On The Al Gorium. (Or Why Al Gore is not an Argument you Stupid Asshole.)

Don't act like you don't want what he's got bitch.

O.K. Slim, I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. The message is wholly, completely, totally, and utterly independent of the messenger in every way. If Hitler tells you that water is wet, water is wet. The fact that Al Gore has a big house means nothing. The fact that Al Gore has a private jet means nothing. If Al Gore had a fleet of three hundred diesel tankers idling in his back yard and running continuously simply to satiate his carbon monoxide fetish, it would mean nothing. The problem with killing the messenger is so obvious that it is almost universally known by its common name instead of the official Latin one. (That's Ad Hominem Slim")
There is no excuse whatsoever for anyone of average intelligence to think that either hypocrisy or perceived hypocrisy is relevent to anything whatsoever. The Ad Hominem is the tool of the moron and the liar and no one else.

It's not fair, I know, the fact that Al Gore has infinitely more money, power, and respect than you do, even though he doesn't know how to be a real man like you do. All the same, the way that Al Gore is jammed into global warming arguments like a frat house broom rape does betray a deep level of envy towards someone who's more successful than you, and that's not very conservative of you now is it Slim? A hundred years from now, Al Gore will be remembered in history with admiration and respect. Your great-grandchildren will read about his wisdom and his foresight while throwing your polaroid out with the cat liter. Fuck you.

So Here's a Little Link from Conservapedia.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Lenski_dialog#Second_reply

Follow it and you find a conversation between Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly, (who we can be reasonably certain is at this moment smiling approvingly while mother Phyllis belittles his wife's chicken Marcella) and one Dr. Richard Lenski, evolutionary biologist and professor at Michigan State. The conversation consists of Schlafly's bullying attempts to get Dr. Lenski to 'explain himself' and 'show' the data gathered for a study showing that E. Coli bacteria evolve (duh-duh-duh) over time in order to better fit into their environments. Lenski replies that the data for the experiment is thoroughly documented in the paper he wrote for it, and helpfully points out that Schlafly could download the paper from most any university library if he should ever care to read the study he is criticizing.

Schlafly than makes a huffy second request for data, again making it clear that he has still not read the paper and does not seem to know exactly what "scientific data" entails. Lenski's reply to this is, magnificent.

"...It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab!..."

The thing that makes this such a beautiful moment in internet history is that Schlafly printed the dialogue, which everyone but him can immediately recognize as an absolute rhetorical drubbing, on his very own FAS baby, Conservapedia.com, under the headline, "Take a good look at the attitude our tax dollars are paying for."

I do suppose that it costs money to actually learn something instead of believing in that what we must not think about, but more to the point is the fact that it's Lenski's bad attitude that Schlafly thinks he is revealing, this man who was accused of shoddy record-keeping and outright fraud in a project he had been working on for twenty years, simply because it is proof that evolution exists, and so simply had to be untrue. The sense of entitlement Schlafly feels towards "lesser Americans", the ones who read what they criticize or even the ones who go through college without blocking out all of the information that God doesn't want them to know, is nauseatingly clear.

If you don't have the time to read the entire exchange, you'll find out everything you need to know by how the two mens signitures Schlafly his letters as "Andy Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D. www.conservapedia.com" while the man who has spent the past twenty years working on a hugely important biological study and can also claim the incredible accomplishment of knowing what the hell he's talking about signs as "Richard Lenski."

"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation … the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not … express themselves in ideas but only … in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" Lionel Trilling-1950

Susan Smith

I was just reading about the one who drowned her kids about fifteen years back and blamed their disappearance on a phantom black man who who officials dutifully chsed around the country for nine days before the local sheriff employed time-tested Catholic tactics to elicit the down-home Llorona's confession.

I was thinking in particular of her sexual affairs. Smith was catting about with the son of a textile mill owner who was the major employer of her hometown of Union South Carolina. The theory goes that the rich dick didn't want kids, so Smith decided to dispose of her own in order to win his heart and position herself to become the economic crown princess of her town. Like I said, Daisy Mae La Llorona. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona

Smith was also still fooling around with her ex-husband, and the mill owner herself, and the step-father that had began raping her when she was fifteen. (A respected member of the community, the church, and the Republican Party by the way, I'd just thought I'd mention.) Her psychiatrists say that the abuse instilled Smith with an insatiable need for love and affection. Two guards have been fired from the prison where Smith is kept for providing vigorous love and affection.

I know I'm an evil man for thinking this, but I have a feeling that you're thinking it too. God damn but she must fuck like a beast.

Confirmation Bias is a Hell of a Drug.

“He did it by his own achievement. Nobody gave it to him.” Ward Connerly, on Barrack Obama's nomination.

That's an odd way to think of it , Mr. Connerly, since being a successful politician in a democracy necessarily requires depending on other people to give you your job.

"The entire argument for race preferences is that society is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” The historic success of Senator Obama, as well as Senator Clinton, dismantles that argument.”

Or perhaps the fact that these campaigns were historic after two hundred and thirty years of American history is proof of that argument's validity.

Perhaps you have been trying very hard not to notice people of average intelligence latching on to the self-apparently ludicrous rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim agent, desperate to find anything to justify their ill-defined fear of the other. Perhaps you haven't noticed the common and equally absurd belief that Senator Clinton
is a stone-hearted man hating harpy, an attitude that is based solely on the fact that Clinton is a woman who is openly as proud and ambitious as any major male politician.

Have you ever seen people who have lost a house to flood or tornado or what have you on the news, Mr. Connerly? I'm sure that you and I have both seen a newly homeless housewife stare into the camera and declare,"I refuse to be a victim."

You probably approve of this, don't you Mr. Connerly? I personally find this statement very bizarre. In spite of what the Optimism Nazis in this country would have us believe, victimhood is not a choice, it is simply a physical condition that does or does not exist. I do not choose whether or not to be a victim, the tornado does.

And what is a natural disaster if not the ultimate proof that we are not the absolute masters of our own fates? That not everything that happens to us, good or bad, is what we bring upon ourselves?

Though I'm sure you would find it intolerably radical and un-American for me to say so, sir, I would suggest that a human society that is unjust and irrational at some level, as all human societies inevitably are, can leave an individual just as helpless and victimized as a natural disaster.

When African-Americans make up 13% of the general population and 40% of the prison population, what is one to say to that? Though you have been nauseatingly close to the Ku Klux Klan before, Mr. Connerly, surely you don't believe that your own people, (Yes, yes, I know, there is only one American people, and social divisions are nothing but imaginary creations of the politically correct.) are more inclined towards criminality than other people. I'm sure that you studiously ignore the fact that some groups of people are more likely to get pulled over by the police for minor offenses or no offense at all than other groups. (Or, indeed, shot dead for no offense at all every now and again.) Does it make the remotest amount of sense to you, that endemic poverty or children out of wedlock within a certain ethnic group is purely the fault of the individual and has nothing whatsoever to do with the larger society? I can assure you, sir, that your ethnic group is no more debauched than mine. Believe you me, I can assure you of that.

Mr. Connerly, I find it hard to believe that the phallus-inflating lie of the individual human as absolute master of his fate is more important to you than your own eyesight. Most people I know take pride in being able to discern the truth of what is around them and yet you willfully twist the facts and information around you to conform to your cowardly and childish delusion of a just society.

I am sure, Mr. Connerly, that you take pride in your own individual success, perhaps even see it as an example for members of other marginalized groups to follow. But have you ever reflected on how sad the manner you came to national prominence truly is? Trolling around looking for small states where the white working-class is frightened and angered by demographic changes shattering their illusions of being the center of the world, asserting your will by preying on the bitter and the ill-informed, providing a scapegoat of the weak to spare uneducated citizens who pride themselves on patriotism from the frightening idea of challenging the social order. I must say, Mr. Connerly, that it is more than a little galling to see such an inveterate bloodsucker as yourself rail against free rides and handouts.

And now you seek to suck the vitality out of my own alma-matter, a rare oasis from the mono-cultural desert that is Nebraska. I am aware sir, that you are appealing mainly to those Nebraskans who like mono-culturalism. Well fuck them. And fuck you.

There are sir, many places in the third world where an individual superman can make himself rich. A Liberian militia, after all, costs much less than a diploma from an American university. It is painfully obvious, Mr. Connerly, that you are completely ignorant to the true appeal of living in a country like this, the true pleasures of living in the modern world. I will thank you sir, to take your grinding white-bread soulessness the hell out of my state, because we already have a surplus of that.

So What's the Deal with Baseball?

I've often noticed how baseball is associated with children and "purity" more than other sports. The recent steroid scandal revealed an entire universe of commentators who are horrified by the example that the chiseled ass-juicers are setting for the children.

It's not that baseball is the only sport where ill-behaved players are berated for the lessons they are supposedly teaching the children. There are, after all, many people in this world who are rather stupid, and stupid people tend to believe stupid things, such that there is an objective, universal standard of masculinity that can be taught to boys through athletics; that a man's path to fulfillment lies in the pyramid of obedience, to dominate his wife and children as the quarterback dominates his players, and to be dominated by his employer as the quarterback is dominated by his coach.

The most galling thing about those who think that rectal vaccination against pop-fly outs is damaging to the children is the obtuseness of those who worry. These are grown adults who simply can't imagine themselves not being influenced by professional athletes, who simply can't imagine not watching sports and certainly can't imagine their children not watching sports. While it's clear that kids in general and boys in particular have some sort of natural impulse to run and play and compete, this is a different thing entirely from watching thirty-year old men do the same thing. This is something that can be indoctrinated or not. It is a choice. Watching a documentary instead of football is not a sign that you or your children are gay, watching large men work themselves into a lather by slamming themselves into each other is.

But to get back to my original point, it is strange how baseball is associated with "the children" than other sports. Baseball teams will often try to sell themselves as "family friendly." (The K.C. Royals in particular will use this line. Children can hardly hear any foul words when there isn't anyone in the stadium to speak them now can they?) "Bring the kids to the park" goes the jingle.

Baseball than, in its idealized form, is bucolic,morally pure and child-friendly; in other words Marian. The manner in which baseball is idolized, the way in which the public sensibility is SHOCKED by any suggestion of naughtiness in the game, makes it clear that some point in our history the collective American conscience came to associate the game of baseball with white women.

It is a damned strange phenomenon, and I don't have the slightest clue for when, where, and how this came to be, but it's certainly clear enough now isn't it? Perhaps it's the fact that baseball has historically been played by more clean-cut crackers than other professional sports. (Barry Bonds as devil.) but than their is also the prevalence of Latinos, the hot other of the month, in the game, and the defenders of youthful virtue are at least publicly unbothered by this, so I don't know.

I had a history professor once who offered a class called "Baseball is America." A real jackass that guy.