Thoughts on Jindal's response.

"Kenneth from 30 Rock" comparisons are in vogue, as are comparisons to Mr. Rodgers. Jindal was wretched all right. He had been a popular contender for the 2012 GOP nomination, and probably still is even after his bizarre and thoroughly insulting speech. After all who else do they got?

Give Republicans credit for noticing how President Obama has inspired people with his personal story, how he has given national confidence a boost by displaying the incredible amount of social mobility there is in this country; in spite of efforts to retard that mobility made mostly by Republicans, but never mind.

So send out a brown skinned immigrant son of your own. One who has had a similarly impressive political rise. (A rise aided by the drowning of even browner people who had made Louisiana a reliably Democratic state, but never mind.) Put the young buck in front of a camera and have him spout sunshine and endless possibilities. That's all there is to the Obama formula, isn't there?

If you saw the response and wondered why Jindal was talking to you like a child it is because this is what conservatives consider anyone without power over others to be.

'Americans can do anything, so long as that blasted government isn't involved. Who can forget when General Motors landed on the moon, or Goodyear built the interstate highway system, or Dow Chemical invented the atomic bomb?'

Of all the things that went terribly, terribly wrong with Jindal's response, the stilted delivery, the childish tone, the robotic sloganeering, the biggest laugh lines undoubtedly came with what Jindal considers to be wasteful spending in the stimulus bill. His attempt to paint volcano monitoring as pie-in-the-sky pork just might be the most absurd statement ever made to the American public. Republicans have historically stressed the importance of order and security. Does Jindal really not see how volcano monitoring could be useful as far as that goes?



"Volcano monitors? What the hell could you possibly do with those? Those silly libs and their pipe dreams. LOL!!"


When Sarah Palin mocked government spending on fruit fly chromosome research (Responsible for the bulk of what we know about genetics.) I thought it had to be the absolute peak of Luddite madness. But apparently there's some sort of contest among GOP hopefuls to see who can dismiss the most undeniably useful government project as needless waste. Expect Mitt Romney to dismiss sewage treatment plants as socialist boondoggles any day now, and just how much hard-earned taxpayer money is being spent on those damned traffic lights anyway?

Also dismissed by Jindal was a proposed maglev line from Las Vegas to "Disneyland." Aka Los Angeles, aka the thirteenth largest metropolitan area in the world and certainly the biggest one without high-speed rail to other large cities in its own region.

The delusional dogma that private business is the only source of progress has caused the U.S. to fall technologically behind the filthy Eurotrash (not to mention the Chinese commies) in several important areas. I've commented before on how the Republican aversion to public transportation is particularly weird; considering that, if there is a choice between road and railroad, some sort of government spending is going to be involved either way.

The maglev train, (Short for magnetic levitation, perhaps Jindal mistook it for some sort of new-age cult.) is exactly what it sounds like, a train that can break 300 mph. running on magnetic rails. It's perfectly reasonable to put the Maglev on the short list for most badass invention of all time. The sort of thing Americans used to invent with regularity before we turned the free market into a jealous Old Testament God.

And at any rate we have our other cults to worry about; the cult of the automobile, which feeds into the cult of vast land ownership as universal ideal, which feeds into the cult of property ownership as source of personal dignity and sign of social worth. Americans can do anything. But if it involves challenging our all-encompassing dogmas of unshakable truth than never mind.

Or perhaps the difference between capitalistic highway spending and socialistic public transport spending lies in the amount of social interaction. The risk that families traveling by private car will actually talk to other different from themselves is quite low. The responsible driver can be counted on to listen to the music that he personally likes, eat the fast food that suits his own palliate, and generally develop his own personal taste for shit he would like to buy. Well fret not conservatives. Ever since the rise of the laptop and the mp3, citizens can be counted on to stay wrapped up in their own materialistic bubbles even in the largest of crowds.

Americans can do anything. All it takes is the willingness to accept that any internal improvements to the country in general would necessarily make life better for the stinking underclasses. That's fine by me. I am the stinking underclass. Yet I must admit that there is something admirable in the way leading Republicans are more or less honest in their belief that they prefer a descent into Bartertown over progress.




And now that I think about it, who the hell wouldn't?


Afterthought:

Caribou Madonna

Bill O'Reilly said that she sounded like the Wicked Witch of The East the other day. That would be funny, except the woman is eighty eight years old. everyone who lives that long has a voice that grows weak and quivery. (Right-wing bloggers have savaged Thomas for her opposition to the Iraq War, often grotesquely mocking the unattractiveness of a woman who, again, is eighty fucking eight. More mainstream conservative voices have cautiously pecked at Thomas in the manner that O'Reilly did the other day. The public generally respects Thomas and won't stand to see her take the all-out savaging on TV that she gets on the internet.)


Feminist groups publicly called for an apology from O'Reilly, and one of them, Women's Media Center, sent a representative to his show. O'Reilly demanded to know why Women's Media Center hadn't complained about Tina Fey's mockery of Sarah Palin. When the poor woman meekly said that she supported Palin's right to run, O'Reilly said that she failed to do so in "public debate" which is the same as never saying anything at all of course, and so the hypocrisy stood.

If this strikes you as an extremely odd apples and vaginae comparison, well then you should have heard the passionate conviction in O'Reilly's voice. Fey was a woman mocking another woman, sure. Political figures have historically been considered more open to ribbing then civilians, true. And at any rate it was done on a show dedicated to satire while O'Reilly's show is presented as a perfectly sober news program, fair enough. But the voice man. The voice.

The Tu quoque is very much in vogue with the right these days. Right-wing radio is full of 'when Bush did A liberals screamed bloody murder! But when Obama does B what do we hear from the mainstream media? Silence, that's what. and You know why? Because they're all a bunch of traitorous Marxist god-hating commie flag burning...'
The rhetorical impulse to reach for any tattered thread that could lead to a charge of hypocrisy against ones' opponent is of course a childish one, revealing a segment of the population that feels deeply powerless and afraid.

If you listen to all of this you-too overload you will find that Sarah Palin comes up quite a hell of a lot. ('Liberal woman does A, but when Sarah Palin, terrorist commies..) Even Palin herself got into the game, complaining that the media treated her much more harshly then east-coast elitist Caroline Kennedy. (This despite the very public split among New York Democrats regarding Kennedy and a chilly air of doubt on the NYT editorial page, and oh by the way the vice-president has a higher profile then a Senator.)

On the one hand it's easy to suspect that Palin was nominated to the vice-presidency partly because of the knowledge that normal political attacks wouldn't go over so well when directed against an attractive woman. On the other hand any sincere belief that all unflattering things said about women in the public eye are basically the same would reveal one's sexism much more clearly then some crack about Helen Thomas.

But perhaps there's a perfectly good explanation for this. Perhaps Republican lust for Palin has been transformed into something higher, even sanctified. When a woman is publicly criticized conservatives reflexively think of Palin not because she's a woman too but because she is Womanhood. Sarah Palin Mater Dei. Even now my mind drifts to thoughts of the Mother Of All Tender Mercies killing and gutting a reindeer, and it's unbearably erotic. Or that time Our Lady endured a birthing labor silently so that she could give a speech in Texas; damn that's hot. How could one not be inured to protect the vehicle of our Redemption from all vulgar insults and indulge her with any office she may request? This, my friends, is why Sarah Palin won't 'just go away' She is as eternal as the cloak of stars which covers her sacred loveliness, and all we her children can do is bow and sing ave.

Well, The Holocaust Sort of Came Up.

I was texting with Becky and she brought up the rehabilitation of the Holocaust-denying Bishop, and how it was causing a major ruckus in Europe, particularly in France. Though why a historically Catholic country that was occupied by the Nazis would worry about this sort of thing I don't know.

And it just got me thinking, of all the inconceivably moronic things that otherwise intelligent people believe, Holocaust denial, I mean seriously, where did the Jews go? Where did all of the skeletons come from? Fucking Holocaust denial.

Fuck.

I've Had The Flu This Week

I've been spending my twelve hours of wakefulness reading "Innocents Abroad" and editing the Wikipedia entry on Mean World Syndrome. This is how I convalesce. I'm getting better now, able to drink my usual daily dose of coffee, able to stand in 50 degree weather without being blinded by my own sweat, and I seem to have completely lost the taste for nicotine. We'll see if it holds this time.

Post D

"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world."
H.P. Lovecraft


"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

Confession

Its long been that the human word is by far the least reliable form of evidence in any court case. Deliberate lying from guilty persons or false accusers is a problem of course, but this isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

If sociological inquiry compelled me to beat a nun to death with a shovel in front of a stadium full of people, no two people out of thousands of witnesses would give the same description of me to the police. Ask any cop yourself and he'll tell you the same thing. Human beings tend to perceive passing glances of strangers to be much more accurate then they are. The human brain is morbidly obsessed with 'knowing". It has a hard-wired intolerance for ambiguity that is usually subconscious. The only way police "know" that witnesses are talking about the same person is if they generally agree on the most obvious physical characteristics; skin color, hair color, some unavoidably noticeable deformity, etc. Have you ever heard a conspiracy theorist make a big deal out of the fact that witnesses to the Tippet shooting described Lee Oswald as fat, bald, middle-aged, etc? Nothing at all suspicious, as it turns out. This is the norm.

To make things worse it turns out that all of the supposed walls between the rational brain and the emotional brain have never existed, and that imagining is essentially the same mental process as remembering. If I were to hold someone else in such contempt that I wouldn't be remotely surprised to hear that they killed somebody, it becomes very easy to start daydreaming about the hated foe doing just that, and then to become convinced that this daydream was a real-life murder that I was witness to. Real-life cases of this scenario are abundant. Just think of the elderly parents thrown in jail because of middle-aged children who suddenly remembered a hellish childhood of rape thanks to a "repressed memory specialist," or the child who feels he's disappointing an authority figure when a detective sternly asks him if he's "really sure" that his teacher didn't touch him inappropriately.

There is a scientific probability bordering on certainty that you, I , and everyone around us knows something that isn't true. The brain's hatred of ambiguity is just that strong, even for those of us who know it's there. So it goes without saying that people don't like to be told that they probably have a false belief or two, and when people hear a fact that's either unpleasant or frightening... Well, let's put it this way; global warming is a lie because Al Gore thinks he's better then me. Need I say more?

Why do I bring up Al Gore of all people? Well, it seems that the forces of intolerance for ambiguity and delusion are especially strong in societies that are educationally underachieving yet materially prosperous. Welcome to America, land of the spoiled, stupid, and clinically insane. The land where respectable conservative columnists cite Jack Bauer as justification for real-life torture with perfect, blissfully unaware sincerity.

Which finally brings us to our point; The sacred and mystical criminal confession. Police know full well that forensic evidence is far more reliable means of discerning the truth of some ugly occurrence. Still they stay awake past their children's bedtimes and stress themselves into early graves trying to squeeze the confession out of a perp. Because they know that's what the jury cares about more. There are plenty of cops aren't above going Jack Bauer to get the confession, not because they are manfully outraged by the continued cries of innocence from a man who evidence says is obviously guilty. Oh no, at least not usually. The fact of the matter is that when police beat a confession out of a subject it is typically due to a lack of evidence. Because they know what a jury will care about more.

Once when I was watching television I happened across an interview of jurors who had convicted a man of rape and then some years later was proven innocent by DNA. Not a single one of the jurors could bring themselves to believe it. How could a man possibly confess to a crime he didn't commit.? I killed three hookers last night. I'm three hundred and fifty seven years old. The planet Mars is my stillborn daughter. How could it possibly be done?

In order to accept that there is nothing special about a verbal confession we must first accept that there is nothing special about our own words, that there is no mystical force of truth in our own mental processes or interactions with each other.
As long as there are people who blame Darwin for the Holocaust, this simply isn't going to happen.

And so all the constitutional safeguards, all the grand notions of innocent until proven guilty, are nothing but wet toilet paper in the hands of a species that is universally schizophrenic.

The Schafly Impulse

Recall the end of "Pan's Labyrinth." The villainous stepfather, Captain Vidal, is perfectly willing to face death in a calm military manner until he is told that he will be persona-non-grata to his infant son. The desire for a male heir had been the only independent, internally conceived desire the loyal fascist had throughout the film. He is indifferent when his wife dies in the birthing of it, and he is perfectly willing to murder his stepdaughter to make sure the boy doesn't leave him. Vidal is a man who 'obeys simply to obey' while in turn violently enforcing obedience from those deemed subordinate to himself.

I once read a National Geographic article from the sixties in which the writer reported a Barcelona man who crossed himself at the sight of a digital watch. There are many who will accept oppression so long as there is someone beneath them that they can oppress themselves. More importantly we are inclined to accept oppression in return for the promise that society will not change. A society that doesn't change is one where new thoughts do not exist. A father can be assured that his son will inherit his own station, occupation, thoughts, and personality. Accept slavery and live forever.

And indeed it seems that Phyllis Schlafly, eighty-three and still zestfully battling The Other, will do just that. Madam Schlafly is a profoundly strange bird, an indisputable alpha-female who claims that there is no such thing as marital rape, who calls herself a homemaker by profession in spite of making a great deal of bread traveling the country to denounce the dark conspiracies of liberals.

One who reads the drivel of either the elder Schlafly or her dingbat Conservapedia founder son Andrew will clearly discover a morbid obsession with public education,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2009/jan09/psrjan09.html a passionate belief that schools are being used by all of the right's old boogeymen as social engineering factories. One is quickly reminded of the battle cry of fellow lunatic Gary Bauer "We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe."

The theocratic cranks of the world tend to wear themselves on their sleeves. To oppose them there is no need to conjure strawmen of secret thoughts as they do but merely comment on what they admit to. On the one hand there is a strong dose of intregalism here; the belief that society is an organic reflection of nature. In regards to sexuality this leads to a tendency to dismiss the academic distinction between sex (the physical ownership of a pee-pee or hoo-hah) and gender( the meaning that any given society ascribes to having one or the other) as mere politically correct twaddle. It simply doesn't occur to them that there was probably never any such thing as "naturally ordained" sex roles in the first place, that even if there were they couldn't possibly have been filtered through dozens of generations of human kink to emerge in the present day undistorted, and that finally there is no reason to think that human perception regarding sexuality is more accurate then our perception of anything else.

And so we have Madam Schafly's famous predictions of manditory unisex bathrooms and mass lesbianism during her anti-ERA crusade. If social gender is the same thing as natural sexuality, then it follows that the end of whatever legal privilege for this or that gender is the same thing as being physically desexed.

But Schafly would also rail against the dark specter of 'homosexual school teachers' in these halcyon rants, and this brings us back to the original point, slavery for immortality. Phyllis Schafly was willing to sign ownership of her vagina over to her husband in return for the comfort of knowing her place in the world. This was her choice, and people have been known to get quite a bit kinkier then that. So far so good. But Schafly had no hope of living forever unless she could compel all women to wear her gimps mask. Only when slavery is universal does time freeze and mortality cease, and slavery can only be universal when those who have already chained themselves control education. Andrew Schlafly's Conservapedia was built primarily as a home-schooling resource. He has referred to politics as "the battle for control of the future" The Schlafly hatred of education is not based on politics but dynasticism. Their core anger is not directed against pernicious ideas but simply ideas, not liberal teachers but simply anything that may influence their children besides themselves.

Phyllis Schlafly will die wealthy and well-aged. I do not begrudge her this. May every woman who is battered and forcibly kept ignorant in the name of an imaginary God someday enjoy the same fate. At any rate Schlafly has already lived to see her son John admit to flaming gayness and several other children grind through divorce and stunted relationships. The mirage of immortality has dissolved before her eyes, and now there is nothing left to do but spend her days warbling about lesbians and William Ayers for whoever will listen.

No one but each other in the modern right wing.

Don't You Dare Call Us Bitter You Big-City Commie Fagots

Village Voice food blogger Sarah DiGregorio, acting on the express orders of George Soros and William Ayers, wrote the sort of post that only the most degenerate America-hating atheist could possibly conceive of. She poked fun at the jello salad recipe of Rush Limbaugh's mother. This was clearly part of a coordinated attempt to vilify the Limbaugh family and thus destroy the conservative movement, leaving the Muslim Communists free to ship true Americans off to the gas chambers and be rid of their meddling once and for all. Rather than allow this to happen, a brave platoon of online ditto heads, temporarily blessed with Dear Leader's ability to know the hypocrisy of liberals secret thoughts, stepped forward to avenge this unspeakable outrage. Here's some of their comments. http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/index.php?pagenum=2

The media is out to destroy RUSH. Make him look loony! How the Democrats can't compete with ideas; so they are out to destroy Rush Limbaugh!

Clearly: http://www.270towin.com/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)

Liberals keeps attacking Rush for abusing drugs even though he had severe pain, but notice the liberal drive bys don't bring up the fact that our president, barack hussein obama has delved in drugs purely for recreation.
And...he can't stop his nicotine ADDICTION which is also a drug. A little unfairness going on here? Liberals cannot see the forest for the trees!!!
Elizabeth


This has got to be the most pathetic hit-piece EVER. Jello salads were a big thing in the middle class America of the 50s and 60s. Who CARES?


Most pathetic hit piece ever!! http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/23/of-donuts-and-dumb-celebrities/ (Ja, Ja, Ja)

"Sarah DiGregorio reminds me of man-hater feminazis' who never bothered to learn to cook themselves since that would be denegrating to women "of power" everywhere. Perhaps Mz. DiGregorio has a fine recipe passed down from her grandmother, something along the lines of "Che Guevara murdered-innocents topped with burned bra." She of the morning-after pill popping and nonsensical man-hater tirades."

In fairness, I think this might be a case of Poe's Law here. Nobody is this stu... what am I saying?

I dream of a day when yella can be mella, when the redman can get ahead man, when white will do what right, and when the black man will stop sell crack man.

Liberals, the champions of drug addicts and the down-and-out. They pick and choose who they attack. They call Rush Limbaugh a pill popper even though he was not convicted of anything. We see where the real prejudice comes from, the left.

Elizabeth is a cunt


Fight on brave warriors. Fight on.