More like “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and pass gas...”
I'm loving the pixelated blow-up pic of KDW, which shows off his serial-killer nature, and actually is not a bad visualization of hs prose style: grainy and ugly
Gotta say, good as today's post was, I'm not sure it's all that much better than the reality. No doubt Roy trumps (pun intended) reality, just not so sure by how much.
And apropos the reality, let me do a copy+paste regarding same:
Williamson: "...we should have fewer but ‘better’ voters if you know what I mean..."
I dunno... The Rs get elected in large part because of a cohort of voters who believe their role in life is to suffer unless they can make themselves into, uh, ubermenches and, as such, everyone must suffer as well, no one's suffering can be alleived. Even people who don't believe in their need to have the shittiest life possible can't be helped.
And with the unfit pieces of shit they elect, we get continued racism, an extractive, exploitative, impoverishing economy and extremely fucked up and insensible foreign and military affairs.
To state the obvious, because that's my thing, all the unfit pols who've turned the nation into a failed state (see, response to the pandemic, 2020), were nearly all elected to office (or appointed by others elected to office). It's on the voters who elect them.
So I'm not so sure about the use of the word better. I have my doubts.
Lincoln at Cooper Union, on Southern Democrats, the ancestors of today's GQP: "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events."
I'd say that they've bought into a moral code and view of reality whose net effect is to separate humanity into the Elect and the Damned and proscribe any mercy for the Damned as Wrong.
(Back in about 1990 or so, after listening to Rush Limbaugh for the first time, I said to myself, "This man *despises* democracy and the democratic process." And here we are.)
John Derbyshire - now there’s a blast from the past, if by “blast” you mean “wave of fecal sludge released from an unregulated Iowa pig farm.”
Meanwhile, Williamson is as terrible a writer as he is a human. His prose should carry a warning label, “Unrestricted exposure may induce Buckley Syndrome and Hindrocket’s Dementia.”
The Watertown area of our state produced both Hindrocket and Kristi Noem, in addition to others who have so far kept their awfulness at the state or local level. Coincidence? Or Hellmouth?
Incidentally, if you ever meet Josh Whedon, get on his good side by praising the "Buffy…" movie, heaping praise in particular on Donald Sutherland's lines.
Some of us remember Antonin Scalia opining that there is no right to vote because it does not appear explicitly written in the Constitution. Therefore, the Founders never intended for "the people" to ever have any say in their government or governance.
I remember when I was in high school studying the Constitution in American History class. Because I was a super nerd, I went above and beyond, and read the whole thing carefully on my own. The number one thing that struck me (besides, of course, the three-fifths provisions) was that there was nothing explicitly said about the right to vote. It seemed a dangerous omission--and we might just be starting to find out how dangerous.
The way I read it, it says you can't abridge the right to vote for certain reasons, but it says nothing about what the right to vote is. The same is true for the 19th amendment.
That's my old fart rant: That the Constitution is actually anti-democratic instituting a tyranny of the minority. The 15th Amendment threw a wrench in that.
I don't think this fictional Williamson is that strongly misrepresenting The Founders; I do think that rather than taking that as a cue to limit voting rights, we should instead use it as a corrective to worship of the Founders.
I just re-read it. My god, whatever is the polar opposite of "the milk of human kindness" just drips from that column. The racism, the classism, the absolute lack of any moral center whatsoever...yeesh.
What is so evil about him is that he can never, ever, envision himself as the person being evicted because "the check didn't come." Those folks just didn't plan well.
In his desire for an electorate as he imagines it Should Be (rather than the rabble of Wretched Refuse he finds), he seems to be channeling Late Racist Georgia Governor Lester Maddox (a man who’d ride a bicycle backward at sports events because he could: perhaps a metaphor...), who said, regarding Penal policy in the Peach State: “What we need is a better class of prisoner...”
How I love a well-turned phrase wrapped up and warped out with a common sense modestly proposed sensibility. I must confess I had to look up Fleisch-Kincaid and found to my delight which I usually reserve for myself alone an automatic checker. Hours of checking pleasure await in my microcephalic future.
Have never read Kevin Williamson's garbage but if this is a fair parody of his writing style, it is ponderous and tendentious to say the least. I love the way, in your parody of him, he never really makes an actual argument against for or against voting; he just lobs ad hominem insults and dubious historical assertions that have been part of the tired cliches for what passes as conservative thought for decades. I much prefer Paul Weyrich's cynical but direct crudeness:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Unsurprising that Williamson's piece is as gutless as he is. He wastes 1500 words to tell us that voters are stupid (i.e., disagree with him), voters cast votes that are bad (i.e. result in policies he might disagree with), and, worst of all, voters are "unqualified." But not once in this sea of elitest bullshit does he actually have the balls to come out and say just what it is that makes some voters "qualified" or "better" and how such qualifications might be determined. With the exception of an aside that he would raise the voting age to 30 (without offering any rationale for it), he never explains whom he intends to exclude from his American dream of "fewer — but better — voters." The root of democracy is "demos," and that's his problem with it.
Here's one way to we might get his exclusionary purge started: the right to vote should be denied to anyone who doesn't believe it exists.
Really looking forward to 2024, when some Republican actually campaigns by attacking his opponent as belonging to "the party of Walter Duranty," and absolutely every Democrat says "...who?" and 48 hours later absolutely every Republican is acting convinced we hold secret weekly meetings to sacrifice animals on an altar dedicated to Walter Duranty.
They're still using Saul Alinsky as the totem for slightly left-of-center Democrats, and I doubt anyone knew who they hell he was when they threw it at Obama.
Brilliant.
Kevin D. Williamson: standing athwart history, yelling “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Genus At Woik
More like “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and pass gas...”
I'm loving the pixelated blow-up pic of KDW, which shows off his serial-killer nature, and actually is not a bad visualization of hs prose style: grainy and ugly
And what's underlying today's post is discussed here:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/time-to-set-the-days-since-national-review-published-article-explicitly-calling-for-the-intentional-disenfranchisement-of-voters-meter-back-to-zero
Gotta say, good as today's post was, I'm not sure it's all that much better than the reality. No doubt Roy trumps (pun intended) reality, just not so sure by how much.
And apropos the reality, let me do a copy+paste regarding same:
Williamson: "...we should have fewer but ‘better’ voters if you know what I mean..."
I dunno... The Rs get elected in large part because of a cohort of voters who believe their role in life is to suffer unless they can make themselves into, uh, ubermenches and, as such, everyone must suffer as well, no one's suffering can be alleived. Even people who don't believe in their need to have the shittiest life possible can't be helped.
And with the unfit pieces of shit they elect, we get continued racism, an extractive, exploitative, impoverishing economy and extremely fucked up and insensible foreign and military affairs.
To state the obvious, because that's my thing, all the unfit pols who've turned the nation into a failed state (see, response to the pandemic, 2020), were nearly all elected to office (or appointed by others elected to office). It's on the voters who elect them.
So I'm not so sure about the use of the word better. I have my doubts.
Lincoln at Cooper Union, on Southern Democrats, the ancestors of today's GQP: "Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events."
If contemporary cities were installing uberbenches, they would have those rails inside so people couldn't sleep on them...
I said ubermenches, not uberbenches, Teach.
And as to the latter, you've got them so wrong. Uberbenches aren't installed but wait to be called by app to a site. Come when needed and called for.
I'd say that they've bought into a moral code and view of reality whose net effect is to separate humanity into the Elect and the Damned and proscribe any mercy for the Damned as Wrong.
What a lovely human being.
(Back in about 1990 or so, after listening to Rush Limbaugh for the first time, I said to myself, "This man *despises* democracy and the democratic process." And here we are.)
What's going on now is the shit the GOP's been working towards since at least the 1990s, probably the 80s.
1964.
Talking, probably, not really acting in the, well, active sense of the term.
John Derbyshire - now there’s a blast from the past, if by “blast” you mean “wave of fecal sludge released from an unregulated Iowa pig farm.”
Meanwhile, Williamson is as terrible a writer as he is a human. His prose should carry a warning label, “Unrestricted exposure may induce Buckley Syndrome and Hindrocket’s Dementia.”
Now, those are conditions I'll have to google in my microcephalia.
The Watertown area of our state produced both Hindrocket and Kristi Noem, in addition to others who have so far kept their awfulness at the state or local level. Coincidence? Or Hellmouth?
Hey Rapid City unleashed Neil Tapio, Tomi Lahren and Lawrence Lessig on the world
If there’s a teenage girl who kills vampires and takes 8 years to graduate high schoo, it’s the Hellmouth.
It only took her four years.
Incidentally, if you ever meet Josh Whedon, get on his good side by praising the "Buffy…" movie, heaping praise in particular on Donald Sutherland's lines.
Voting is only for those that vote Republican? If that's true, we'[re doomed. I assume you're being satirical.
Some of us remember Antonin Scalia opining that there is no right to vote because it does not appear explicitly written in the Constitution. Therefore, the Founders never intended for "the people" to ever have any say in their government or governance.
I remember when I was in high school studying the Constitution in American History class. Because I was a super nerd, I went above and beyond, and read the whole thing carefully on my own. The number one thing that struck me (besides, of course, the three-fifths provisions) was that there was nothing explicitly said about the right to vote. It seemed a dangerous omission--and we might just be starting to find out how dangerous.
Then we'd better add it ASAP.
15A addresses that, no?
The way I read it, it says you can't abridge the right to vote for certain reasons, but it says nothing about what the right to vote is. The same is true for the 19th amendment.
They didn’t include Italians, Catholics or Italian Catholics, either.
Well, they're OK. But we don't want the Irish!
Careful, they've got a shitload of dimes and we don't want them on the other side.
See : oaths denying belief in the transfiguration of the Host.
That's my old fart rant: That the Constitution is actually anti-democratic instituting a tyranny of the minority. The 15th Amendment threw a wrench in that.
I don't think this fictional Williamson is that strongly misrepresenting The Founders; I do think that rather than taking that as a cue to limit voting rights, we should instead use it as a corrective to worship of the Founders.
OK, I actually went and read his eviction column, just to see if he's as big a scumbag as everybody seems to think.
If anything, he's worse.
I swear, rich people will let ANYBODY blow them.
I just re-read it. My god, whatever is the polar opposite of "the milk of human kindness" just drips from that column. The racism, the classism, the absolute lack of any moral center whatsoever...yeesh.
What is so evil about him is that he can never, ever, envision himself as the person being evicted because "the check didn't come." Those folks just didn't plan well.
In his desire for an electorate as he imagines it Should Be (rather than the rabble of Wretched Refuse he finds), he seems to be channeling Late Racist Georgia Governor Lester Maddox (a man who’d ride a bicycle backward at sports events because he could: perhaps a metaphor...), who said, regarding Penal policy in the Peach State: “What we need is a better class of prisoner...”
"Better class of prisoner" - the kind in the white collar institutions perhaps?
Given the Late Governor’s Raison d’etre, I’m guessing it was the “non (n word)” sort.
Capital! LOL
LOL, the egghead kicker nails it: "the Fleisch-Kincaid score for this column is 20.1"
And his Vogt-Kammf score is “Replicant”..
But what is his Mein Kampf or his Dummkopf score?
His Panzerkampfwagen score is VI (Tiger)
LMAO
He got a 100 on the Dummkopf scale
Well, it is difficult to understand how a human being can be this vile.
How I love a well-turned phrase wrapped up and warped out with a common sense modestly proposed sensibility. I must confess I had to look up Fleisch-Kincaid and found to my delight which I usually reserve for myself alone an automatic checker. Hours of checking pleasure await in my microcephalic future.
That KDW column reeks like old fish guts. I wish we could go back to Hog Holler with Maisiebell and Methedrine.
Have never read Kevin Williamson's garbage but if this is a fair parody of his writing style, it is ponderous and tendentious to say the least. I love the way, in your parody of him, he never really makes an actual argument against for or against voting; he just lobs ad hominem insults and dubious historical assertions that have been part of the tired cliches for what passes as conservative thought for decades. I much prefer Paul Weyrich's cynical but direct crudeness:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
I read the WIlliamson column. Roy is exaggerating, but not by much.
Unsurprising that Williamson's piece is as gutless as he is. He wastes 1500 words to tell us that voters are stupid (i.e., disagree with him), voters cast votes that are bad (i.e. result in policies he might disagree with), and, worst of all, voters are "unqualified." But not once in this sea of elitest bullshit does he actually have the balls to come out and say just what it is that makes some voters "qualified" or "better" and how such qualifications might be determined. With the exception of an aside that he would raise the voting age to 30 (without offering any rationale for it), he never explains whom he intends to exclude from his American dream of "fewer — but better — voters." The root of democracy is "demos," and that's his problem with it.
Here's one way to we might get his exclusionary purge started: the right to vote should be denied to anyone who doesn't believe it exists.
Plus it seems he didn't get the memo that these bills are to prevent "voter fraud". Off script there Kevin.
I regret that I have but one (stranger’s) cell phone to hurl across the theatre at Mr Williamson’s essay.
Deep cut.
Really looking forward to 2024, when some Republican actually campaigns by attacking his opponent as belonging to "the party of Walter Duranty," and absolutely every Democrat says "...who?" and 48 hours later absolutely every Republican is acting convinced we hold secret weekly meetings to sacrifice animals on an altar dedicated to Walter Duranty.
I had to google Walter Duranty. And the Fleish-Kincaid thing too. Ya get a real education around here.
Walter Duranty is set to become the 2020s Saul Alinsky
Boy, that'll teach me to comment without reading the one directly below...
They're still using Saul Alinsky as the totem for slightly left-of-center Democrats, and I doubt anyone knew who they hell he was when they threw it at Obama.