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...
Dennis the Peasant skewers ThinkProgress but good. Goes on to make an ass out of himself afterward, but the skewering is good.
What do you do when you have a degree in journalism but don’t have the brains to think for yourself? Well, if you’re a no-talent dickweed like Alex Seitz-Wald, you end up working for organizations like Think Progress spinning the news for dimwit partisans:
Last night, a California man armed with two semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition opened fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two before being killed by police. The shooter, 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell, was “well dressed in a suit” and “very calm,” walking “very directly to the officers” before engaging them, a police spokesman said.
Bedell “appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings,” the Christian Science Monitor reports, who traveled from California specifically to attack the Pentagon. While police were hesitant to assign a motive, “writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”
In one posting, Bedell ranted against “big government.” In another, he wrote, “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow” — a Marine whose suicide has been the subject of conspiracy theories — because it would be a “step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.
There you have it: (a) The Christian Science Monitor speculates right-wing extremism, (b) You’re paid by Think Progress to propagandize against the right, so (c) Bedell is a right-wing extremist. Never mind that the police are still investigating the facts, what’s important is spinning for your supper.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that if Bedell had been a commie asshole on the level of Van Jones and raving truther ravings, he’d be a fucking left-wing hero. But as we all know, when it comes to left-wing trutherism, well, that’s different…
He goes on to indulge in wild conjecture about Michelle Malkin blaming everything that goes wrong on Muslims, then in an update provides a link to prove his point about her.
Dennis needs to read his links. Malkin made herself crystal clear on this incident:
I’m with Zombie:
Now, just for a moment, let’s set aside the false guilt-by-association game everyone’s always playing. We all know that John Patrick Bedell and Joseph Stack are basically insane, plain and simple — as are any number of similar whackjobs who periodically go loco and erupt into violence. Violent psychopaths often incorporate some seemingly random overarching theme into their mindset, and on occasion that theme involves politics. Whenever someone like Bedell or Stack goes ballistic, every pundit jumps into the fray and tries to spin the outburst as “exemplifying” the political viewpoint of those with whom the pundit disagrees.
But that only rises to the level of a valid argument when a distinct pattern emerges. If, say, 5,000 suicide bombers in a row are invariably Islamic fundamentalists — well, OK, we’ve got a problem with the belief system, not just with the individuals. Yet I don’t see a pattern in these “going postal” violent outbursts which seem to happen perhaps three or four times per year, every year, no matter who’s in power or who’s president: it seems that the “philosophy” (if you can even call it that) of each of the attackers is unique, idiosyncratic and just plain illogical. Even so, if he starts shooting or killing when a Republican is president, he is deemed a left-wing psycho (see: Charles Manson); if he starts shooting or killing when a Democrat is president, he is deemed a right-wing psycho (see: Joseph Stack). But the truth is, paranoid people simply feel threatened by the external power structure in general, so they lash out at any symbol of authority, regardless of its political affiliation.
So, instead of playing the blame game so unapologetically employed by the Left when they feel they can spin things to their political advantage, I’m not going to say that Bedell’s actions at the Pentagon epitomize the leftist worldview. Rather, he was just crazy, as clearly indicated by his belief in the craziest of modern crazy conspiracy theories, 9/11 Truthism.
Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.
Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”
And Zombie speaks for me as well.
I’m sure somewhere out there, there is a right-wing blogger or hardcore conservative guy out there offering this as evidence that the lefties are dangerous psychopaths getting ready to tweak out and shoot things up. But my prediction is that it isn’t going to be quite as prevalent as what you just saw ThinkProgress do.
That’s because it is pointless. When your philosophy is something like “when you don’t have any money, stop spending” — you don’t need to cherry pick news items about non-believers acting crazy, in order to make your idea seem reasonable. Because it already is.
When you believe in crackpot Keynesian economics, that is when you have to sell this snake oil: “People who disagree with me are bonkers, nuts, crazy, stupid, got picked on in school, have syphillis, are stupid women, are repressed homosexuals, are Uncle Toms, are…are…are…”
If you’re in a position to argue your argument based on the merits of your argument — you’re somewhat likely to do exactly that. It’s not a hard rule but it works most of the time. And so the argumentum ad hominem approach is predominantly a left-wing approach. Not absolutely, not completely. But mostly.
Now if someone could please get the Christian Science Monitor, and the Associated Press, some pointers about how to report actual news?
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