Noonan may have had to open the second Scotch bottle to get through this column. But really, Roy is right that she has her own kind of logic – why buck the rightwing tide when you can let yourself be carried along with the current?
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain the only truly moderate Republicans.
Donald J. Trump was (and is) the Greatest American President America has ever had. Donald J. Trump knew from the get-go that the King-Flu was Chinese bio-weapon unleashed on America to kill Americans and cripple America's economy, which was the greatest economy on Earth at the time. And Donald J. Trump knew that the Chinese had committed this act of war upon America.
And because he was the Greatest American President America has ever had, the strongest bestest manliest man of a president, he responded to this Chinese open act of war that was killing tens of thousands of Americans. He responded by, um, suggesting Americans inject themselves with Lysol, or maybe shove a fishtank light up their asses. And then, seeing that the Chinese were continuing to make war upon the United States, Donald J. Trump responded by telling Americans the election was going to be rigged. Because that's what war-time presidents do--they attack their own country.
That raises the Q they won't and can't answer: So why did Donnie allow ~50% of the US Covid deaths to happen? Why did he fail to act?
"I mean we unsophisticated news consumers all know that the Lab Leak is proven, right? It just stands to reason."
Dean Baquet famously stated that the Times' reportage can fail, so to speak, because his readers can suss out the truth. People relying on other outlets ad social networks maybe can't suss?
Anyway.
What cracks me up about the media's masturba-- I mean self-criticism regarding the origins of Covid is that I'm sure that the resistance (!!) to the lab leak theory is that came from Donnie who is a serial liar, was spewing racist shit at the same time and, like nearly always, produced no proof. Hey, maybe if Donnie wasn't such a huge piece of shit of a human being there would have been no issue of the possibility or whatever of a lab leak? Good Q meanwhile: Why is one theory likelier than the other now?
And the bigger laugh at this point: How the Covid developed is way, way less important than turning a global pandemic into a much less deadly and more manageable endemic.
And back to how: The wet market/bat cooties theory gets requires, ultimately, an acknowledge of climate change, something neither the ruling class nor their media care to acknowledge with any depth or seriousness.
I apologize for the verbosity. Noonan and the rest of the monkey turd tossers are worth it. She had an off week and the WSJ op-ed page needs its quota of, uh, well, batshit craziness. The audience must be served.
That's silly. I mean half of all covid deaths Donnie's fault. Do you actually believe those CDC figures? There are really no covid deaths at all. It is all smoke and mirrors. Of course those who did die were al the fault of the Chinese who are as we all know evil.
Shoulda been clear: while the wet market/bats theory requires acknowledging and discussing climate change, the mainstream media never would do any such thing.
“Journalistic traditionalists” [eyeroll] — in addition to being a mendacious hack with an empty gin bottle where her soul ought to be, Noonan is such a bad writer. Sure, she uses nice words and gets them in the right order, but there are so many of them, so many more than necessary, and her baroque sentences plop to the deck like an enormous tangle of fishing line.
I find it hard to believe this is a column in reputable newspaper, which just shows my biases (and naivete) about journalistic and editorial integrity. A friend wanted me to tone it down if not turn it off about Republicans being crooks or rubes. "Okay, you protested about police brutality towards black folks, and we get it. Now let's all just go back to how it was before. You have emoted enough." Change is something we used to have in our pockets, a thing of the past, 1960's, I think. Actual transactions are now plastic or virtual. Nobody need be concerned by color or content or character, right?
Well it was the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page which isn't particularly reputable. There news was pretty good before the Murdoch's bought it, but the Op-Eds have been trash for a long time.
I am way out of touch with the news media! I used to read a lot of papers 30 years ago. Subscribed to magazines. I still get Scientific American. That's it. I rely on Roy to keep me infotained now.
Oh yes! It's all your fault I'm part of the ignorant electorate. We might as well all move to Romania or Pacoima. Then we'd be happy right where we are, dammit.
Our categories and terminology have been exceeded by the predominance of misinformation and prejudicially based delusions that now determine the course of American politics. Something isn't right with the brains of many Americans. They process the world through a haze of error and ignorance. I know we have long considered other peoples at other times to have been misguided in their beliefs, from preindustrial societies to the antebellum South, but we're deluded to think that the incredible expansion of factual knowledge about the world since the Enlightenment has stopped this apparently inevitable reversion to self-affirming fantasy. Noonan has the legal right to publish this senseless drivel but the harm all this shit does to our ability to function as a civilization is immeasurable. The temptation to call it a mental illness is wrong, but what do we call this phenomenon of willfully embracing all things false? Bob Altermeyer, following Adorno, said it is an authoritarian personality and has lots of evidence to support that interpretation. Do we stop calling them sick and fascist and adopt that label? Or will it be coopted by the very people it describes and thrown back against humanitarian efforts, like prescriptive epidemiology?
Well, okay, maybe the virus DID come from a lab leak. Maybe not; maybe so. I have no emotional investment in this. But the way wingnuts are acting all gleeful about the possibility...what do they think is going to happen, exactly? Are we going to war with China? Or is it just "hah, see, my anti-Chinese racism was JUSTIFIED, as it will be going forward forevermore!?" In spite of everything, I still find this pathology astounding.
If it did come from a lab leak, then wingnuts and MAGA and etc. will use that fact to "prove" that everything Trump said or says, no matter how insane or false, is also true.
I see your problem, you're thinking. Try to see this as a conservative would: "how does this argument make me feel?". Obviously, you can't trust China, they're tricksy and evil. So of course they'd create a deadly virus to make everyone sick. Since they are not America, they screwed up and It "got out" somehow, the petty details of how that would work, like massive undetectable voter fraud, don't matter. It feels right, so it must be true.
I've asked and answered the question, "What is it about Noonan's writing that is so nauseating?" more times than I can count. So why stop now?
Ordinary conservative writing addresses, in varying degrees of bad faith and mendacity, the realm of facts (e.g., "There were good reasons to think Saddam possessed WMD's."). Even when asserting opinions, they affect to base them on objective truth, however much they omit, distort, or ignore that truth in the service of their foreordained conclusions.
Noonan's beat, though, is *feeling.* She presents herself as being above the vulgar fray of arguing about evidence and slugging it out over opinions. She fancies herself wise in the ways of human nature, and her analyses are always rooted in her (superior) understanding of "how people are." She doesn't try to persuade, because--since she spends her time defending the indefensible, when not ignoring it completely--how could she? No, she affects to enlighten.
This is the source of her immense, suffocating disingenuousness--which is to say, her bad faith that seeks to pass as better-than-good faith. She's a conservative op-ed flack for the Wall Street Journal who asks us to see her as an advice columnist with whom we *already* agree, because isn't that how people are?
"We like to be in a fight—'Albion’s Seed'—and on a side."
It's a small thing, but that right there is where I have a problem. 'Cause if she'd actually *read* David Hackett Fischer's book, she'd know that's not at all what the book's about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
She's clearly still feeling her way in this strange new land. I mean, what other choice does she have? The only Never-Trumpets making coin are political operatives, what's she going to do, a (ugh) podcast? She hits the bullet points pretty well, though oddly: "shut down" instead of the preferred silenced or cancelled, "big corporations tell you what to think" with "Woke" sitting right there. But give the old girl time, she'll pick up the lingo toot sweet, or shell have to switch to Taak vodka.
I must admit that at times I think that COVID-19:Trump::Malaria:Syphilis.
If it were earlier last year and an evil djinn gave me a choice between the world we got and one without that pandemic and with more Trump and a Trump Senate…well, I'd agonise over, and make a choice but demand that I at least _get_ COVID-19 as part of the deal, which would have had a good chance of killing me. Really, it wouldn't be that hard a choice, because if it weren't that pandemic on Trump's watch it would have been another pandemic or Subcontinental nuclear exchange or something else an an even more empowered 'his watch', and he'd not be any less evil or any more competent.
It might be a damned, colonialist, lie, but there's this talk of 'primitive tribes who believe that no death is natural' and react to any death by looking for an evil sorceror to kill.
Then again, even if it is an evil, colonialist, lie, that might be a good indication of how the inside of the most evilly colonialist minds work at their hearts—along with, of course, 'A dream/Of a girl/About fourteen'.
(I've been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately, and more about him than I had, which doesn't make him look better or his music worse.)
I forgot to get explicitly to my point: if you're unwilling to see any evil in the basic system, you must always find an evil-doer when things get so bad that you can't deny that something were wrong. (This is corollary to the Just World Hypothesis: the Just World Hypothesis + Satan when something is so wrong that even Pangloss demurs.)
Noonan may have had to open the second Scotch bottle to get through this column. But really, Roy is right that she has her own kind of logic – why buck the rightwing tide when you can let yourself be carried along with the current?
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain the only truly moderate Republicans.
Thank heavens those two are busy sniffing their own farts, or else the Senate might abandon Institutionalism and bestir itself to do something!
Donald J. Trump was (and is) the Greatest American President America has ever had. Donald J. Trump knew from the get-go that the King-Flu was Chinese bio-weapon unleashed on America to kill Americans and cripple America's economy, which was the greatest economy on Earth at the time. And Donald J. Trump knew that the Chinese had committed this act of war upon America.
And because he was the Greatest American President America has ever had, the strongest bestest manliest man of a president, he responded to this Chinese open act of war that was killing tens of thousands of Americans. He responded by, um, suggesting Americans inject themselves with Lysol, or maybe shove a fishtank light up their asses. And then, seeing that the Chinese were continuing to make war upon the United States, Donald J. Trump responded by telling Americans the election was going to be rigged. Because that's what war-time presidents do--they attack their own country.
Thus is the Greatness of Donald J. Trump shown.
"...the Chinese meant it to kill Americans..."
That raises the Q they won't and can't answer: So why did Donnie allow ~50% of the US Covid deaths to happen? Why did he fail to act?
"I mean we unsophisticated news consumers all know that the Lab Leak is proven, right? It just stands to reason."
Dean Baquet famously stated that the Times' reportage can fail, so to speak, because his readers can suss out the truth. People relying on other outlets ad social networks maybe can't suss?
Anyway.
What cracks me up about the media's masturba-- I mean self-criticism regarding the origins of Covid is that I'm sure that the resistance (!!) to the lab leak theory is that came from Donnie who is a serial liar, was spewing racist shit at the same time and, like nearly always, produced no proof. Hey, maybe if Donnie wasn't such a huge piece of shit of a human being there would have been no issue of the possibility or whatever of a lab leak? Good Q meanwhile: Why is one theory likelier than the other now?
And the bigger laugh at this point: How the Covid developed is way, way less important than turning a global pandemic into a much less deadly and more manageable endemic.
And back to how: The wet market/bat cooties theory gets requires, ultimately, an acknowledge of climate change, something neither the ruling class nor their media care to acknowledge with any depth or seriousness.
I apologize for the verbosity. Noonan and the rest of the monkey turd tossers are worth it. She had an off week and the WSJ op-ed page needs its quota of, uh, well, batshit craziness. The audience must be served.
That's silly. I mean half of all covid deaths Donnie's fault. Do you actually believe those CDC figures? There are really no covid deaths at all. It is all smoke and mirrors. Of course those who did die were al the fault of the Chinese who are as we all know evil.
The Chinese or Jesus Christ -- either way, our savior is innocent
"Give us Bar-Trump-as!"
That's a really excellent point about climate change. That's what the Dr. Moreau evil science hypothesis is meant to steer us away from.
Shoulda been clear: while the wet market/bats theory requires acknowledging and discussing climate change, the mainstream media never would do any such thing.
To paraphrase one R.M. Nixon, I believe you made that perfectly clear.
Proof hell. Evidence, a theory, an argument. Something. No, assertion and repetition are all you need to establish the Brand. Why waste energy?
“Journalistic traditionalists” [eyeroll] — in addition to being a mendacious hack with an empty gin bottle where her soul ought to be, Noonan is such a bad writer. Sure, she uses nice words and gets them in the right order, but there are so many of them, so many more than necessary, and her baroque sentences plop to the deck like an enormous tangle of fishing line.
I find it hard to believe this is a column in reputable newspaper, which just shows my biases (and naivete) about journalistic and editorial integrity. A friend wanted me to tone it down if not turn it off about Republicans being crooks or rubes. "Okay, you protested about police brutality towards black folks, and we get it. Now let's all just go back to how it was before. You have emoted enough." Change is something we used to have in our pockets, a thing of the past, 1960's, I think. Actual transactions are now plastic or virtual. Nobody need be concerned by color or content or character, right?
Well it was the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page which isn't particularly reputable. There news was pretty good before the Murdoch's bought it, but the Op-Eds have been trash for a long time.
I am way out of touch with the news media! I used to read a lot of papers 30 years ago. Subscribed to magazines. I still get Scientific American. That's it. I rely on Roy to keep me infotained now.
Oh no!
Oh yes! It's all your fault I'm part of the ignorant electorate. We might as well all move to Romania or Pacoima. Then we'd be happy right where we are, dammit.
Our categories and terminology have been exceeded by the predominance of misinformation and prejudicially based delusions that now determine the course of American politics. Something isn't right with the brains of many Americans. They process the world through a haze of error and ignorance. I know we have long considered other peoples at other times to have been misguided in their beliefs, from preindustrial societies to the antebellum South, but we're deluded to think that the incredible expansion of factual knowledge about the world since the Enlightenment has stopped this apparently inevitable reversion to self-affirming fantasy. Noonan has the legal right to publish this senseless drivel but the harm all this shit does to our ability to function as a civilization is immeasurable. The temptation to call it a mental illness is wrong, but what do we call this phenomenon of willfully embracing all things false? Bob Altermeyer, following Adorno, said it is an authoritarian personality and has lots of evidence to support that interpretation. Do we stop calling them sick and fascist and adopt that label? Or will it be coopted by the very people it describes and thrown back against humanitarian efforts, like prescriptive epidemiology?
I think we know the answer.
"I know error and ignorance is bad for me, but it's so *delicious*!"
Well, okay, maybe the virus DID come from a lab leak. Maybe not; maybe so. I have no emotional investment in this. But the way wingnuts are acting all gleeful about the possibility...what do they think is going to happen, exactly? Are we going to war with China? Or is it just "hah, see, my anti-Chinese racism was JUSTIFIED, as it will be going forward forevermore!?" In spite of everything, I still find this pathology astounding.
If it did come from a lab leak, then wingnuts and MAGA and etc. will use that fact to "prove" that everything Trump said or says, no matter how insane or false, is also true.
Were the release of corona a lab-leak, this makes Trump look worse. Well, except to the Magats
I see your problem, you're thinking. Try to see this as a conservative would: "how does this argument make me feel?". Obviously, you can't trust China, they're tricksy and evil. So of course they'd create a deadly virus to make everyone sick. Since they are not America, they screwed up and It "got out" somehow, the petty details of how that would work, like massive undetectable voter fraud, don't matter. It feels right, so it must be true.
I've asked and answered the question, "What is it about Noonan's writing that is so nauseating?" more times than I can count. So why stop now?
Ordinary conservative writing addresses, in varying degrees of bad faith and mendacity, the realm of facts (e.g., "There were good reasons to think Saddam possessed WMD's."). Even when asserting opinions, they affect to base them on objective truth, however much they omit, distort, or ignore that truth in the service of their foreordained conclusions.
Noonan's beat, though, is *feeling.* She presents herself as being above the vulgar fray of arguing about evidence and slugging it out over opinions. She fancies herself wise in the ways of human nature, and her analyses are always rooted in her (superior) understanding of "how people are." She doesn't try to persuade, because--since she spends her time defending the indefensible, when not ignoring it completely--how could she? No, she affects to enlighten.
This is the source of her immense, suffocating disingenuousness--which is to say, her bad faith that seeks to pass as better-than-good faith. She's a conservative op-ed flack for the Wall Street Journal who asks us to see her as an advice columnist with whom we *already* agree, because isn't that how people are?
Periodic reminder that the only thing she really believes in is the Worship of Ronald Reagan's Loafers.
Well, then, fuck their feelings, hers, theirs, all of them.
"We like to be in a fight—'Albion’s Seed'—and on a side."
It's a small thing, but that right there is where I have a problem. 'Cause if she'd actually *read* David Hackett Fischer's book, she'd know that's not at all what the book's about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
but Noonan knows what side of the cocktail glass her twist is rubbed on
And what to do with an empty gin bottle.
She's clearly still feeling her way in this strange new land. I mean, what other choice does she have? The only Never-Trumpets making coin are political operatives, what's she going to do, a (ugh) podcast? She hits the bullet points pretty well, though oddly: "shut down" instead of the preferred silenced or cancelled, "big corporations tell you what to think" with "Woke" sitting right there. But give the old girl time, she'll pick up the lingo toot sweet, or shell have to switch to Taak vodka.
I must admit that at times I think that COVID-19:Trump::Malaria:Syphilis.
If it were earlier last year and an evil djinn gave me a choice between the world we got and one without that pandemic and with more Trump and a Trump Senate…well, I'd agonise over, and make a choice but demand that I at least _get_ COVID-19 as part of the deal, which would have had a good chance of killing me. Really, it wouldn't be that hard a choice, because if it weren't that pandemic on Trump's watch it would have been another pandemic or Subcontinental nuclear exchange or something else an an even more empowered 'his watch', and he'd not be any less evil or any more competent.
It might be a damned, colonialist, lie, but there's this talk of 'primitive tribes who believe that no death is natural' and react to any death by looking for an evil sorceror to kill.
Then again, even if it is an evil, colonialist, lie, that might be a good indication of how the inside of the most evilly colonialist minds work at their hearts—along with, of course, 'A dream/Of a girl/About fourteen'.
(I've been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately, and more about him than I had, which doesn't make him look better or his music worse.)
I forgot to get explicitly to my point: if you're unwilling to see any evil in the basic system, you must always find an evil-doer when things get so bad that you can't deny that something were wrong. (This is corollary to the Just World Hypothesis: the Just World Hypothesis + Satan when something is so wrong that even Pangloss demurs.)