’s that poll? Where’s that poll? -Behar

Hello? Did you not just hear the studio audience’s response? The studio audience, I might add, of The View?????

No, she didn’t. She’s oblivious.

Muslims killed us on 9/11. – O’Reilly

Noooooooo!!!! Oh my God, that is such bullshit. – Goldberg — hands up, holding her head in dispair and disdain.

Like it is the worst sacrelige to say … and it is … to the progressive left. Even though it’s just a bare fact. But facts contrary to their belief are so abhorent to them that they not only won’t acknowledge them, they actually melt down in denial!

How can you even discuss it if one side reacts this way to a bare fact?

And then, O’Reilly interjects I’m tellin’ you, 70% of the country…”

Again, the crowd erupts in enthusiastic cheering.

Then I believe it’s Behar saying “I’m not going to sit here…” but it’s hard to discern much of anything else because of all of the self-righteous cackling culminated in the two zealots getting up and leaving the stage … to applause, to be sure, but to applause for what?

For sticking to their principles?

Or because it was clear that O’Reilly had nailed them?

If the previous two bursts of applause and cheering were any indication, I’d say at least a lot of it was the latter.
- philmon | 10/18/2010 @ 08:07
P.J. O’Rourke put it rather well the other day on the Dennis Miller Show:

“To me it was [~would be] like building the U.S. Cavalry Museum at Wounded Knee. No matter how tasteful the presentation, no matter how sensitive to the feeling of the Native Americans it was gonna be, it would just sort of be in — bad taste.”

It was U.S. Cavalry that killed those Indians! You wouldn’t hear any progressives saying “wait, that was U.S. Cavalry extremists!!!!!” …. and defenders of other U.S. Cavalry members wouldn’t be saying “Noooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my God! that is such bullshit.”
- philmon | 10/18/2010 @ 08:25
How can you even discuss it if one side reacts this way to a bare fact?

Now there’s a BSIHORL if ever there was one. Cylarz, this is surplus answer to your question; this is a big problem lately. We have all these people out there with their “principles”…scare quotes intended. And then somewhere after the principles, come facts. If the facts fit. If they don’t, they’ll go out and “research” some more “facts”…scare quotes intended there, too.

Phil has nailed it. If you don’t like a fact, you can argue how it was observed, or what is to be safely concluded from its observation. But when you go protesting the fact itself, something’s jacked up.
- mkfreeberg | 10/18/2010 @ 08:44
The first requirement for permanent liberal personality syndrome is not being capable of the emotion of embarrassment. People who are without it are incapable of change. It is probably necessary to be closely related to such a person to understand this is no exaggeration.
- jamzw | 10/18/2010 @ 09:46
You may be right, Phil. I didn’t hear anyone boo-ing O’Reilly. Just wild applause and a bunch of people trying to talk over him every time he tried to speak. Is Hasselback the blond gal on the right side of the screen? It almost seemed like she was trying to ask O’Reilly a question and couldn’t get it in there.

The whole getting up and leaving thing, the bleeped profanity from Goldberg….gah. You’re right. It’s impossible to have a civilized discussion with many leftists. They’re all wrapped-up in emotion.

I don’t understand. Don’t Behar and Goldberg understand that the likes of those who attacked us on 9-11 would beat them and put them in burquhas? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
- cylarz | 10/18/2010 @ 10:23
It’s like we say in the ivory tower: If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

Maybe I’m over-sensitive to this (since it’s my job and all), but it seems to me that Behar-style liberalism — which is just plain old liberalism with a big-ass megaphone — pretty much boils down to the endless assertion that I Am Smarter Than You, which is the professoriate’s favorite pastime. It trickles down from the higher reaches of academe, becoming dumber and more obnoxious at every remove.

For instance: some philosopher raises an interesting, and valid, question about the epistemological underpinnings of science or math. Actual scientists, engineers, etc. don’t care, since 2+2 will still equal 4 no matter how many fancy words like “unfalsifiability” and “paradigmatic” you throw at it. But then some history professor gets ahold of it, and all of a sudden it becomes “‘science’ is a social construction.” And then some English professor gets ahold of it it and it becomes “‘science’ is just a social construction.” Then some Womyn’s Studies professor jumps in with “reality (gravity, whatever) is only a social construction”…

…and this, filtered through the pot-addled brains of several generations of pretentious, perpetually indignant undergrads, allows idiots like Behar and Whoopi Goldberg to blithely dismiss honest-to-god, slap-you-in-the-face facts that don’t fit their politics. And that, in turn, allows them to remain Smarter Than You, no matter how great the gap between your respective IQs or your relative command of verifiable data.

And if you don’t believe me, that’s because you’re just in thrall to the reified paradigmatic hermeneutic cisgender phallocentric neo-colonial praxis.
- Severian | 10/18/2010 @ 10:30
Yes, that’s Hasselbeck. The only reason I know is that a certain significant member of my extended family, a staunch, proud self-described Progressive … watches the show religiously.

And thinks she’s engaging in some deep analysis of world events through the eyes of a washed up commedian, another admittedly talented commedian-actress, a token conservative woman married to an NFL quarterback — mainly to beat up on when they allow her to speak at all, and a washed up news anchor who is most famous for asking people what kind of tree they would be.

She watches it because it is an all-woman show, and she thinks that fact makes it uniquely profound.

Yes, I think Behar and Goldberg do understand that the likes of those who attacked us on 9-11 would beat them and put them in burquhas … but they are under the delusion that 1) very few Muslims would support such a thing and would never allow it to happen, and 2) it can’t happen here.

And 3) … anyone who thinks otherwise is a “hater”.

Behar et. al. think that “the likes” of those who attacked us on 9/11 are few and powerless.

But there are lots of Muslims all over the other hemisphere that would beg to disagree. Some because they are “the likes”, and others because they are intimidated and subdued by “the likes”. And both sets are dangerous. The former because they will try, and the latter because they will not try to stop it.
- philmon | 10/18/2010 @ 10:35
And if you don’t believe me, that’s because you’re just in thrall to the reified paradigmatic hermeneutic cisgender phallocentric neo-colonial praxis.

As one who spent 8 years in college and has worked with academics for the following 20 years … I know how absolutely dead-on and priceless this quote is. 😉
- philmon | 10/18/2010 @ 10:40
In a monumental display of irony, NPR fired Juan Williams yesterday over the example he used to make point on political correctness.

I’ve disagreed with Juan on a lot of things. And agreed with him on a few. But like I said, NPR re-enforced his point in a profound way.
- philmon | 10/21/2010 @ 09:39
Sev, your comment has been noticed. You’re a superstar.
- mkfreeberg | 10/21/2010 @ 10:45
Whoohooo! Hats off to you, Severian! My favorite sentence of the week is getting some well-deserved exposure! LOL

And if you don’t believe me, that’s because you’re just in thrall to the reified paradigmatic hermeneutic cisgender phallocentric neo-colonial praxis.

It’s gonna take some effort to memorize that precise, technically-logical gobbldygook, but … I should, just so I can use it in a conversation. 🙂
- philmon | 10/21/2010 @ 12:03
(gotta recite it using “the voice”, you know … the one that sounds like an adolescent hyperactive Kermit the Frog.)
- philmon | 10/21/2010 @ 12:04
I was kind of wishing you managed to hit “heteronormative” somehow.
- mkfreeberg | 10/21/2010 @ 12:05
I have found that xxxxxxx-normative is used in certainas a slur against “normo-normative” people. The fact that there are normal traits that most people have and we’re supposed to ignore that while praising those who have particlular, sanctioned traits that fall outside of that set … again, while not recognizing that there is a set to be outside of. Or by demeaning it by referring to “everyone else” as “run of the mill, dime a dozen” by adding “normative” at the end.
- philmon | 10/21/2010 @ 12:17
in certain communities … typo above
- philmon | 10/21/2010 @ 12:18

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Coulter Versus BeharSunday, October 17th, 2010

Coulter Versus Behar
Sunday, October 17th, 2010