Trapped In The Mirror Universe
Life in the United States of Bearded Spock
Friday, October 30, 2009
US interference in Latin American politics
...is okay when Obama does it. Seriously, this is just shameful. How disgusting.
(Via Transterrestrial Musings.)
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Generation Empty
Okay, today’s Slap ‘Em Silly treatment is this article from way back in January that I came upon. It’s—Well, let’s just say I haven’t come on this much smug self-regard since the last time I unwisely clicked on a link that led me to something with “manifesto” in the title. I don’t know why I do things like this. Things with “manifesto” in the title rarely fail to cause me irritation. Anyway, I haven’t given anyone a real good fisking in a while. It is time.
No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Twisted truth and half the news
I should have known Rick Sanchez was involved in the whole “Rush said this list of racist things!” lie-fest. Anyone who lived in Miami in the 80s and 90s knew who Rick Sanchez was. In short, he was a scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, if-it-bleeds-I’m-gettin’-my-cryin’-face-in-front-of-it fuckup when he was on the local news, and he’s still the same ball of rancid, smug, self-regarding assholery now that he’s a big deal on cable teevee news. It really is true that grease rises to the top, but when it comes to cookery it gets tossed out; in the professional news media it just gets promoted and promoted.
Some appropriate songs below the fold:
This strikes me as misconceived
The GOP recently redesigned their website. So many things are wrong with the new design, but what I noticed most was how much it looks like the flag of Communist China. I’m not crazy—here is a comparison of the two:
Their header graphic, which I nicked (click for a larger image):
And this is a photo of Red China’s flag (click for full size):
I almost thought the site was a parody, but it’s apparently authentic.
Anyway, it’s not that I haven’t had the urge to post, it’s that I can’t seem to get myself worked up to post anything here. I had set up this site on Posterous, just because it’s free and I wanted to see what they offered. Then I got a couple of emails saying people were following me, and I hate letting anyone down, so I wrote something. Here it is. I guess I’ll have to keep on updating the site from time to time. But a Posterous blog is easy to set up and use, any of you people who want a blog without having to go to a lot of trouble.
Update, October 18: I’m going to close comments on this one. It’s getting spam.
Just Bizarre • No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Friday, October 09, 2009
I woke up this morning, my head was so bad
This is the worst hangover that I ever had…
Not really, but when I woke up and my friend told me this news I, like Kathy, at first thought it had to be a joke—an Onion article, or something. But it’s twue, it’s twue! Porcelain unicorns across the land are getting bathed in tears of joy! Just ignore that war we’re still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq behind the curtain…
Added: the Volokh Conspiracy is starting a Top Ten Reasons Obama Won The Peace Prize list.
Added again: commentary on Ace of Spades.
And again: Tim Blair wonders, what for?
And one more time: how could I forget the Beer Summit? Of course, now it’s all clear. Those Scandis do love a good beer.
Just Bizarre • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Thursday, October 08, 2009
At Least Our Children Is Learning!
I’m so glad we voted in an intelligent, eloquent president after eight years of that dummy Bush!
As the world celebrates International Day of non-violence, US President Barack Obama on Thursday said America has its “roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi.”
He goes on to qualify it as “the America of today” but that still doesn’t wash. No, Mr. Obama, as much as you’d like to give credit for everything on Earth to someone, anyone else, I’m afraid that the roots of “the America of today,” and the philosophies of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all stem from that northern European phenomenon known as Western Culture, which was in turn spawned by the Middle-Eastern religion known as Christianity, not Islam. What did they teach Obama in that fancy Hawaiian private school—Surfing 101? Advanced Hula Dancing?
We have three more years of this? My head hurts.
(Via Hot Air and Kathy Shaidle.)
No Just No • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Monday, October 05, 2009
Reading for Dummies
The funniest comment to this post is this one:
Why is the Numa Numa guy on Blogging Heads?
Note to guys: if the bottom of your face is wider than the top of your face, don’t grow a beard. Anyway, why can’t Matthew Yglesias (who has one of those high, squeaky, beta male voices, by the way) just admit that he finds Clever, Ironic, Parodic, whatever, written-by-a-tragic-suicide-so-it-gets-moved-up-to-“important” giant long novel Infinite Jest boring, and that he doesn’t want to finish it? There’s no shame in that; even in the height of my reading mania (three books a day, DTs if my dad wouldn’t take me to the library) I was known to stop reading a book every now and then if I decided it wasn’t worth my time. But that’s not good enough for pseudo-intellectuals like Yglesias: they can’t admit that an “intellectual” activity like reading a long, acclaimed novel failed to keep their attention—that’s tantamount to treason to their peer group, for whom acts like reading things like Infinite Jest are worn like Eagle Scouts wear their badges, to show their accomplishments and gain status. So they tart up fake-o discussion topics like “Are Long Novels Still Worth Reading?” Hey, are home cooked meals still worth eating? Why, there’s all this fast food, so much of it, and restaurants too; why take the time and trouble to chop up onions and garlic and cook meat when you can have some reconstituted, regurgitated slop fried in oil by illegal Mexicans and handed to you ready to eat?
The Stand
It occurs to me that there are two basic kinds of ways of being in life. It’s not liberal vs. conservative or leftist vs. rightist. It’s like this:
There are people in the world, currently mostly to be found in positions of authority like the professional news and entertainment media, government, and academia, who are all about power and status and who’s in the “inner ring” (as C.S. Lewis called it), and who’s out. These people have no real friends or family as those terms have traditionally been recognized—they have associates and acquaintances (the way they talk about their friends—“she’s such a deeply spiritual person,” “he’s brutally honest”—“brutally honest” is powerspeak code for “rude and obnoxious and can’t be counted on to keep a secret”—“she’s so talented,” “he’s the most intelligent person I know”—the constant affirmations of the wonderfulness and specialness of them, is a clue to how shaky the relationships really are; real friends don’t need to blather on to everyone and sundry like this); and their intimate relationships are notoriously feeble and apt to break at the most trivial of pressures, such as the significant other leaving the toilet seat up or down, or voting Republican, or something. They are always waiting for the “right” moment—that is, the moment where it either won’t interfere with their incessant status-seeking or will enhance same—to have children. And so on.
Then there are people who don’t seek status or power, and it’s true that what you don’t seek you basically don’t have. They try to support themselves, by working and making money, but they don’t equate having a lot of money with being important in the larger scheme of things like the power-seekers do. And when it comes to friends and family, they don’t have an interchangeable set of bodies designed to get them further up the status ladder. They consider their friends and family to be both separate, individual people and part of the “team,” so to speak, and thus due for a certain amount of support no matter what they get into as individuals. I’ve vented frustration a few times at conservatives who put up with all manner of political nonsense from friends and family, but putting up with a certain amount of nonsense is seen as one of the normal conditions of life.
Anyway, the difference is brilliantly spelled out by Ann Coulter here in a response to high-status harpy Joyce Behar:
There is a liberal obsession with “tell us who your leader is.” And you realize why liberals want to know is because this is how they argue: they find who the leader is and they destroy him…. We’ve decided we’re not going with a leader this time, so you’re going to have to argue with us on the facts.”
Status-seeking liberals can’t function without someone over them both to tell them what to think (not so much what to do) and to try to drag down so they can replace him with another, “more perfect,” leader. Conservatives these days—or not so much conservatives but the people the powerful hold in contempt—have been making the mistake of trying to find a “leader” in this mold, but once that is done he becomes one of the powerful and gets sucked into the status-seeking maw and thus becomes useless. (That’s the other way they get you, see—if they can’t beat you, they’ll get you to join them. The only way back from this fate is to relinquish the power, but power is very alluring—only a few people in my lifetime have voluntarily relinquished it before it ate them up; Sarah Palin is one of these.) The only way to deal with this routine is to treat each other like a family or a team, and neither make celebrity leaders nor help the opposition drag them down. With all their talk of “the masses” and “the people,” the liberal Powers That Be can’t stand against an entire group.
Anyway, that’s why I won’t jump on the Glenn Beck-bashing bandwagon. I don’t listen to him—I don’t listen to talk radio—but he is entitled to his opinion as anyone else. And he’s one of us—you don’t throw family members under the bus.
(Via Kathy Shaidle.)
Of Interest • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Well there goes that dream (Update: or is it an even stranger, deeper dream?)
I remember somebody—I think it was Kathy Shaidle—wrote something about how Twitter seemed to be free of the trolling and comment fights that have infested blogs and forums and so on. I didn’t expect that pleasant state of affairs to last—and it seems it hasn’t. Unless this guy’s Twitter site is some sort of elaborate prank, because otherwise it seems that someone has figured out that Twitter is a great, near-anonymous way for people with little writing talent to vent those “bad thoughts” that would otherwise be confined to the bumper stickers on their Prii, and they can still attack other Twitterers, if not as directly as on a comment or forum thread.
Update: you know, the more I go through this guy’s tweets, the more I am beginning to think this is some kind of performance art thing, someone pretending to be a kind of distilled essence of the most obnoxious BDS-suffering troll. Because no one could be this idiotic and stupid, not in this day and age. Could they? Then again, looking back at some of my old comment threads on previous blogs... On the other hand, at least my trolls were pretentious and snotty in an over-educated way. I observed a while back that the quality of trolls in blogville had gone way down, almost as if the original pack of trolls, having some modicum of brain power, eventually found better things to do (like get lives, jobs…) leaving only their retarded cousins in the basement.
Friday, October 02, 2009
More Nanny Government Interference
Did you know that the Obama administration has banned the sale of “flavored cigarettes” (like the goths’ beloved cloves) because they “lure adolescents into smoking”? Well thank you, Mommy President! Now the kids can go back to smoking Marlboros and other Big Tobacco brands, as God intended.
Seriously, this is ridiculous. Adolescents are “lured” into smoking for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones being that it pisses off purse-lipped no-fun we-only-want-what’s-best-for-you types like the ones in the anti-smoking (which mostly means, anti-smokers; no one is proposing actually shutting Phillips-Morris down, which would create havoc in Washington) movement. Personally, I wouldn’t smoke, but I will admit now that I find the aroma of unburned tobacco pleasant, and the scent of clove cigarettes even more pleasant and also evoking of that long-ago time when I stood around in over-airconditioned clubs where the only light came from a few candles on the bar and you didn’t have to talk to your friends and it was impossible anyway because you wouldn’t be heard over the Sisters of Mercy song currently playing. I had actually thought of buying a pack of cloves and sticking them in my car, just so I could have that aroma. Now I can’t, thanks to our new Hope and Change government that Cares About Our Children Better Than We Do.
Here, anyway, is a helpful article from Boing-Boing on how to roll your own, since they haven’t been able to ban people from making their own cigarettes. Yet. You just wait.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Neque femina amissa pudicitia alia abneurit
That means “when a woman has lost her chastity, she will shrink from no crime.” Tacitus said it, and I believe it. Exhibit number 1: Anne Applebaum, distinguished Washington Post columnist, has written an opinion piece deriding the recent arrest of Roman Polanski by Swiss authorities for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old in this country. Anne Applebaum just happens to be married to a Polish minister who is trying to get the charges against Polanski dropped. This is as loud and clear an example of conflict of interest as there can be, but leaving that aside, it’s time for women to admit that without supreme exertion of will (which we used to call “self-discipline” but that term has fallen out of vogue—I think it’s racist or something), women will always succumb to whatever whims and follies their male bed partners are into. Women are naturally drawn to men with stronger wills than theirs, which is the real reason the halls and byways are littered with unattached beta “nice guy” males. Women in America are raised to “think for themselves” but we forgot to tell them what to think, so they fall back on feelings, which they’ve confused with thought. Mrs. Sikorski’s husband probably didn’t even have to ask; she probably just listened sympathetically like a good wife and went to her computer. I’m just surprised the WaPo went along with it…
Wait, no I’m not. Polanski has made a bunch of movies, none of which have added anything of importance to Western Culture (but these days that’s a plus, not a minus), that inexplicably have garnered all sorts of learned accolades and awards. I’m sure Hollywood’s love of Polanski is based on his European origins and the burnish of having a murdered wife and a sex crime charge didn’t hurt either, though an American director would never get the same sort of sympathy, even if he had a whole passel of slaughtered relatives. And if an American director had turned out the sort of bloody slash-flicks sprinkled with the condiment of ersatz “European” attitude that is most of Polanski’s oeuvre he’d have been called a trashy grade B movie hack. Only certain types of men get a pass in status-symbol land.
(Via Ann Althouse.)
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Carter II
Obama doesn’t care about victory. Good. Then he won’t mind losing the election in 2012.
Seriously—Anybody/Anybody 2012. I don’t care if it’s Carrot Top/Krusty the Clown.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Reading is fundamental
The definition of a leftist is someone who insists that the phrase “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, …” means something totally different from “He’s just a guy in my neighborhood,” when in fact the latter is a paraphrase of the former. Do we know what “paraphrase” means, children? Well, we seem to be the only ones.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
On Tenther Hooks
These are apparently the scariest words in the English language to ReProgressives:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
No really—they’re trying to turn “Tenther” into the new sneerlabel for us crazy rightwingers. Radley Balko at Reason quotes:
More important, there is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance.
*Giggle* Did these peoples’ parents have any children that lived? Seriously, I agree with Balko—anyone who writes that it’s authoritarian to forbid the government from being authoritarian for something “the American people” want (hey, the death penalty for murderers is popular too among “the American people” but I’ll bet you Ian Millhiser at The American Prospect doesn’t want congress to make that policy across the land) is being disingenuous at best. Anyway, call me a “Tenther.” I can take it.
Monday, September 21, 2009
“Progressives” are behind the times
They don’t even understand how cable tv works when it comes to revenue as opposed to network tv: in short, network tv programs are dependent upon ads, but cable tv is dependent upon subscriber fees. And that’s why boycotts against cable tv shows that target the show’s advertisers don’t work.
The subscriber-revenue thing, by the way, is something I figured out way back in the days when I first got cable, which was in the 80s, when the idea was that cable television wouldn’t have all those ads cutting up shows like the ones on network tv. This turned out not to be the case for many stations, but the money must be good, and the advertisers as well must be happy that they don’t have to worry so much about all those Aunt Mabels in Aurora, Illinois who write in threatening to stop buying Crisco because they heard someone on tv say “dammit!” Or today’s equivalent, the “activists” who want to remove Aunt Mable and her conservative values from the airwaves.
(Full disclosure: I have never seen the Glenn Beck show and don’t have any interest in doing so, and I currently don’t even have television—the friend I’m staying with doesn’t watch it. I don’t miss it, since I can get anything I want from the internet.)
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