Here in By God Southeastern Appalachian Ohio one day I sat in a judges chambers and listened to him rant about people who wear camo everywhere. To be fair it was pretty funny. Then we went out to try the case and my client sat head to toe in camo. I did briefly consider asking him to recuse himself for prejudice.
They annoy me in the same way SUVs in the mall parking lot annoy me. I imagine the SUV spends just as much time offroad as the guy in the next booth in the Denny's decked out in camo does hunting. Don't get me wrong, though, I'd rather they wore camo than hunted, and I'd rather they kept their fucking SUVs off of the fragile landscape. I just think they're assholes.
Here in deep-blue Vermont, hunting is sacred. I know lots of people who hunt, nearly all of them are liberals. And the main reason that fewer and fewer of my hunting friends are getting out to their tree stands is because of work. Their jobs have slowly morphed into 50- and 60-hour weeks, leaving no time to pursue Bambi and friends. So it ain't pressure from Brooklyn SJWs that is depressing hunters--it's the invisible hand of the magic marketplace.
I had one hunter acquaintance who's cut way back on his hunting time for two reasons: (1) he's pretty good and he bags his limit early, and (2) the number of nitwits with rifles in the woods scares the crap out of him. He only hunts on private land now, and won't go near the national forests.
Lots of willies in his prose. Was Kevin bullied by mean "secular-urban....MFA types" who shoved spit-lathered fingers in his ears? It would explain so much.
"Also, as anyone who followed the saga of Cecil the Lion will know, it’s not just liberals who find big-game assholes disgusting; it’s the much larger and more diverse group of people who like animals and want to pet and love them instead of blowing them away with an elephant gun."
I don't know hometown hunters the way I used to, but back in the day they belonged to that group. Nothing but contempt for people who killed animals they didn't intend to eat. They may have tended to vote Republican, but Junior and Eric and their dude wardrobes would absolutely not impress them, and they'd be mostly creeped out by the adoration of Kevin D. Williamson and Victor Davis Hanson.
Get thee to Texas, where many ranchers have given up on cattle and now have their range stocked with oryx and gazelle, zebra and gnu--all for well-heeled hunters like the Trump spawn to come shoot at.
It's not just hunter number that aren't getting stronger, it's the game numbers, too, both in terms of species and populations. If they want to take some shots at rats, I'm cool with that. But no, they're in it for the lions and the bears and the big buck elk. Take a lesson from the dodo. It doesn't do us a lot of good to mount the last of a species in a museum or a trophy room, for chrissakes. But the dickhead fisher/hunter I know thinks "critically endangered" seems like an excellent reason to try to bag his before they're gone. Fortunately, he's dumb as fuck and broke as hell, so I'd be amazed if he could afford the bus fare to the sturgeon hatchery, let alone a canned rhino hunt. ... Also, nothing says "tough guy" to me like someone who calls people "cupcake". What the fuck are you, Strawberry Shortcake?
Dunno much about the large-animal situation in your neck of the woods, but deer and bear are problems around me. As the climate warms, the bears are not hibernating like they used to. If we're lucky, they bed down some time around Christmas and come back out in March. If we're not, they may take a nap in January. Otherwise, they're out foraging, which means they're in your bird feeders, in your trashcans, or (more often these days) in your kitchen ripping the cabinets off the walls as they try to steal your box of Lucky Charms. The deer are actually worse because they've now developed the delightful habit of running into stopped or even parked cars--that in addition to playing chicken with cars at night on the highway. My sister in Florida just had her flower shop's van crunched in by a deer that ran into it at a stop sign. $5,000 worth of damage. So I got no problem with the local hunters shooting the deer and bear. Come and get 'em, I say, because they're badly overpopulating.
My damn suburb has a freakin' herd of deer in it, and a couple of them have figured out how to suck the birdseed out of the bird feeders, so now those have to get taken down and locked away every night. A couple counties over one town decided to have an urban archery season, figuring that was safe enough. (You're required to hunt from a stand, so you're firing the arrow downwards and any misses wind up in the ground.) Turn 'em all into bambi-burgers and good riddance to 'em, I say.
When did National Review turn from old school conservatives like William F Buckley (yachts, white wine, Atlantic crossings) to Texans shooting and gutting hogs? Buckley must be rolling in his grave.
There was always room in the movement for class war, and though National Review used to have a few good writers, I don't remember any of them convincingly describing people any lower than upper middle class.
"...the sort of thing that gives the willies to your familiar irony-dipped secular-urban Brooklyn-dwelling MFA types..."
I've always been left laffing and gasping at this sort of self-parodying two-fisted, he-man, "Now it's time for what THIS GUY thinks" bullshit, but I think I've figured out what it is. It's the pundit/op-ed version of fan fiction: idealized, imititative-of-one's-elders-and-betters, suggestive of desperation masquerading as confidence. And, of course, he does what all wingnuts do when they write about the real world, as opposed to about ideas--he serves up stereotypes and then critiques them or mocks them, and thinks he's actually said something.
Even if this dork wrote about ideas though, he wouldn't actually write about ideas. He'd serve up a stereotype of the ideas and then critique that. Defensive mockery is integral to the rightwing mindset. I mean Trump wins and "liberal media" goes on a bender with 10,000 Cletus Safari features to understand just how the other side feels. When Trump gets his ass handed to him (please God) by Gillibrand or whoever in 2020, how much effort will rightwing media make to understand her voters or ideas? I will bet much, much less than zero. Saying nothing useful is central to their point.
You know, when I wrote "ideas" I paused and thought, Do I really mean that? But of course you're right. They'd stereotype the good ones ("freedom," "opportunity") and hype them without shame, and then the bad ones ("political correctness," "socialism") and condemn them without a speck of intellectual honesty. All this proceeds from the fact that the rightwing has nothing affirmative to offer normal, non-millionaire-type people EXCEPT cliches. Certainly not legislation or public policies. Rightwing media does literally nothing in good faith. There is no difference between its pundit/op-ed output and raw propaganda.
Oh yes, and to keep this train a-rollin: Yesterday NPR (increasingly a disaster) was softball-interviewing an Orange County Republican, and she lamented what a bunch of racist loons her party has become. "We used to represent freedom, and liberty!" And I thought: But neither of those words means a specific, agreed-on thing, though. Neither is a policy. You basically spent 40 years campaigning on the line, "Unlike that Founders-hating *other* side, we're FOR the Holy Miasma!" If you wanted to produce serious and decent citizens, then you should have proposed honest policies using math and science and empathy. Because being "for liberty" is how you end up with a camp full of racist loons.
I hate to seem like one of those trigger snowflakes &c, and no doubt Williamson would hold me in the greatest contempt, but would it maybe possibly be possible to NOT open letters with pictures of grinning psychopaths with their slaughtered megafauna? It's not a pleasant image to start the day with.
The funny part here is that between the parasites (feral pigs are lousy with 'em) and the testosterone in the boars(it makes the meat inedibly rank), feral hogs usually aren't eaten--so there's no reason to gut them. People hunt them because they're goddamn pests, an invasive species that does a lot of damage, and nobody cares if you plug half a dozen.
The use of symbols in propaganda, even from Roman times always portrays the propagandiser’s faction as heroic and therefore lion-hearted. (Sorry Cecil).
Unfortunately, K.D.W. falls far short of Roman requirements, except perhaps for the fifth one;
“An orator should be required the sharpness of a logician’s mind, the thinking of a philosopher, the expression similar to that of a poet, the memory of a legal expert, the voice of a tragedian and, I would say, the gestures of a famous actor. Therefore, there is nothing rarer in this world than a perfect orator”. - Cicero. http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/V3103/pdf
On another note, I had an very annoying camo-bedecked acquaintance who relentlessly machoed it up at every opportunity. He dropped dead at 55, his heart a victim of the amphetamines that propped up his act.
Sometimes the stupid shamelessness of the bullshit (not to mention retarded logic) is awesome. Williamson: "There’s no such thing as clean energy... even the great green god of solar power must bow to that reality: Do you know what the panels that photovoltaic cells are mounted in are made of? They are made of polyester. Do you know what polyester is made of? It is made of oil."
See? Using (as opposed to burning) a relatively small fraction of extracted fossil fuels to manufacture things that don't pollute the atmosphere while creating decades-worth of energy is somehow "dirty", just like destroying the climate by burning millions of tons of those same fossil fuels. See? Solar energy can't be clean because you need oil to make stuff like Mylar film, and extracting oil is just as dirty as burning it. Consider yourselves owned, libtards!
Is it any wonder that conservatives are the No. 1 market for scams? To a conservative, what Williamson is presenting is air-tight reasoning. His logic is geometric and inescapable. So, yeah--libtards be owned! But the same facility of reasoning that sees Williamson's bullshit a pure logic also hears Alex Jones talking about his special vitamin formula that contains secret ingredient R-236 (so potent it has not only been banned by the government, but pharmaceutical companies have banded together in a worldwide effort to wipe all references to it from existence!) and they think "Wow! Shut up and take my money because that's gotta work great!"
Here in By God Southeastern Appalachian Ohio one day I sat in a judges chambers and listened to him rant about people who wear camo everywhere. To be fair it was pretty funny. Then we went out to try the case and my client sat head to toe in camo. I did briefly consider asking him to recuse himself for prejudice.
They annoy me in the same way SUVs in the mall parking lot annoy me. I imagine the SUV spends just as much time offroad as the guy in the next booth in the Denny's decked out in camo does hunting. Don't get me wrong, though, I'd rather they wore camo than hunted, and I'd rather they kept their fucking SUVs off of the fragile landscape. I just think they're assholes.
Here in deep-blue Vermont, hunting is sacred. I know lots of people who hunt, nearly all of them are liberals. And the main reason that fewer and fewer of my hunting friends are getting out to their tree stands is because of work. Their jobs have slowly morphed into 50- and 60-hour weeks, leaving no time to pursue Bambi and friends. So it ain't pressure from Brooklyn SJWs that is depressing hunters--it's the invisible hand of the magic marketplace.
I had one hunter acquaintance who's cut way back on his hunting time for two reasons: (1) he's pretty good and he bags his limit early, and (2) the number of nitwits with rifles in the woods scares the crap out of him. He only hunts on private land now, and won't go near the national forests.
Lots of willies in his prose. Was Kevin bullied by mean "secular-urban....MFA types" who shoved spit-lathered fingers in his ears? It would explain so much.
Maybe they just gave him a B- and told him to turn off the adjective fountain, which made him feel small.
Cut to a National Review desk jockey furtively stabbing an imaginary boar with a letter opener.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
"Also, as anyone who followed the saga of Cecil the Lion will know, it’s not just liberals who find big-game assholes disgusting; it’s the much larger and more diverse group of people who like animals and want to pet and love them instead of blowing them away with an elephant gun."
I don't know hometown hunters the way I used to, but back in the day they belonged to that group. Nothing but contempt for people who killed animals they didn't intend to eat. They may have tended to vote Republican, but Junior and Eric and their dude wardrobes would absolutely not impress them, and they'd be mostly creeped out by the adoration of Kevin D. Williamson and Victor Davis Hanson.
Get thee to Texas, where many ranchers have given up on cattle and now have their range stocked with oryx and gazelle, zebra and gnu--all for well-heeled hunters like the Trump spawn to come shoot at.
It's not just hunter number that aren't getting stronger, it's the game numbers, too, both in terms of species and populations. If they want to take some shots at rats, I'm cool with that. But no, they're in it for the lions and the bears and the big buck elk. Take a lesson from the dodo. It doesn't do us a lot of good to mount the last of a species in a museum or a trophy room, for chrissakes. But the dickhead fisher/hunter I know thinks "critically endangered" seems like an excellent reason to try to bag his before they're gone. Fortunately, he's dumb as fuck and broke as hell, so I'd be amazed if he could afford the bus fare to the sturgeon hatchery, let alone a canned rhino hunt. ... Also, nothing says "tough guy" to me like someone who calls people "cupcake". What the fuck are you, Strawberry Shortcake?
Dunno much about the large-animal situation in your neck of the woods, but deer and bear are problems around me. As the climate warms, the bears are not hibernating like they used to. If we're lucky, they bed down some time around Christmas and come back out in March. If we're not, they may take a nap in January. Otherwise, they're out foraging, which means they're in your bird feeders, in your trashcans, or (more often these days) in your kitchen ripping the cabinets off the walls as they try to steal your box of Lucky Charms. The deer are actually worse because they've now developed the delightful habit of running into stopped or even parked cars--that in addition to playing chicken with cars at night on the highway. My sister in Florida just had her flower shop's van crunched in by a deer that ran into it at a stop sign. $5,000 worth of damage. So I got no problem with the local hunters shooting the deer and bear. Come and get 'em, I say, because they're badly overpopulating.
My damn suburb has a freakin' herd of deer in it, and a couple of them have figured out how to suck the birdseed out of the bird feeders, so now those have to get taken down and locked away every night. A couple counties over one town decided to have an urban archery season, figuring that was safe enough. (You're required to hunt from a stand, so you're firing the arrow downwards and any misses wind up in the ground.) Turn 'em all into bambi-burgers and good riddance to 'em, I say.
Holy Hell, trigger warning on the giraffe carnage, man. Was not ready for that first thing.
I'll try to be more aware in the future.
When did National Review turn from old school conservatives like William F Buckley (yachts, white wine, Atlantic crossings) to Texans shooting and gutting hogs? Buckley must be rolling in his grave.
There was always room in the movement for class war, and though National Review used to have a few good writers, I don't remember any of them convincingly describing people any lower than upper middle class.
When the Koch's (oil) money turned the John Birch Society into a thing.
"...the sort of thing that gives the willies to your familiar irony-dipped secular-urban Brooklyn-dwelling MFA types..."
I've always been left laffing and gasping at this sort of self-parodying two-fisted, he-man, "Now it's time for what THIS GUY thinks" bullshit, but I think I've figured out what it is. It's the pundit/op-ed version of fan fiction: idealized, imititative-of-one's-elders-and-betters, suggestive of desperation masquerading as confidence. And, of course, he does what all wingnuts do when they write about the real world, as opposed to about ideas--he serves up stereotypes and then critiques them or mocks them, and thinks he's actually said something.
Even if this dork wrote about ideas though, he wouldn't actually write about ideas. He'd serve up a stereotype of the ideas and then critique that. Defensive mockery is integral to the rightwing mindset. I mean Trump wins and "liberal media" goes on a bender with 10,000 Cletus Safari features to understand just how the other side feels. When Trump gets his ass handed to him (please God) by Gillibrand or whoever in 2020, how much effort will rightwing media make to understand her voters or ideas? I will bet much, much less than zero. Saying nothing useful is central to their point.
You know, when I wrote "ideas" I paused and thought, Do I really mean that? But of course you're right. They'd stereotype the good ones ("freedom," "opportunity") and hype them without shame, and then the bad ones ("political correctness," "socialism") and condemn them without a speck of intellectual honesty. All this proceeds from the fact that the rightwing has nothing affirmative to offer normal, non-millionaire-type people EXCEPT cliches. Certainly not legislation or public policies. Rightwing media does literally nothing in good faith. There is no difference between its pundit/op-ed output and raw propaganda.
Oh yes, and to keep this train a-rollin: Yesterday NPR (increasingly a disaster) was softball-interviewing an Orange County Republican, and she lamented what a bunch of racist loons her party has become. "We used to represent freedom, and liberty!" And I thought: But neither of those words means a specific, agreed-on thing, though. Neither is a policy. You basically spent 40 years campaigning on the line, "Unlike that Founders-hating *other* side, we're FOR the Holy Miasma!" If you wanted to produce serious and decent citizens, then you should have proposed honest policies using math and science and empathy. Because being "for liberty" is how you end up with a camp full of racist loons.
Republican policy has been reduced to Cleek's Law and tax cut for the ultra wealthy.
I can't figure out why this isn't exactly right. Thanks! I guess... (I didn't know what Cleek's Law was, so THAT was helpful.)
I hate to seem like one of those trigger snowflakes &c, and no doubt Williamson would hold me in the greatest contempt, but would it maybe possibly be possible to NOT open letters with pictures of grinning psychopaths with their slaughtered megafauna? It's not a pleasant image to start the day with.
Sorry, pal. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is as inured to violent imagery as I am.
We live in an antiseptic world, and there is no cure for that quite like gutting a Texas feral hog or roasting a pheasant you shot yourself.
What are the odds that our Kevin has never shot and gutted a feral hog. I suppose he may have shot a pheasant, but I doubt he gutted it if he did.
The funny part here is that between the parasites (feral pigs are lousy with 'em) and the testosterone in the boars(it makes the meat inedibly rank), feral hogs usually aren't eaten--so there's no reason to gut them. People hunt them because they're goddamn pests, an invasive species that does a lot of damage, and nobody cares if you plug half a dozen.
The use of symbols in propaganda, even from Roman times always portrays the propagandiser’s faction as heroic and therefore lion-hearted. (Sorry Cecil).
Unfortunately, K.D.W. falls far short of Roman requirements, except perhaps for the fifth one;
“An orator should be required the sharpness of a logician’s mind, the thinking of a philosopher, the expression similar to that of a poet, the memory of a legal expert, the voice of a tragedian and, I would say, the gestures of a famous actor. Therefore, there is nothing rarer in this world than a perfect orator”. - Cicero. http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/V3103/pdf
On another note, I had an very annoying camo-bedecked acquaintance who relentlessly machoed it up at every opportunity. He dropped dead at 55, his heart a victim of the amphetamines that propped up his act.
Sometimes the stupid shamelessness of the bullshit (not to mention retarded logic) is awesome. Williamson: "There’s no such thing as clean energy... even the great green god of solar power must bow to that reality: Do you know what the panels that photovoltaic cells are mounted in are made of? They are made of polyester. Do you know what polyester is made of? It is made of oil."
See? Using (as opposed to burning) a relatively small fraction of extracted fossil fuels to manufacture things that don't pollute the atmosphere while creating decades-worth of energy is somehow "dirty", just like destroying the climate by burning millions of tons of those same fossil fuels. See? Solar energy can't be clean because you need oil to make stuff like Mylar film, and extracting oil is just as dirty as burning it. Consider yourselves owned, libtards!
Is it any wonder that conservatives are the No. 1 market for scams? To a conservative, what Williamson is presenting is air-tight reasoning. His logic is geometric and inescapable. So, yeah--libtards be owned! But the same facility of reasoning that sees Williamson's bullshit a pure logic also hears Alex Jones talking about his special vitamin formula that contains secret ingredient R-236 (so potent it has not only been banned by the government, but pharmaceutical companies have banded together in a worldwide effort to wipe all references to it from existence!) and they think "Wow! Shut up and take my money because that's gotta work great!"