i've got nothing much to say here, because i can't find anything with which to disagree. i've long given up arguing with, or even engaging with, those on the right. there's no point, when one's positions are met with frontier gibberish. i used to find the lack of the possibility of dialog troubling, but now all i can do is shrug it off.
Looks like I’m going to have to reconsider whether all those fine people are pathological or just suffer from hanging with the wrong people. Not it matters beyond an intellectual exercise.
"the liberal idea typified by Hofstadter’s generous disclaimer, his implied insistence that most people are better than they seem, has indeed been strangled, or at the very least, is gasping for air. Who talks that way today?" thanks!
My current take is people are better than one expects within their tribe or one at least isn’t seen as a threat. Beyond those tight parameters, nah, they’re shit.
Trump appeals to those who feel there's no point to _not_ being a dickhead, freeing them from any obligation to try to do better. They reason inductively from free-of-constraints him, and from 'G-d donʼt make no junk!'ʼs explicit message and the message implicitly conveyed by its bad grammar, to conclude that noöne can be better than they are, and any claim to do better by dint of effort or decency or self-control is just faggy/intellectual/Hebe-y (to use what is for them a double-redundancy) Coastal Elitism.
And that had better be good old fashioned fossil-fuel generated power, Goldernit! None o' that renewable shit! Nuke is okay, too. If I'm gonna go electric I wanna know it was greenhouse gases lit me up.
"Power to the people"? Sounds potentially like a lynch mob. A mob of some kind. How do you spell hysterical party time? Say, is a lampshade on the head still the indicator things have crossed over into a gen-you-wine party?
This is part of their attack on democracy: even as they attack the legitimacy of black and brown people voting, they can hold-up their own base as prime examples of white people whom _we_ mught not think ought to have the right….
Pseudoconservatism gave up on intellect long ago. Back in the day there were right wing “intellectuals” like William Buckley but despite putting on airs of superiority, their arguments wilted in the face of opponents like Steve Allen, a comedian! Flash forward to the likes of Jonah and the pretense was paperback thin. Now it’s become the standard at the highest levels: Trump with his 4th grade vocabulary and kindergarten debating skill, the parade of dolts in his White House, the House of Reps and the Senate, and now the Supreme Chortle where knowledge and wisdom have been abandoned for fervor and fallacy. The last few gabblefabs in the Chambers of the Jesters might had well been emojis and gifs, for all the mental rigor on display by the likes of Kegs and ACB. Those who resent experts are bound to be ruled by idiots.
The Oxford (the one in England, not Mississippi or Georgia: Magdalen College in, I think Economics) educated John Neeley Haney, er, Kennedy, has been using the shtick of the late Pat Buttram, and Foghorn Leghorn (himself a parody of the mostly forgotten Sen.Claghorn {Kenny Delmar, Fred Allen's announcer: https://youtu.be/N6-JddDUnyY ) to become a mean stupid ass.
I've heard the senator speak sensibly and with hardly a trace of an accent on the BBC several times(Business Report, before the election, sayin' tariffs were generally regarded as bad...): and one must conclude the ol' bastard, a Democrat whom the party "left" forcing him to become a redbaiting fool and cornpone conman, thinks it smart to be so flamboyantly stupid.
And give his Base (and they are! they are!) he may not be wholly wrong as a tactical matter.
For decades — probably forever — Republican pols only had fear, hate and bullshit with which to attract voters given that their ultimate goal was extraction and impoverishment. All Donnie did was lower the level of pandering but it was always bullshit.
The Axis of Evil, which includes Grenada, a base to launch a takeover of all rib joints in the US and beyond. Yes, Canada, too. There is no sanctuary when the wrong people get equal rights under the law. Buy more guns and ammo now, or face annihilation of your way of life! OMG! What's that exactly? MY WAY OF LIFE?!! Gone!
"[T]hey're not supposed to say 'Fuck Joe Biden,' so they say something meaningless with the same cadence instead."
This is what I find so ridiculous about the whole phenomenon. Many of these same people have flags that literally say "Fuck Joe Biden." They wear t-shirts that say, "Fuck Your Feelings." Since when are these assholes shy about using curse words?
And they're right to do so, because it's what dullards perceive as clever, too. It's hard to believe they think we don't know what secret message is being shared. But they're authoritarians. It must be a kick to be naughty, and defy Mommy and Daddy (i.e., polite society, as tyrannically defined by liberals) with their secret code.
There's a whole conspiracy theory behind it (of course) reporter interviewing a NASCAR driver while the crowd chants "Fuck Joe Biden", the reporter interprets this as a cheer for the driver, who is named Brandon. And there we are. Because the Liberal Media can't tolerate criticism of Biden (LOL) and so pretends it's something else. You can judge for yourself how well the Liberal Media is executing its supposed mission of keeping hatred of Joe Biden a secret.
But the reporter, worrying that the crowd's chant of "Fuck Joe Biden" might leak through onto the audio of his interview and thus escape to the broadcast audience, knew he had to reimagine it as "Let's Go Brandon" or he'd lose his job and be sent to the gulag for... ow my brain hurts.
I thought it was a college football game. That's what one of my contacts to this world first related to me in a phone call, as he giggled about it. He was disappointed by my apparent lack of innerest [sic] in the titillation of the thing. Maybe he was touching himself, hoping I would join in the pleasure.
1. How do you have the patience to engage with these idiots? My blood pressure won't allow anything like that.
2. "Let's Go Brandon" really is the idiot catchphrase of the early '20's. My spam filter is constantly filled with offers for t-shirts brandishing this stupid slogan. I'd suggest counter peddling shirts that read "F$%k Donald Trump," but a lot of folks who identify as Democrats would find this vulgar so no go.
I’ve started to think that for them, the emojis are the visual equivalent of “HA, made you look!” They’re thrilled they’ve been engaged by someone who has mental functions above brain-stem activity – it allows them an opportunity to put their underpants on their head and prance around. I think it kind of is another version of Own the Libs, just distilled down to its absolutely dumbest, non-verbal form. Because yeah, they don’t have any real arguments, just a lot of animosity and bullet points of misinformation.
I was talking about this a few posts back -- the whole thing seems to play into their thirst for imaginary social media grievance: in their minds saying "Fuck Joe Biden" would result in instant "Cancellation." (TM)
It's also "He who cares the least wins", because 1) The ONLY thing they ever understood about Cool is that it somehow involved not caring about stuff and that's the only part of Cool they can ever hope to accomplish and 2) They belong to a political tendency that's anti-empathic, because empathy might compel you to spend a buck on the poor and OH NO MY TAXES.
If Erasmus of Rotterdam were writing today for a RW intellectual NYT sinecure column, his first offering would be titled "In Praise of Falling Down Jokes"
"Leave aside . . . my own sport with Jonah Goldberg, for whom flatulence is a key to character."
If it weren't for flatulence, that asshole would have nothing to say.
Ah, Roy! Surely you must remember Bobby Jindal delivering his SOTU response about how stupid it is to have an entire government office devoted to monitoring volcanoes . . . only to have a volcano erupt in Alaska the very next morning and disrupt cargo flights for a week.
Surely you must remember Jindal exhorting his GOP confederates that Republicans "not become the Party of stupid" . . . only to have his confederates run him out of the Party for not being stupid enough.
Teh Stupid is all they know, all they want, all they think they understand. Donald Trump is epically stupid, and thus to they identify with him.
I know I'm becoming tiresome on this point, but the stupid grows from "Government should not do anything" because WHO is always bringing things to the attention of the government that might require some doing to be done? Scientists, for one. Goddamn volcanologists and their Fake News volcano threats, just to get some grant money from us hard-workin' taxpayers.
I passed a by asemi-truck a month or so ago that had
"Fk the Brandon admin" written in the film of dirt on the back door. It was high enough up it couldn't have been written from the ground. I realized I had found someone even the Stupid probably considered stupid.
There’s something about the religion that allows, as a practical matter, all sorts of pathological behavior. Like being pro-death, that is, a holy acceptance of life being shit and suffering and doing about it is unacceptable.
When Fred Hiatt died and the accolades came pouring in about how great his editorial page was, I just kept thinking, "but he kept Marc Thiessen (and Hugh Hewitt) on there for years past their expiration date." Ya know what? Maybe poor Fred was trying to get his audience to understand the MAGA crowd by keeping on his Jane Goodall, the person who could interpret the grunts and howls for the human audience. The only difference is, I think the gorillas liked Jane; no one fucking likes Marc.
I was a real George Carlin "7 words"/ Lenny Bruce "to is a preposition , come is a verb " kind of guy in my lower teens. "They are just words. man. What is everyone afraid of?"
Now that we've reached a point where you can say whatever the fuck.
And your approach is direct, compared with the sly jokes people like me make about the idiocy of Latin America, they don't speak Latin and there are lots of countries there, etc. Ridicule is basically the same and for similar reasons used, regardless of the ideologies of the various employers. It's all a bad job, but the only worse is moving straight to a punch.
"liberals are always trying to explain things or make sense of them, and what better way to frustrate them than by announcing yourself too dumb to know or care what they’re talking about?"
Roy hits the nail right on its fucking head. Well done.
Liberals are people who take stuff seriously (climate change, gun deaths, Covid, etc.) so per Cleek's Law, right-wingers must position themselves as anti-serious. Taking things seriously would generally imply some government action should be taken, refusing to take things seriously is a way to forestall government action, so "Let's Go Brandon" grows naturally from seeds planted by Ronald Reagan and other eminent conservatives.
To be (way more than) fair, there are a handful of liberal phrases that still light up the MSNBC crowd like they’re at a Frampton Comes Alive concert: “Basket of deplorables.” “Please proceed.” [WOOO! So awesome! GOT ‘EM!] But despite phrases like that being stale at best, or not clever in the first place at worst, they were at least grounded in *something* other than third-grade poo flinging.
Plus, liberals, silly idealists that they are, still want to actually be FOR stuff (Solar power! Universal Pre-K!) and bickering about what to be for tends to take center stage for them, especially when the Dems come to power. Pity the poor conservatives, who have nothing else, snarky meme-creation will always be the center of their universe.
These are the same people who eat turkey, not because they like it but because of Sarah Palin, or well done steaks not because they like them but because Trump. But, first they must tell you they don't really like these things, but eat them because by doing so they own the libs (some how).
I do not appear to have the ability to understand them. And many days I don't want to expend the energy.
i've got nothing much to say here, because i can't find anything with which to disagree. i've long given up arguing with, or even engaging with, those on the right. there's no point, when one's positions are met with frontier gibberish. i used to find the lack of the possibility of dialog troubling, but now all i can do is shrug it off.
Someone say stupid
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/the-third-force-stupidity-and-transcendence/
Looks like I’m going to have to reconsider whether all those fine people are pathological or just suffer from hanging with the wrong people. Not it matters beyond an intellectual exercise.
But Roy, tell us how you really feel.
"the liberal idea typified by Hofstadter’s generous disclaimer, his implied insistence that most people are better than they seem, has indeed been strangled, or at the very least, is gasping for air. Who talks that way today?" thanks!
My current take is people are better than one expects within their tribe or one at least isn’t seen as a threat. Beyond those tight parameters, nah, they’re shit.
"What good is “power to the people” if the people are dolts?"
Indeed.
That’s a problem. And why the Founders didn’t implement universal suffrage because having property was per se proof of smarts and sobriety.
And proof that you’re correct is the shit ton of unfit leaders the voters have elected the past couple of decades.
Also too:
"dare I admit my preference for a society that doesn’t destine me to be a dickhead?"
To which the appropriate response could be "Put a sock in it!" Or alternately: "Put a sock on it!"
Trump appeals to those who feel there's no point to _not_ being a dickhead, freeing them from any obligation to try to do better. They reason inductively from free-of-constraints him, and from 'G-d donʼt make no junk!'ʼs explicit message and the message implicitly conveyed by its bad grammar, to conclude that noöne can be better than they are, and any claim to do better by dint of effort or decency or self-control is just faggy/intellectual/Hebe-y (to use what is for them a double-redundancy) Coastal Elitism.
These chuds heard "power to the people" and they thought they should stick a fork in an electric outlet.
And that had better be good old fashioned fossil-fuel generated power, Goldernit! None o' that renewable shit! Nuke is okay, too. If I'm gonna go electric I wanna know it was greenhouse gases lit me up.
"Power to the people"? Sounds potentially like a lynch mob. A mob of some kind. How do you spell hysterical party time? Say, is a lampshade on the head still the indicator things have crossed over into a gen-you-wine party?
This is part of their attack on democracy: even as they attack the legitimacy of black and brown people voting, they can hold-up their own base as prime examples of white people whom _we_ mught not think ought to have the right….
Pseudoconservatism gave up on intellect long ago. Back in the day there were right wing “intellectuals” like William Buckley but despite putting on airs of superiority, their arguments wilted in the face of opponents like Steve Allen, a comedian! Flash forward to the likes of Jonah and the pretense was paperback thin. Now it’s become the standard at the highest levels: Trump with his 4th grade vocabulary and kindergarten debating skill, the parade of dolts in his White House, the House of Reps and the Senate, and now the Supreme Chortle where knowledge and wisdom have been abandoned for fervor and fallacy. The last few gabblefabs in the Chambers of the Jesters might had well been emojis and gifs, for all the mental rigor on display by the likes of Kegs and ACB. Those who resent experts are bound to be ruled by idiots.
At least conservatives have shown that an ivy league degree (two in Ted Cruz's case) isn't necessarily proof of intelligence, accomplishment or skill.
Weiner and Radlauer's "Monsters of the Ivy League," proved that. Glad I've lived my life so as not to appear in its pages.
Maybe Ellis will do a new one just for you
The Oxford (the one in England, not Mississippi or Georgia: Magdalen College in, I think Economics) educated John Neeley Haney, er, Kennedy, has been using the shtick of the late Pat Buttram, and Foghorn Leghorn (himself a parody of the mostly forgotten Sen.Claghorn {Kenny Delmar, Fred Allen's announcer: https://youtu.be/N6-JddDUnyY ) to become a mean stupid ass.
I've heard the senator speak sensibly and with hardly a trace of an accent on the BBC several times(Business Report, before the election, sayin' tariffs were generally regarded as bad...): and one must conclude the ol' bastard, a Democrat whom the party "left" forcing him to become a redbaiting fool and cornpone conman, thinks it smart to be so flamboyantly stupid.
And give his Base (and they are! they are!) he may not be wholly wrong as a tactical matter.
Newt Gingrich is also fluent in French. I think he might have minored in the language.
Plenty of other stupid people speak French though.
For decades — probably forever — Republican pols only had fear, hate and bullshit with which to attract voters given that their ultimate goal was extraction and impoverishment. All Donnie did was lower the level of pandering but it was always bullshit.
The Axis of Evil, which includes Grenada, a base to launch a takeover of all rib joints in the US and beyond. Yes, Canada, too. There is no sanctuary when the wrong people get equal rights under the law. Buy more guns and ammo now, or face annihilation of your way of life! OMG! What's that exactly? MY WAY OF LIFE?!! Gone!
Don’t forget most (all?) ivies have legacy admissions and a gentleman’s C grade for the less ambitious.
"nostalgie de la baba booey": I'll use this.
And "Dare to be stupid" was prophetic.
"[T]hey're not supposed to say 'Fuck Joe Biden,' so they say something meaningless with the same cadence instead."
This is what I find so ridiculous about the whole phenomenon. Many of these same people have flags that literally say "Fuck Joe Biden." They wear t-shirts that say, "Fuck Your Feelings." Since when are these assholes shy about using curse words?
This has the added attraction that, as my parents used to put it, they think they're being cute.
Yes!
It's how dullards try to be clever.
And they're right to do so, because it's what dullards perceive as clever, too. It's hard to believe they think we don't know what secret message is being shared. But they're authoritarians. It must be a kick to be naughty, and defy Mommy and Daddy (i.e., polite society, as tyrannically defined by liberals) with their secret code.
There's a whole conspiracy theory behind it (of course) reporter interviewing a NASCAR driver while the crowd chants "Fuck Joe Biden", the reporter interprets this as a cheer for the driver, who is named Brandon. And there we are. Because the Liberal Media can't tolerate criticism of Biden (LOL) and so pretends it's something else. You can judge for yourself how well the Liberal Media is executing its supposed mission of keeping hatred of Joe Biden a secret.
The media interviewer's company would have been highly fined had she stated what the crowd was saying
But the reporter, worrying that the crowd's chant of "Fuck Joe Biden" might leak through onto the audio of his interview and thus escape to the broadcast audience, knew he had to reimagine it as "Let's Go Brandon" or he'd lose his job and be sent to the gulag for... ow my brain hurts.
A. I believe the reporter was a she, not a he
B. had she repeated the chants, she likely would have lost her job. Not been sent to a gulag or anything else but fired
"Look, Smithers! Garbo's coming!"
LOL
I thought it was a college football game. That's what one of my contacts to this world first related to me in a phone call, as he giggled about it. He was disappointed by my apparent lack of innerest [sic] in the titillation of the thing. Maybe he was touching himself, hoping I would join in the pleasure.
They’re idiots. Pretty much just that simple.
1. How do you have the patience to engage with these idiots? My blood pressure won't allow anything like that.
2. "Let's Go Brandon" really is the idiot catchphrase of the early '20's. My spam filter is constantly filled with offers for t-shirts brandishing this stupid slogan. I'd suggest counter peddling shirts that read "F$%k Donald Trump," but a lot of folks who identify as Democrats would find this vulgar so no go.
I’ve started to think that for them, the emojis are the visual equivalent of “HA, made you look!” They’re thrilled they’ve been engaged by someone who has mental functions above brain-stem activity – it allows them an opportunity to put their underpants on their head and prance around. I think it kind of is another version of Own the Libs, just distilled down to its absolutely dumbest, non-verbal form. Because yeah, they don’t have any real arguments, just a lot of animosity and bullet points of misinformation.
I was talking about this a few posts back -- the whole thing seems to play into their thirst for imaginary social media grievance: in their minds saying "Fuck Joe Biden" would result in instant "Cancellation." (TM)
Again: what they call cancellation is just people being repulsed, being held accountable.
It's also "He who cares the least wins", because 1) The ONLY thing they ever understood about Cool is that it somehow involved not caring about stuff and that's the only part of Cool they can ever hope to accomplish and 2) They belong to a political tendency that's anti-empathic, because empathy might compel you to spend a buck on the poor and OH NO MY TAXES.
"Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain." Schiller
Treason In The Defense Of Stupidity
If Erasmus of Rotterdam were writing today for a RW intellectual NYT sinecure column, his first offering would be titled "In Praise of Falling Down Jokes"
"Leave aside . . . my own sport with Jonah Goldberg, for whom flatulence is a key to character."
If it weren't for flatulence, that asshole would have nothing to say.
Ah, Roy! Surely you must remember Bobby Jindal delivering his SOTU response about how stupid it is to have an entire government office devoted to monitoring volcanoes . . . only to have a volcano erupt in Alaska the very next morning and disrupt cargo flights for a week.
Surely you must remember Jindal exhorting his GOP confederates that Republicans "not become the Party of stupid" . . . only to have his confederates run him out of the Party for not being stupid enough.
Teh Stupid is all they know, all they want, all they think they understand. Donald Trump is epically stupid, and thus to they identify with him.
I know I'm becoming tiresome on this point, but the stupid grows from "Government should not do anything" because WHO is always bringing things to the attention of the government that might require some doing to be done? Scientists, for one. Goddamn volcanologists and their Fake News volcano threats, just to get some grant money from us hard-workin' taxpayers.
I passed a by asemi-truck a month or so ago that had
"Fk the Brandon admin" written in the film of dirt on the back door. It was high enough up it couldn't have been written from the ground. I realized I had found someone even the Stupid probably considered stupid.
I blame Facebook.
I’m not sure I don’t blame religion, one in particular that’ll go unnamed for reasons, sorry. (May be obvious now that I think about it.)
Church is where they teach you to believe crazy shit. Way more Evangelicals than atheists in Qanon.
There’s something about the religion that allows, as a practical matter, all sorts of pathological behavior. Like being pro-death, that is, a holy acceptance of life being shit and suffering and doing about it is unacceptable.
Magic.
When Fred Hiatt died and the accolades came pouring in about how great his editorial page was, I just kept thinking, "but he kept Marc Thiessen (and Hugh Hewitt) on there for years past their expiration date." Ya know what? Maybe poor Fred was trying to get his audience to understand the MAGA crowd by keeping on his Jane Goodall, the person who could interpret the grunts and howls for the human audience. The only difference is, I think the gorillas liked Jane; no one fucking likes Marc.
Hiatt’s operation only looked good compared to its inspiration, the Wall Street Journal.
I shouldn't talk.. I just come right out and say
"Fuck Trump".
All the time.
I was a real George Carlin "7 words"/ Lenny Bruce "to is a preposition , come is a verb " kind of guy in my lower teens. "They are just words. man. What is everyone afraid of?"
Now that we've reached a point where you can say whatever the fuck.
I kind of miss the Language Police.
The whole culture is stuck in third grade recess.
And your approach is direct, compared with the sly jokes people like me make about the idiocy of Latin America, they don't speak Latin and there are lots of countries there, etc. Ridicule is basically the same and for similar reasons used, regardless of the ideologies of the various employers. It's all a bad job, but the only worse is moving straight to a punch.
"liberals are always trying to explain things or make sense of them, and what better way to frustrate them than by announcing yourself too dumb to know or care what they’re talking about?"
Roy hits the nail right on its fucking head. Well done.
Liberals are people who take stuff seriously (climate change, gun deaths, Covid, etc.) so per Cleek's Law, right-wingers must position themselves as anti-serious. Taking things seriously would generally imply some government action should be taken, refusing to take things seriously is a way to forestall government action, so "Let's Go Brandon" grows naturally from seeds planted by Ronald Reagan and other eminent conservatives.
To be (way more than) fair, there are a handful of liberal phrases that still light up the MSNBC crowd like they’re at a Frampton Comes Alive concert: “Basket of deplorables.” “Please proceed.” [WOOO! So awesome! GOT ‘EM!] But despite phrases like that being stale at best, or not clever in the first place at worst, they were at least grounded in *something* other than third-grade poo flinging.
Plus, liberals, silly idealists that they are, still want to actually be FOR stuff (Solar power! Universal Pre-K!) and bickering about what to be for tends to take center stage for them, especially when the Dems come to power. Pity the poor conservatives, who have nothing else, snarky meme-creation will always be the center of their universe.
These are the same people who eat turkey, not because they like it but because of Sarah Palin, or well done steaks not because they like them but because Trump. But, first they must tell you they don't really like these things, but eat them because by doing so they own the libs (some how).
I do not appear to have the ability to understand them. And many days I don't want to expend the energy.