Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
What is a liberal? Many things define what the word has come to describe nowadays…few of them good. And a big chunk of them fall under this brief essay by Gary Kamiya, which was linked at Jawa, which in turn was linked by Good Lieutenant.
In a nutshell: Yes, they know they’re whacked-out wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy. That’s why they’re high-fiving each other and calling everybody else stupid.
Make sense now? Wonderful. Ice cream has no bones, turn on the radio I want to fly a kite, they’re coming to take me away haha.
Is there life after Bush?
We’ve been hating him forever, but he’s leaving. Now we have to decide what to do with the rest of our lives.
By Gary KamiyaHating George W. Bush sometimes feels like a full-time job…I’ve been forced to deal with this wretched president for so long that hating him has virtually become part of my identity…Pretty soon, we won’t have Bush to kick around anymore. And I’ve started wondering: What are we going to do then? …Maybe we Bush-haters are extreme and obsessive. But Bush made us this way.
You can tell from the ellipses sprinkled in there like raisins, I’m facing a challenge teasing it in a way that it makes sense. Kinda like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But Mr. Kamiya demonstrates that all things do not have to be sane, to be revealing.
I’m not using Dowdisms to change the meaning of anything. Go read the whole thing.
One more time: These people want to decide what our public policies are going to be, foreign and domestic. And when they talk about “dissent == patriotism” they aren’t talking about dissent against them or their compatriots; they want blind obedience in that area. Once we’ve had a chance to inspect what they think and what they want to do, the more responsible folks among us wouldn’t trust them to walk the dog. Want proof? You only have to click.
Update: You know, I’m doing some more thinking about this and, as I attempt to find out anew what makes these people tick, a thought occurs to me that raises far more questions than it answers.
If I hate somebody or something…let’s just strip all the emotional turmoil out of it and call the thing “X” instead of “George Bush.” If I hate X, and I’m accepted into a community wherein all others present similarly hate X, there really isn’t going to be a lot to be said when you discount all the marginal conversations that could be fairly categorized as off-topic. “Hate to threadjack, but…” type-stuff, “when is this feature on your blog going to be available again,” stuff like that. Maintenance issues aside, there isn’t going to be much call to exchange ideas.
I mean to put it more concisely, if I hate X and you hate X, what more is there to be said? I suppose we could come up with new and creative ways to express our hatred of X, turning the whole pointless exercise into a more stimulating vocabulary-building experience. Loathing X, pontificating grandiloquently against X, for hatred’s sake spitting my dying breath at X, et al. Or, we could compare notes on what widely-visible fountainhead of opinion strikes us as being unfairly biased in favor of X, and resolve to ensure nobody ever drinks from that wellspring without a large grain of salt. Or, we could have some extremely brief conversations about “this is my reason for today for hating X.” And I would expect once we agree that this is a valid reason, the conversation would shift to something else.
Or…I suppose we could come up with personal priority lists about reasons for hating X. I could offer the opinion that “Reason #43 on your list is significantly weightier than Reason #27, which I consider to be a tangential issue” — and then we could debate that.
I see very little of the above on DailyKOS or other left-wing resources. I think it’s fair to say most of what is actually offered therein, is a lot of bloviating about how much smarter the people in there, are compared to the rest of the normal folks out here.
Which is remarkable in itself. Since, a few personal entanglements aside, they don’t appear to know a great deal about one another, apart from their shared dislike of George W. Bush. It’s almost as if…I would say, exactly as if…the hatred of George W. Bush is some kind of litmus test for intelligence. If you share it, you pass, even though your facts can be wrong, your grammatical construct can be atrocious, and your spelling looks like you’ve been letting a cat walk on the keyboard, and your logical arguments have more holes than your average kitchen sponge.
But if, by process of elimination, we’re down to just a lot of huffing and puffing about how much smarter our blue-staters are compared to our red-staters — or mostly down to just that and nothing more — how much liberal stuff could be uploaded on a daily basis? I mean, anywhere? What’s the point of mentioning it over and over again? If there was truth to it, of the self-evident variety or otherwise, the contributors themselves should be able to see they’ve crossed into the “doth protest too much” territory at a breakneck pace, and move on to something else.
I suppose that criticism might have merit wherever it is directed. Even here, to some extent, some might say. But good heavens. In all of human literary history, has any medium of written communication become so voluminous, so repititious, about so little, as the left-wing blog during the Bush II presidency? I suspect Mr. Kamiya has correctly identified a “future hangover” concern that is entirely meritorious, but severely underestimated just how much of a problem it will be.
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[…] Which was not yet the case when I wrote What Is A Liberal? Part V or IV, or the first three chapters either. Now, the air is thick with their blatherings. I haven’t exactly been trying to escape them, but assuming that avenue was open to me, escape doesn’t seem to me to be a wise plan. Being a liberal is all about coming up with ideas to solve problems, that aren’t necessarily so likely to solve the problem, as they are to change the lives of everyone in a way we can’t ignore once the ideas are put into effect. So this is the interesting thing about our liberals — you can ignore them today, you can ignore them tomorrow. Can’t do both. There’s a certain “pay the piper” attribute when it comes to paying attention to, or ignoring, liberals. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 12/01/2007 @ 11:26