To Mikey, With Love
Mikey has raised a point that I think many are feeling as the anxiety of this final sprint to the election ratchets up to an unending string of 11s. It’s in response to the wolf-shooting ad in the previous post. Here are Mikey’s thoughts, mine follow:
Are you kidding me? Yeah, I know, it’s “savagery” to shoot wolves from the air. But all these people, even Obama and Biden feel like it’s ok to advocate shooting PEOPLE from the air, and bomb them, blowing up their houses and tearing their women and children into little pieces. In all sorts of places. Missiles in Pakistan. Bombs in Afghanistan. Guns in Iraq. Iran and Syria on the radar screen.
I’m not saying animals don’t count.
But here’s the news. These fucking people are animals. They speak so casually of the brutal destruction of human life on an unimaginable scale. Unimaginable at least to americans, who routinely visit death, destruction and horror on other people without ever feeling the consequences (outside of that pesky 9/11 blowback thingie) of their savagery.
When are we going to talk about that?
What follows is some back-and-forth between Mikey and some other commenters that gets fairly heated, and again, I think it goes to show how on-edge this crazy, crazy time is making many of us feel.
Anyway, here are my thoughts on Mikey’s point:
It sucks that in the course of our efforts towards getting Obama-Biden in and preventing Bush III, we have to in some ways artificially desensitize ourselves to the big picture ultra-violence that’s going to go on regardless of whether it’s Obama-Biden or Palin-McCain in the White House. It really sucks.
But Mikey (and many others) have in past comment threads made the compelling argument that even though we’re faced with a bad choice, as per usual, it’s still a choice that means something. And that it’s the only choice. And that it’s way past the due date for dropping out of the process or voting Green or whatever.
So we need to fight for Obama even though he’s imperfect, even though he sure as shit is going to start another war and send some more shrapnel burning through the limbs and organs of innocent people, because that’s what American presidents do and have always done no matter whether they happen to be nice-enough seeming fellows or raging douchebags. It’s what they do, and our choice is limited to picking the candidate who will probably do such things less than their opponent.
So we fight for that person.
And the thing about fighting for something, even if it’s a lesser-of-two-evils something, is that if you really are committed to it, you can’t go at it in half-measures or with cynicism or plagued by doubt. That is a recipe for losing. So you wind up fighting for this imperfect, pockmarked thing with a zeal that is objectively unwarranted, but situationally appropriate.
That’s all a lot of us are doing in this sprint to the finish of this very important election, man.
fighting for this imperfect, pockmarked thing with a zeal that is objectively unwarranted
Imperfect, pockmarked things need love too.
Yup. And the real work begins Nov 5. Nah, not “the” real work. but it sure as hell continues.
Here is my thing … the ad sucks. Complaining about “savagery” for shooting wolves out of planes is just gay. Like giving blow jobs in a men’s bathroom at a Liza Minelli concert gay.
Shooting wolves from planes is lazy. Cowardly. Shitty. Cruel. About the lowest form of hunting short of caged hunts.
But savage? Come on. No one but the most effete of viewers is going to see it as savage. Savage is practically a compliment in this country. Complaining about it being savage is just going to make it a positive to all the wannabe savages out there who watch WWF and dream of being that awesome themselves. And anyone with an IQ over 90 is going hear the use of the word savage (with the sissy accent) and be reminded of every “liberals are such wusses” comment ever made.
This commercial is a wash. Animal lovers will be horrified. The less empathetic probably become more pro-Palin for it, if only because being “savage” sounds cool and the announcer is such a pantywaist about it.
My daughter says the rapper who likes learning the most is LL School J.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that American presidents start wars because the American people love ’em. I don’t fully understand why this is, though I’m sure we all have our theories, but them’s the facts.
We had a truly anti-war candidate running for the Democratic nomination, and he was treated like a joke. It’s impossible to get close to the presidency without expressing a willingness to blow the shit out of people, over there.
What we can hope for, and what it seems we’ll get with Obama, is someone who will at least be somewhat clear-eyed and realistic about the use of killing force. The alternative to that is a pair of flat-out sadistic warmongers who want to start wars with Iran, Russia, and who knows where else before they’re done.
It’s far, far, far from perfect, but it’s worth the fight.
When have we not talked about the imhumanity of war? Everytime sick disturbed leaders start one we talk about it. Everytime some sick fuck blows up a building filled with men, women and children we talk about it. When some deranged fucker shoots up a school, we talk about it.
I value the lives of those ‘humans’ less than animals, and have no guilt about it, and make no apologies for it.
Same goes for the twisted fucks leaning out of an airplane turning animals into pin cushions because they can’t get a clean shot off.
To paraphrase HellenWheels, Fuck Them.
Alex Tabarrok, a libertarian economists at Marginal Revolution, had this top say about a similar situation for libertarians
The libertarian voice has not been listened to in Republican politics for a long time. The Republicans take the libertarian wing of the party for granted and with phony rhetoric and empty phrases have bought our support on the cheap. Thus – since voice has failed – it is time for exit. Remember that if a political party can count on you then you cannot count on it..
This about the only thing I have ever agreed with Tabarrok about. This I suppose might be the one election where this is OK for progressives. The likely Supreme Court openings might be worth it. Obama likely would at least pick justices that will be less amenable to allowing the continued destruction of the Bill of Rights and playing King Me with Presidential power, although he likely would continue/strengthen the pro-corporate positions of the court.
the sad thing is that the progressive wing of the Democrats hasn’t even got phony rhetoric and empty phrases for our support
Mikey is the man. You should all read IOZ from time to time, for a fuller understanding of the dynamic mikey is describing.
None of us know how either major candidate will govern when elected. McCain may, if he wins, go all Mavericky on us and declare war on the religious right, and/or tell America he thought the Bush tax cuts were retarded, and now that he has the reigns of power he can tell us how he really feels.
Obama may tell America that the War on Drugs is a travesty of a sham of an abortion, and use the evidence of his own use as support for his case.
I don’t think either will happen, but it is a fool’s game to declare either a non-possibility.
It’s an odds game. Odds are that McCain-Palin will be fantastically militant and ignorant, and odds are Obama-Biden will be equally sane and factish.
I have no hope that either has any sort of magic wand to repair the utter clusterfuck Bush The Lesser has left them, and living in IL, I have the luxury of voting for REAL change, some third party psycho, just to make a point. But if it is close, Obama gets my nod.
I often think of him as Jackie Robinson writ national. Not only did Jackie need to be a better baseball player than the vast majority of his peers, he needed to be a better human being than the vast majority of his peers, for obvious and transparent reasons.
I just don’t know if we’re ready. To me, the polls being close, despite the utter viciousness and incompetence of the McCain campaign, we’re already too far down the drain of Empireness to sweat it. In the words of the great Heywood J.:
The fact is, it’s because of the drama. Americans like wars for the same reason they like action movies: like action movies, our wars have few tangible negative consequences for nearly all Americans, and they provide thrilling action scenes for a lot of people. I don’t have any other explanation for this lack of empathy other than sociopathology.
War=money. Conflict equals money for Corporate Media Man. Close elections are directly, vested, lock-step winners for the ad game with Media Man.
Deal with it.
And the thing about fighting for something, even if it’s a lesser-of-two-evils something, is that if you really are committed to it, you can’t go at it in half-measures or with cynicism or plagued by doubt. That is a recipe for losing. So you wind up fighting for this imperfect, pockmarked thing with a zeal that is objectively unwarranted, but situationally appropriate.
I’m sorry but no.
Fighting for the lesser of two evils? Ok. Fighting for the lesser of two evils not just as a True Believer (which is bad enough on its own), but as a fake True Believer, with all the genuine article’s stupidities and intemperance? This is moral method acting, and it sucks.
One should support the lesser of two evils. Yadda yadda yadda. But in doing so, to act as if that lesser evil is not evil at all is …. I don’t have the right word. The only thing that seems appropriate is something from sermons heard in childhood: an abomination. I’m sure this will elicit squeals from the likes of Jay B. but there it is.
Yes, he’s better than Bush III and he must win. But for the love of Jebus stop fucking pretending he’s the Kwitsatz Hadderach when you know he’s not. I’ve always known of lies so huge they knock the truth out of victims — after all, such lies have been the tools of rightwingers for years. But this shit is different, and new to me. It’s the lie so huge, told in such bad faith but at the same time delivered in tones of such sincerity, it knocks the truth out of the liar, too. Just stop the fanboyism. Be a partisan hack. Tell the truth. Go negative. But fucking please stop talking up the lesser of two evils as if he’s not evil at all.
Here is IOZ’s take on the same general subject.
Dammit. The preview told me I had the link right.
Try this one.
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2008/09/empire-of-spite.html
The half/half electorate is psychologically unsustainable.
Human behavior naturally divides itself into thirds. (See the case of German police officers: two thirds refused to participate in the murder of citizens in the occupied countries. In the Stanley Milgram experiment, a solid third of participants refused to go into the danger zone, no matter what the experimenters did. And look at the Bush dead-enders… hovering around a third of the populace for the past few years.)
In any moral situation, you have solid thirds at each end of the bell curve, and the swayable middle. I find it comforting that the R’s had to cheat to get themselves over the top for the past two Presidential elections.
What we have in the middle now is people who don’t make up their minds until they have seen the whole thing play out; since they don’t have enough understanding to take a position early, they rely on an accumulation of hunches, images, and even issues, if they feel strongly enough about a particular one.
All this poll anxiety is groundless. They bumped up the numbers of Republicans in the poll so McCain could look like he had a bounce. We have charged up wingnuts, but they weren’t going to vote for a sensible candidate anyway. Polls don’t use landlines; how many people do you know who have only a cell phone? And they aren’t polling any of the new voters who have been registered this past year.
Somehow, I don’t think they signed up to vote for the Republicans, who have lost about 300k, just in the 26 states who track such things.
Yes, it’s depressing that the entire country hasn’t woken up. But this is a democracy. We don’t need the entire country. We just need enough.
We are confident they don’t tell us the truth about so many other things. What makes anyone think they are telling us the truth about the polls?
And the thing about fighting for something, even if it’s a lesser-of-two-evils something…
I can’t think of time in my adult voting life when elections haven’t been about opting for the lesser of two evils. If the electorate are overwhelmingly interested in voting this time round, it’s because the choices are much clearer this time: There’s very very very diabolically evil and slightly evil (sort of akin to the Clinton administration which wasn’t that bad before the BJ blew everyone’s senses).
After eight unrelenting years of the former, the message is sinking in. Snooze through this one and you risk another four years like the last eight, only worse because you’ve got real bible camp people, not just fake pandering ones.
I really sympathize with this commenter. And yes, Obama’s capitulations to right-wing foreign policy rhetoric are terribly disappointing. But can anyone honestly say that we would have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our hands right now if Gore had been elected in 2000? Sure, he would have let us down in innumerable ways. But the fact is that the Republican party has become something akin to a death cult over the last several years, and now that they’ve turned the presidency into a virtual elected dictatorship, you would be terribly mistaken to think that a vote for Obama is morally comparable to a vote for McCain. Let’s not forget that it was McCain who was pushing for the invasion of Iraq as aggressively as Kristol or Krauthammer, and who was ridiculing the French for their suggestion that doing so might not be a good idea.
And I hate to say it, but it’s pretty clear that a McCain/Palin administration would be way worse than what we’ve experienced over the last 8 years. To have a shot at the presidency, McCain has made a Faustian bargain with the people he used to hold in contempt, and now we finally face the prospect of a true-believer Pentecostal who has flirted with far-right secessionist politics being our president. This is the nightmare scenario, folks. I’m as resistant to the rhetoric of party loyalty as anyone, but this is a real fucking disaster in the making, and now just isn’t the time to doubt whether Obama is a morally acceptable choice.
Finally, I don’t think that talking about animal cruelty is a diversion from the cruelty of bombing innocent people. Machiavelli said that hunting is practice for warfare. If Dick Cheney and his pals enjoy their canned hunts, it’s a reflection of their overall infatuation with cruelty of all kinds. Their attitudes toward animals only makes visible the kind of brutality they’d like to inflict on all of their prey, human and otherwise.
These fucking people are animals. They speak so casually of the brutal destruction of human life on an unimaginable scale.
Not only casually, but as if destruction is a fucking virtue. “Sanctity of life,” my fat, white ass.
ps- I love you Mikey!
WearBear,
True indeed. Polls are horseshit at this point in the game, since election after election tells us a huge slice of the electorate doesn’t decide until days, even minutes before they get into the booth.
To quibble a bit, I think the composite poll numbers are relatively accurate, and those polls spell nothing but disaster for this country, even if Obama wins by a nose.
We have never had a national election where the outcome should be so…easy.
As analogies go, the British 100 years ago is a very scary one — even World War I, the greatest bloodbath in history (at least to that point) was not enough to end the Empire. That took World War II, whose horrors have been underplayed by fantasists like Brokaw — Stalingrad not least. Soviet blood drowned the Nazis, and meanwhile Britain was destroyed, along with Germany as was. I was born four years after WWII, and I remember bomb sites and rationing and all that playing-in-the-rubble aftermath.
It took about fifty years for Britain to recover, although at almost no point during that cycle did anyone admit such a thing, especially in the latter stages. After all, we won. Yeah, right.
Things seem to go quicker now. The dying throes of the American Empire are already ugly. How much worse can they get? We shall see ,,,
You got it exactly right, PS.
We have never had a national election where the outcome should be so…easy.
There also hasn’t been a black guy with a funny name in the running.
People would do well to remember that the anti-wolf kill video was not put together by Obama’s campaign, but an animal rights group. Since animal welfare is their focus, I can only applaud their effort, not denigrate it.
Ditto for Planned Parenthood’s bitchslap.
More of the same would be good to see over the coming weeks in response to the lies and bullshit of the McPalin campaign.
Obama’s campaign should fight back and there are ways of doing this without being dirty like Republicans. That PP video was perfect. More of the same would be nice to see.
That’s right, RB, and don’t for a minute think it doesn’t count.
If Obama wins, it will in fact be a secret landslide, but Media Man won’t play it that way.
As I always say, this particular election is going to be unique in its reflection on exactly where America stands as a people. And you can put in the bank that the international press will rub our noses in it.
Michael Jackson’s Dying Pumpkin Crepe
Ingredients:
6 ounces omnivorous mustang
1 stick pumpkin
2 pounds purified beer cheese
6 bags kinkajou eye, strained
1 stick baking powder
1 pinch cocoa
Begin praying. Place the mustang into a large saucepan. Use a food processor to mash the beer cheese with the pumpkin. Stuff the resulting concoction into the mustang. Crush – very softly – the kinkajou eye, baking powder, and the cocoa. Heap everything together. Bake for 68 hours. Serves 13 individuals with complex stomachs.
All I know is that if we fuck it up this time, I’m leaving. Enough.
Is there a country that takes American political refugees?
This comment makes me very sad.
The lowest common denominator has it, people. Some badass named Glunk who can’t read – because reading is for fags – and dreams of winning big on the next dog fight is who we must appeal to now. To call what’s savage savage makes us gay and effete. Sure, wounding defenseless animals and leaving them to die IS savage, but don’t call it that for God’s sake because Glunk might be watching and heaven knows we must do everything in our power to persuade Glunk to vote against what is in his nature even if it means compromising every principle under the fucking sun.
PATHETIC.
So we need to fight for Obama even though he’s imperfect,
even thoughbecause he sure as shit is not going to start another war and send some more shrapnel burning through the limbs and organs of innocent peopleFixed.
Seriously, the wolf-killer ad was made for and by a specific constituency. I don’t think it will alienate people who don’t agree with it (who the hell agrees with shooting animals from airplanes in winter? Besides Dick Cheney?). The Planned Parenthood ad, likewise. They are both trying to show how these two clowns are either sadistic jerks or pandering simps. I think on both counts, Obama is in the clear.
I say, more ads addressing that will resonate with more constituencies. All they have is fear and hatred. We can do better than that.
I think this post needs a big picture of Al Gore so we all know what it means to fight for the lesser of two evils, and what can happen if we throw our hands up and say, “they both suck.”
Jennifer, based on everything and only what you’ve written here, would you like someone to come with you?
I’m with Bill Maher. I don’t give a flying fuck what the Glunks and Rockhammers think or say. Fuck ’em all. If there are so many of these fuckwits that we have to stop calling shit that is savage what it is, then America is DOOMED.
You cannot cater to assraping hillbillies. Negotiating and compromising will taint you.
Also, none of these Republican supporting shitbags enlisted to fight in the war they support from their armchairs. And they never will. I might pay them scant attention if they ever sign up for what they support. Until then, Mysticwhatever, these true savages can go fuck themselves.
The Republican Party will be destroyed by a thousand points of snark. This is one.
How is this bad? “Mommy look, the Republican lady is shooting puppies!!!”
And I suggest daily web ads from Obama. Give them to the media as video press releases like McPalin does, make them super cheap, and super cheesy that keep a running tab of McCain’s lies. Call it “McCain’s Daily Lie,” with a bell that rings up a lie and a big number that denotes the number of lies. You know, good, old-fashioned media catnip for teh stoopid peeple owt ther.
Thanks, mikey, and thanks DA. Let’s just get out there and do it. Also, let’s get Obama elected and put some pressure on the man, as Bun B likes to say.
Just for the record, I don’t think Obama “sucks.”
He, not unlike McCain, has to win first to do shit. I’ve met Obama in an intimate and pretty lengthy setting. At one point he turned to me and created the biggest choke of my lifetime, to date, considering I had about a million things I wanted to challenge him on.
I said, “I’m nobody.” To his credit, he laughed and said that probably wasn’t true. But it was. I’m just a an opinionated quasi-libertarian, increasingly anarchist, rational idealist, who believes naively in our better angels.
So we need to fight for Obama even though he’s imperfect,
even thoughbecause he sure as shit is not going to start another war and send some more shrapnel burning through the limbs and organs of innocent peopleFixed.
Hahahahahahahahaha. Oh, sad.
Jennifer, I like the “we” in “if we fuck up” — and I don’t blame you for wanting to quit. Me, I fled one country (voluntarily; the British aristocracy was and is just too much for my fragile psyche, even though they wanted to invite me in), and I ain’t leaving.
In the immortal words of Winston S. Churchill, imperialist extraordinaire, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, and we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!” The old bastard could speak …
Several folks have hinted at what I am going to rant about here, so I think I’m not alone in my thoughts.
That is, America is doomed. Even if Obama wins. The window (what is it called again?) has moved so far right, and the media is so controlled by the right, that there is little chance for any sanity in the future. Even if Obama wins. It seems the Blood Thirst of Americans has been mightily stoked by the Corporate Media, and they might have created a mob they can’t control anymore.
Even if Obama wins.
America is growing more and more like Germany circa 1936. The rest of the world knows that. S,N posters know that. But…the even crazier thing is that a large portion of the REST of the world is growing more fascistic too. Look at the right wing “wins” in other major countries recently. Vote fraud doesn’t just occur in Russia and the USA, dontcha know?
The fact is, capitalism is in its final stages, folks. The reality of capitalism can best be called “trickle up”, AKA “the rich get richer”. The crumbs the powerful are willing to give to 99% of humanity are getting smaller and smaller.
Where does it end? Who knows, but make sure you have lots of intoxicants ready.
In the meantime, do everything you can to help Obama win. He buys sanity a few more years.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, ya’ll.
We can only do the best we can. An example with an animal theme:
A year ago we got a new kitten. We have a tiny apartment and two cats already. This guy was not cute. He’d been held as evidence in an abuse case, lost half his fur and all of his body fat, and had bounced through three shelters with no takers and no prospects.
Now, I haven’t cured any diseases, saved a bunch of people from a burning airliner, or brought peace and harmony to the entire world.
But I could do this. And I did.
And for this little morsel of thinking, feeling, being… it was everything.
Fuckin’ everything.
Let me tell you, from a quarter century in animal rescue: You can’t save them all.
And if you burn out, and get bitter, and give up… you won’t save even one.
Commander Palin not only will continue policies leading to the collapse of America during her term, she will take everybody else down with us.
The USSR had the grace to fall apart without firing a single nuclear shot.
Does anybody believe the Pentecostal President would do the same?
PS, I’m about as combative and relentless as they come, though I’m profoundly non-violent.
I just think that one needs to understand that beating one’s head against the wall of stupidity is not very rational.
If McCain wins, it is very likely, probable even, that the fight will be sucked out of me like some sort of national vampire has a hold of my neck.
I’m not proud to admit it. But I’m proud to be able to understand it.
Get Obama elected first. Expect disappointment.
…
Then, stay on his ass. But not only the senator himself, but your senator. Tell them you’ve had enough of this shit. The kind of change we need has to be forced. There is no precedent for just electing a guy and expecting him to do everything. It doesn’t work that way.
And, don’t ignore, belittle, or shit on the people who make up the conservative base. Talk to them. Listen to what they’re so pissed off about. Challenge their religion on its own level. It’s easy. I can Bible-whip a fundie in less than a minute.
Point is, the fight must continue long after the election. And the enemies must be clearly delineated. Why has no-one tried to take down Rupert Murdoch yet? Who sits on the board of Exxon-Mobil? FCC, anybody? Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin? These are the criminals that run the place, not your poor Cheeto-eating schlub from Thomasboro, IL, who works at an auto repair shop.
John O, that’s honest of you (and thanks for previous kind words). I’m committed to non-violence but when I went to Nicaragua I finally understood, on a deep emotional level, people picking up guns. I’m too old and slow now. I think.
And my money’s still on Barry … Just ask the East Germans: Change IS possible. It’s just that (a) external realities constrain it and (b) we sure as hell can’t predict it.
I posted on Obama’s blog when lots of folks were bitching on Monday and Tuesday.
I think we give the media too much credit. Here’s why I think that;
You have Dems and Reps. They’re the ones who vote on the issues, their minds are made up. Those elusive undecideds are impossible to quantify. They’re voting on a gut reaction. Americans are paranoid people. A lot of people actually think they’re at risk for a terrorist attack. They want the to know that the POTUS stands in the way of trouble, whether it’s terrorists, banks, mortgage lenders, criminals… you name it. McCain is convincing them that Obama is bad and he’s protecting them from that.
It’s simple. Obama has to do the same to McCain form here on out. Don’t say anything nice about McCain EVER AGAIN. Nothing. Our compassion will not be shared by the opposition party. They’ll do anything to win, so we have to be willing to do more, that’s the bottom line.
Hang up the intellect, he’s won all the votes he’s going to get by appealing to people’s minds. He needs to get that gut feeling in people, and he’ll win. He has that “it” factor too, that killer instinct too. He needs to stop letting himself get talked out of it.
Sadly, yes. My (Iranian-born) wife is very bitter, and complained that she didn’t see the difference between McSame and BO. (Yes, I reminded her about bomb-bomb-bomb…) I reminded her that people said the same thing in 2000, and maybe, honey, would Gore have been 10% better than Bush? That’s over TEN THOUSAND lives.
This was the first argument she’s ever admitted I won!
John O – sure, maybe if we pool resources we can afford a farmhouse in Umbria and start an agri-tourism business.
And PS – Churchill was referring to the enemy from outside. As inspiring as his words were, he was speaking to a people united in purpose.
We don’t have that here. We have one group that pretty much bases their decisions on leadership based on what will fuck everyone smarter than they are (even though they fuck themselves in the process) and another group, which unfortunately seems to grow smaller with each passing year who doesn’t want to see anyone get fucked, and which is rewarded for their efforts by being jeered at by morons. Fuck that noise, I’ve had enough of that. If the retards like getting fucked, that’s their business…but if I’m that outnumbered that they’re going to succeed in making sure I get fucked too…well then, I’d prefer to point and laugh at them from afar.
I worked for several years for The Nature Conservancy, and whether it’s sensible or not, cruelty to the charismatic megafauna brings the voters out in masses. People in this country don’t like cruelty, and they are more inclined to care for animals than for their fellow humans, probably because animals are seen as innocents, whereas all us humans are sinful creatures who deserve whatever torture we get.
Yes, there will be people who smile with pleasure as the wolves cry out in pain, biting their own legs in a vain attempt to stop the hurting. Those folks are already Republicans. But your ordinary soccer mom doesn’t like seeing dogs shot. And I suspect at least some hunters won’t like that unsportsmanlike conduct.
Defenders of Wildlife are solid on this issue. They have the moral standing to make the case, and make the case they should.
LOL, WereBear,
About 4 years ago, I was stopped suddenly and rather emergently on a 4-lane road I took to work every day, at a very unusual place to have to slam on the breaks.. Turns out everyone was breaking hard for a kitten that was scrambling across one helluva a lot of traffic.
He froze next to my car. I looked up through the sunroof and said, alone, with a selfish, solitary grin on my face, “It’s a test, isn’t it?”
It was Christmas time. He was a runt, and I’m pretty sure his mother abandoned him for same. Survival and all.
I took him in. He went from cat-hell to cat-heaven (I already had two) in about 20 minutes. I was hosting a Christmas party that night, and tried desperately to give him a good home that wasn’t mine. Many spouses argued, mostly the wives saying “take him” and mostly the husbands saying no.
He was 10 weeks old. I had 40 people over to the pad not two hours later, and the poor little thing crapped in the litter box almost immediately upon getting “home,” had his first decent meal in who knows how long, and relaxed and slept in the midst of a loud, boisterous fun, nice, warm Christmas party without ever leaving the crowd once. He as tired, and he knew he was safe. It would not be an exaggeration to say he got a lot of attention from the guests.
To this day, he’s my best hunter and fetcher. You can hear him purring from a room away.
And the day I retire, I’ll have a dog before I get home. My three cats are used to them, and one in particular, not the stray, makes no bones about whose house the dog is occupying. 🙂
Jennifer, I switch all the time between “we” the total society (we elected Reagan — I used to annoy people by insisting on that) and “we” the folks I identify with. Yeah, Churchill’s referent was a wider “we” — I was just (somewhat ironically) encouraging the never-say-die spirit. Che would probably have agreed. He dead. Oh well.
Jennifer, I’ve whored myself to Corporate America for 20 years. If you can bring to the table anything near what I can, I’m all in. 🙂
It ain’t a lot, but if you can match it, it’s enough. Can we grow high-grade reefer?
LOL.
I worked for several years for The Nature Conservancy, and whether it’s sensible or not, cruelty to the charismatic megafauna brings the voters out in masses. People in this country don’t like cruelty, and they are more inclined to care for animals than for their fellow humans, probably because animals are seen as innocents, whereas all us humans are sinful creatures who deserve whatever torture we get.
Now this, in substance and tone, is more like it.
MOAR, plz.
mikey, thank you for your post. i hope you don’t go away; you say things that need to be said.
i’ve been talking to a lot of young people lately about the election, and some of them really enjoy complaining about the american electoral system, the utter uselessness of most democrats, and the yuckier things obama has said…and then proudly telling me that they’re not going to vote because of it.
and the way i see it is that now is triage time. our electoral system is in serious need of overhaul. obama isn’t perfect. democrats will continue to disappoint me. i’m not sure if i’ll live to see third (and fourth and fifith and sixth) parties viable on the national level. and these are things that we need to deal with on november fifth.
right now, my priorities are to help elect obama, and to work against california’s proposition 8 (which, if passed, would amend california’s constitution to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry here.) for me, these are the two emergencies that need to be dealt with immediately. the rest is important too, and that comes in six weeks, once bush III has been prevented.
YCPLOAR — It’s the Overton Window.
And, yes, it has moved rather grossly (in all meanings of that word) to the right over recent years. If you go by what passes for political analysis these days, Obama and the Democrats are just slightly to the right of Marx and Lenin. In actuality, none of them is as liberal (in the original political meaning of the word) as, say, Richard Nixon was (never mind even thinking about Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller or John Lindsay).
Today’s Dems are yesterday’s moderate to conservative Republicans. Today’s Republicans are yesterday’s John Birchers with better suits and focus group-tested language (although the latter part seems to be fading as well, thanks to the antics of Turd Blossom et al.). If Obama is elected, perhaps, maybe, hopefully, the window will stop sliding to the right; hell, it might even move an inch or two to the left. But no way in hell is he going to be able to replay the Great Society, much less the New Deal.
OTOH, if the Rethugs are elected this time around, we may as well just change our name to Weimar Republic II. Aside from the complete and utter lack of concern for anything other than their own bank accounts, they haven’t a clue how to restore America’s former greatness, politicially, economically, or militarily.
To put it another way: the bubble of American Exceptionalism is about to burst (or probably already is bursting). Our only hope to avoid some serious ugliness (I’m talking food riots, wheelbarrows of money to buy your groceries, etc.) is to find someone who can lead us to what the economists like to call a “soft landing”. Obama may or may not be that person (I have my doubts), but there sure as shooting isn’t any modern-day Republican who ever will be.
Sorry for the typos. Getting pretty tired, but this place always keeps me stimulated enough to hang.
Breaks? Wow. Brakes.
as = “was.”
Sheesh.
What fun it is to review your own idiocy.
In the end, November 5 is going to be a big day for me. That’s all.
I think it goes to show how on-edge this crazy, crazy time is making many of us feel.
There are ways of dealing with the stress that we all feel. Practice some mindfulness exercises. Turn off the computer, go watch a movie, enjoy the sunset, go for a walk, talk to a friend.
It’s important to get some perspective, some distance. There is a kind of myopia that you get when you spend too much time focusing on this stuff. Confirmation bias, self defeating narratives, the poison of cynicism and despair. We all develop habits and routines online that tend to amplify our preconceived ideas. In fact, I think that many of the fears and concerns that I see people expressing online are subconscious projections, digital simulacra of our worst nightmares. They say a good deal about us and almost nothing about reality.
We don’t know nearly as much as we think we do. This predicting the future business is really just guesswork. Hell, we can’t predict the weather more than a few days out and we can see that stuff coming. Why? Because weather is a dynamic mathematically chaotic system. So are societies. We do not know the future. So relax, take some deep breaths, this will help you to cope with the uncertainty with the added bonus of helping you to deal with whatever it is that comes next. It’s win win.
(Mounts soapbox.)
Attention non-crazy Americans:
HOLD FAST!
For the next two months it’s broken field play. Get used to it, and prepare for the emotional thumps you will take along the way. The goal line is in only one direction, but tacking is the best way to get there. Let’s get there together.
Please… please please please. Get local.
GOTV is critical. Make a plan today for how you can help on 11/4.
Write a letter to the editor tonight. Proofread it tomorrow, then send it. Make it local and personal.
Go to http://www.barackobama.com and buy some bumper stickers for all your friends.
You will give heart to your kindred, and strike fear in your enemies!
It’s go time.
(That soapbox so wanted it.)
David, that was wonderfully put, and right on in a big way.
There is a frightening possibility that after a mere 240 years, we couldn’t handle it, ultimately.
Rome laughs.
So, if Obama wins by 10 electoral votes and 2% popular, are you all going to seriously believe we’ve made any substantive headway? Other than delaying the inevitable fate of every Superpower in history?
I suppose the end might be postponed a little in that case, unless Obama is truly more remarkable than anyone thinks.
So, not me. Any close result screams “monon-America.” At least to me.
Yeah, there will be a faint glimmer of hope. Hope is for losers, like rabbits are for luck.
If Obama wins big (300 EV, 5%?), I’ll maybe believe again. And just think about that for a minute: 5%?
Not good.
“monon-America?” Uh, I meant “moron-America.”
Time to go to bed. ‘Night, all. Keep up your good work, your good words, your good deeds, and your good snark.
David in NYC said,
Today’s Dems are yesterday’s moderate to conservative Republicans.
This is true of Canada’s Liberals. Today’s Conservatives make the Canadian Cons of 30 years ago look like left of centre liberals, which, when I think back and remember the actual ‘tards they were (in context), I can hardly believe that today I might give anything to have them back as the enemy.
John O: Thanks for the compliment.
Empires rise and decay much more rapidly than they did in the past (someone tell the Chinese) for the same reasons that everything else changes more quickly — greater access to, and easier dissemination of, information. Not that long ago, it took literally days for the news to travel from, say, Europe to America. Now that happens instantaneously.
Empires, nay, all civilizations, are attempts to impose order on chaos. It works for a while, but eventually chaos wins out. To say it poetically, as Yeats did, “Things fall apart/The centre does not hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” To say it scientifically, all systems tend towards maximum entropy and minimum enthalpy.
The only question remaining is how many will suffer, and how much so, when “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” It’s going to be ugly — but is it going to be apocalyptic? The most frightening thing to me about the Rethugs is that so many of them (e.g., those waiting on the Rapture, like our potential VP) actually want — and pray for — the latter.
From one of the red states:
Think they’ll be inviting Sara Palin?
I worked for several years for The Nature Conservancy, and whether it’s sensible or not, cruelty to the charismatic megafauna brings the voters out in masses. People in this country don’t like cruelty, and they are more inclined to care for animals than for their fellow humans, probably because animals are seen as innocents, whereas all us humans are sinful creatures who deserve whatever torture we get.
This is a very astute statement and it goes a long way towards explaining why I like that ad politically and kind of despise it emotionally, especially in light of Mikey’s comments.
I am much more stricken by the images of Iraqi children who have been torn apart by our bombs than by this ad, which laments the wolves who have been killed by Alaskans. The fact is (sorry), that I feel that this ad is something of a pot-shot at ordinary people up in Alaska who are dealing with a reality that the people who are going to sympathize with this ad don’t really understand.
The practice of shooting wolves from helicopters is cruel, but it’s also life. The people doing it for whatever reason — to protect livestock and/or make some cash on the side from their state government — are probably not taking very much pleasure from it at all. Most of them aren’t “savages” and in the cases of those who are, I bet it could be argued that any savagery they display is a self-defence mechanism so they won’t go nuts.
The real savages are the assholes who crack jokes about clubbing baby seals or turning Mecca into glass from the comfort of their keyboards and wingnut welfare sinecures, not the people who are actually out there in real life, doing the sometimes nasty shit that needs to be done to advance one’s metaphorical game token to the next square.
To Josh Marshall’s criticism – I don’t want to promote an idea that people should fake support of Obama or consciously pretend that the lesser of two evils is really the Messiah or pretend that problems with him don’t exist. My opinion, instead, is that those of us who have been invested in this race for a long time and have decided to support the LOTE have long ago internalized and personally dealt with the inconsistencies of that position, so it’s not “faking” to be 100% behind the guy, it’s very real and heartfelt.
All I know is that if we fuck it up this time, I’m leaving. Enough.
You are aware of course that while you may leave you can’t take your money with you right? That door was closed a few days before the fannie may, freddie mack takeover. You can physically leave the US but you can’t expatriate your money without being heavily taxed. I guess it’s an improvement over simply closing the borders. That tends to panic people.
john o
you may be right.
and yet if you don’t fight fight fight for obama, you are still an asshole. i know, he’s not your horse, maybe he’s not mine, but I WILL MAX MY FUCKING SHIT OUT FOR THAT GUY no matter the case that he’s not perfect, he’s not really a progressive and so on.
and anyone who gives a shit about what is smart and good will do the same, whatever their misgivings. i don’t think it’s a close call.
buck up kids. i better fucking see you all in nevada, or colorado, or wisconsin, or new hampshire, or wherever. we can rest when we are dead.
and to be clear to those who don’t know my commenting history on this fine site, i’m no obama homer. i pretty much think the democratic party is composed of feckless corporate-compromised asswipe losers. it doesn’t change the above one whit. and you have to be a narcissistic child not to understand that.
Today’s Conservatives make the Canadian Cons of 30 years ago look like left of centre liberals
Yup. The Reform/Alliance/PC merger was actually a brutal smash-and-grab by Harper’s coalition of fundies and neocons. And right now they’re poised for a majority win in October. I say this as warning to any disaffected Yanks who figure fleeing north if Palin/McCain wins. Us Canucklevanians have plenty of political stupid also.
Speaking of Red Tories, I voted for Joe Clark (!!) in 2000 to help prevent the Reformer from taking the riding.
The practice of shooting wolves from helicopters is cruel, but it’s also life.
Your comment reflects, in part, the very prejudice it takes on: the assumption that the aerial gunning of wildlife is what rural folks must do to survive. With all due respect, you’re mostly speculating, D because you assume this is how rural life is and you assume the people who stand against aerial culling are emotional city dwelling elitists who know jackshit about what life is like out in the boonies.
You may be interested in this item. Though it is dated, it paints a more complex picture of what drives wolf-killing.
I worked for several years for The Nature Conservancy, and whether it’s sensible or not, cruelty to the charismatic megafauna brings the voters out in masses. People in this country don’t like cruelty, and they are more inclined to care for animals than for their fellow humans, probably because animals are seen as innocents, whereas all us humans are sinful creatures who deserve whatever torture we get.
Many, many years ago, Garry Trudeau drew a cartoon where college-aged Boopsie was trying to convince her college-football-player boyfriend B.D. not to join the Army and fight in Vietnam. She stormed into a football huddle and read out a news report about an American bombing run (hello, Flyboy McCain!) that “overshot its military target, but destroyed a hospital, an orphanage, and some baby ducks.”
And Zonker, at the other side of the huddle, wailed in distress, “Not baby ducks!?!”
The wolf-blasting ad is aimed at the Zonkers among us. JNFR is right, there are lots of people who can’t work up an opposition to killing other human beings in the abstract, but explicit cruelty to adorable fuzzy animals bothers them. I’m willing to give the Zonkers credit for simply failing to understand that “pre-emptive / preventive war” involves more specific cruelties than any other video game, whereas most of us over the age of 12 know that the people who enjoy torturing animals will also enjoy torturing other people if the rest of us are dumb enough to give them the power to hurt other people that middle-school bullies have to hurt household pets and whatever neighborhood fauna they can corner.
P.S. Mikey Rules OK!
The practice of shooting wolves from helicopters is cruel, but it’s also life. The people doing it for whatever reason — to protect livestock and/or make some cash on the side from their state government…
Not to argue with any of your larger points, DA, but I don’t see how there could be any profit in this. We sometimes have to rent helicopters in the work I do. The rate is $1400.00/hr.
I should probably read the whole story, get the details, etc. but it’s late. Does anyone know who pays for these aircraft?
also just want to reiterate that SadlyNo posted the anti-aerial kill ad that seems to have inflamed and divided some commenters (who seem to think the ad is inappropriate and may hurt the Obama campaign. No, really? Is it this bad?).
It was made by an animal rights group that knows something about this particular dirty business. They have every right to make such ads.
Now, perhaps some of you (who obviously know better) have some advice for them on how not to alienate the many sensitive assholes in America who are offended by the word “savage” because sheeeeeit, these are just wolves after all. Not women and children. I’m fine with that, but why post the video in the first place when it’s a drop in the bucket, really, is unlikely to have much impact and is not in any way associated with Obama’s campaign?
DA sez “The practice of shooting wolves from helicopters is cruel, but it’s also life. The people doing it for whatever reason — to protect livestock and/or make some cash on the side from their state government — are probably not taking very much pleasure from it at all. Most of them aren’t “savages” and in the cases of those who are, I bet it could be argued that any savagery they display is a self-defence mechanism so they won’t go nuts.”
I sez, you must not have watched the video in the link provided by Jelperman in the last thread that shows what even the hunters in AK think about this shizzle. Not taking pleasure? I believe someone in the vid describes it as “thrill killing”. Protection my ass. Wolves weed out the sick and the weak from the herd. These “savages” are pussies, and there is a federal aerial hunting ban that AK is loopholing here.
P.S. Lesley I have a woman-crush on you.
Btw, if Alaska is the boonies, then rural Kenya trumps it and I can tell you that people living there, including the tribal Massai, are opposed to the aerial slaughter of wild elephants (even though they compete with these animals for grazing land and elephants tend to invade farms and eat all the crops). This killing from the air has nothing to do with the regular folks who live and survive on the land, and many of them are finding other more constructive ways to coexist with wild animals they’ve been living with for thousands of years.
If this argument was about clear-cutting forests it would take the same direction. Somebody would argue that if forests can’t be clear cut then some blue collar worker would be out of a job. But this is just bullshit. Over ten thousand forestry workers in BC are out of work, not because of environmentalists, but because of the subprime mortgage crisis. Most of the loggers and pulp mill workers have already come to terms with the fact that forestry practices HAVE TO CHANGE if the human race is going to survive. They also know why they are out of work now. And they are not angry with environmentalists. In the past ten years these two once disparate groups have come together and sorted out many of the issues that divided them.
We really need to have bigger balls than this. If you’re not willing to stand up for what you believe in because you might offend some neanderthal who has always voted for some bible thumping assclown, I don’t know what to say. And if you’re at the point where you’re thinking that most Americans are complete dumbasses who don’t get the fundamentals then America is doomed already and nothing you say, no amount of pussy footing and tip toeing and being careful is going to make any difference.
One thing’s certain, Republicans have nailed this “elitist” insult. All they have to do is turn their head sideways for some of you folks to jump on the fence of compromise. Hell, they’ve gotten so good at it, you don’t even need them to be present to do it.
Ugh ugh ugh.
I don’t want to promote an idea that people should fake support of Obama or consciously pretend that the lesser of two evils is really the Messiah or pretend that problems with him don’t exist. My opinion, instead, is that those of us who have been invested in this race for a long time and have decided to support the LOTE have long ago internalized and personally dealt with the inconsistencies of that position, so it’s not “faking” to be 100% behind the guy, it’s very real and heartfelt.
Fair enough, but you have to understand how that makes me shudder, because I feel it’s a contradiction that cannot and should not be resolved. More to the point, “resolving” the contradiction to the extent that there, in practice, is no contradiction to me seems little different from selling out the internal humanity that made one recognize the contradiction in the first place. What’s the point of being able to see Teh Evil if you act as if it doesn’t exist?
Don’t take this personally, D.A. But all this Hopey Dopey shit on the one hand, and Typical Republican horseshit on the other is driving me moonbatty. And then when I say something about it, I have to hear morAns bitch and moan about how I’m either just trying to be cool by being cynical or I’m being a hardass purity troll when I’m neither. I’m gonna vote for Obama, whom I have never thought — or argued, or inferred — is anything other than a Clintonoid centrist, a corporate whore, and likely mass-murderer — and therefore wicked in way that is morally-reprehensible to sugar coat in any fashion (e.g., to excuse on the grounds that “they all do it.”). And then, immediately, I’m going to attack him from the Left. And I just know eleventy-bazillion idiots will say people like me are the enemy of Hope and Change when actually the enemy is the triangulating God they worship.
Lesley – I’m gonna say you’re probably right, here. I don’t know. All I know is that I sympathize with Mikey’s sentiments, too. I also admit that I think I’m as locked into the crazy ‘was that good for Obama or bad for Obama’ mind loop when I think about this shit as much as any MSM gasbag, and I have to sometimes step back and evaluate that mindset.
I hear ya, JM – I’m too fucking sloshed to say much more on a Friday evening, but I hear ya.
not to beat a dead horse, but so called sportsmen who travel to places like Alaska (and northern BC) in their crisp newly purchased manwear to shoot big game live in cities. Going to the wilderness is their little he-man fantasy. (I’m sure the guides all have a good laugh at their expense every he-man season.)
They pay the state (or province) a shitload of money to kill a beautiful animal and it’s not even a drop in the GDP bucket.
No offense to Anne Laurie, but I’d just like to mention that Thomas Jefferson was infamous even in his own time as a savage abuser of horses. There are exceptions to every rule. I pretty much agree that those who abuse animals are more likely to abuse people, but I also think (so many badly written novels about serial killers) that it’s become cliche’. There is also some truth in the rural belief that so many urban animal lovers are a bit unhinged, their only real experience of animals coming from cuddly pets (cf. Nietzsche’s syphilitic insanity’s onset coming when he stopped a man in the street from beating a horse).
Both sides are right, and that’s not meant as false-equivalence or bullshit evenhandedness.
some groundhog – I’ll be in Nevada stumping mid-October, in the Reno area.
Heh, Indeed Some Ground Hog.
More or less saying what others have said:
I’m primarily interested in making the revolution, not supporting part of the US state over the other; but anyone who thinks that elections don’t matter at all or that there isn’t ‘some’ value in lesser-evilism seems to do so for 2 main reasons. Neither of which makes sense to me:
1. Heightening the Contradictions—Assumes that progressive reform can only be achieved in times of great distress among the “masses.” A prerequisite here is the suffering of a whole fuckload of real live people–not just domestically, but abroad as well. To me, this way of viewing things is uncomfortably close to the rhetoric of punishment used by the right–salvation only through suffering. Fuck that noise. I also note that there is no guarantee that the Left would like the results of this. See Germany, Nazi. Oops.
2. Party Similarity–This undeniably has a bunch of truth to it as regards the Big Questions. Obama will surely kill a bunch of people through the apparatus of the US state. I think that we all believe that McCain will kill more. On non-killing issues Obama is much likely to be much much much better. Wouldn’t Progressives like to fight the Dems from the Left; maybe try and drag that Overton window back a bit, without having so much at stake–like we are now?
I think that the debate here on S,N! over is partly about Strategy v Tactics; and partly about the Authenticity of dissent–what actually qualifies.
D. Aristophanes, I agree with Mikey too, and if I’m reading the threads right, it seems everybody does so I’m not exactly sure what the fighting was about in the first place. Not sure it was worth this much ballyhoo. My impression is it was one of those silly misunderstandings where everyone agrees more than they disagree about the fundamentals.
Also, although Obama is the lesser of two evils (by whatever degree is arguable) but what seems much more true is that he’s really the only hope liberals of all persuasions have. For this reason, all political strategy needs to be focussed on getting him elected and getting Democrats a majority. I’m an ignoramus when it comes to campaign strategies and what works and what doesn’t but it seems to me that if there was ever a time to stand up for what you believe in it’s now. There are more effective ways than others to do this, but we’ve got to show these evil pricks on the right we’re not wimps who can be easily cowed.
Well, Josh Marshall, that “both sides” stuff tends to tumble when you meet born and raised rural fellers who are environmentalists and humanitarians. Sometimes you even meet one who is a vegetarian.
It’s unbelievable.
(cf. Nietzsche’s syphilitic insanity’s onset coming when he stopped a man in the street from beating a horse).
Wasn’t that Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ or a vision from the Brothers Karamazov?
I get my Eatern Euro morbidity lit confused sometimes ….
L – I am really 57 varieties of 9 sheets to the wind right now … which is to say I totally forget what this whole thing was about, too … was there a point where I said ‘I love you, Mikey’ or ‘To Mikey, Love DA’ or something? ‘Cos I am going to be so embarrassed tomorrow morning if I did that …
D, your headline could be put to music. Har har.
you’re all a bunch of fucking jerkoffs.
playing with language, “perfect is the enemy of the good” and “OMG HES NOT PERFECT SO DONT SAY HE IS” – please put down the keyboard. words are not action. there is no platonic ideal of perfection. forms are horseshit.
none of this shit matters. what matters is pushing back the ETA for total fucking annihilation, because in the meantime, we have the option to change it, if we work really fucking hard and try our damnedest.
it’s not going to fucking matter to the people who have already been the recipients of our hegemonic brutality, like the people of haiti, or the people of bolivia, who are just now starting to say “hey, you guys are fucked up” in a way that is causing us to take notice.
i dont know whether obama is going to continue the shut-up-and-take-it foreign policy of the past or not. he’s said as much, but that could very well be pandering in order to not upset those idiots who believe in american exceptionalism.
and then again, his vice president is joe biden.
either way, the only thing we’re fighting for is the ability to fight another day, really. all this veiled talk of utopia and perfection makes my hemorrhoids itch.
I dont know whether obama is going to continue the shut-up-and-take-it foreign policy of the past or not.
Of course he will. He’ll do it the Democrat way.
Obama will be as beholden to corporate and capitalist interests as any other president before him, only with less blatant scumminess.
He’s also lying when he hints that he’ll be more protectionist toward American workers and American jobs. He’ll continue the deep integration and free trade talks that are ongoing; and if manufacturing jobs return to America it will be because fuel prices make offshoring the work prohibitive. He’ll have nothing to do with it.
lesley:
so what?
is there another option?
Fred, I merely responded to your “I don’t know if Obama will…” statement.
Odd that you think we’re all a bunch of jerkoffs because you’ve assumed, wrongly, that we all idealize Obama. We all don’t.
Despite your knowing better, you still “don’t know if…”
i didnt know obama was going to for sure start another war
That’s it in a nutshell.
I’ve been married to the same man for 21 years and counting. Is he perfect? Fuck, no. His memory’s wonky, he has a temper that lets him be easily goaded by simpletons, and he’s got weird teeth, to name three items. But he’s my husband, I love him to the depths of my heart, and would defend him to my dying breath. Because he is the best man I’ve ever known. Warts and all.
Barack Obama is the best candidate out there right now. And I’m goddamned if I’m going to let the fact he voted for FISA or anything else stand in the way of my desire to see him win in November. He’s the best. Warts and all.
It’s very simple for me. Do I want a nutter holding the big red button, or someone sane?
Unfortunately, although I and my family and compatriots will probably get nuked before anybody in the US even gets their hair ruffled, we foreigners don’t get a say. We can only watch from afar and put our faith in the innate good sense of the American people as our fates are decided for us.
I’m not ashamed to admit that despite my disdain for his reactionary policies, I’m scared shitless Obama might lose.
The fact is, people who won’t full-throatedly get behind the Obama ticket should have a full-time job scratching my scrotum. Progress is made in increments, not in leaps. Unless, of course, all of the vast ‘pissed off’ stage a French revolution, but I don’t see that happening.
lesley: please re-read my original post, and keep that patellar tendon reflex in check when you do so.
jerkoff.
Forgot to add, Mikey does indeed rule OK, even if he did tell me off once.
God, everything you said in the original post…yeah.
I’m not a regular commenter here, though i link here a lot.
But dammit, it sucks that we sort of sit here, a bit helpless to fight the insanity that’s perpetuated in our names, regardless of who’s in office.
If it makes anybody feel better, I live in the South, and I spent all night at a bar in town, and the predominant theme of the night was “I’m Sarah Palin, and I voted for the Bridge to Nowhere before I was against it!”
I mean, seriously, I’m a political junkie from hell, and I didn’t start that shit, and it wasn’t people I know either.
So maybe there’s hope out there, if we work our fucking balls off (even if we’re girls) to get Obama elected, and then we hold his dumb ass accountable?
I mean, look, what else are we going to do?
two words that every mccain opponent should be repeating at every opportunity:
SARAH PLAIN
Fred, I don’t know whether you frequent this site – your name isn’t familiar to me, but prefacing your commentary by calling every other commenter a jerkoff is not going to gain you a shred of respect. I’m not sure why you think I need to reread your comment. It’s needlessly condescending tone is a turn off.
You sir, could use a course in basic communication. You frankly suck at it.
Mikey is the OG commenter here. We all admit this.
He’s absolutely right.
BUT: big reminder here, the wolf thing is from a wildlife protection agency, NOT Obama. They (and by ‘they’ I’m including the Republicans for Environmental Protection) find Palin so impossibly sleazy that they’re working against her of their own accord.
Obama’s people wouldn’t go for the throat like this, except on stuff like pederasty where if you have a controversy there’s something wrong with you. The wolf thing would be contentious at first glance – wolf culls are a stupid issue and a lot of people are afraid of them. My only objection is using the word ‘hunt’ – strafing a small predator has as much to do with a hunt as smashing dozens of cruise missiles into Baghdad has to do with humanitarian aid.
My main contention against the idea that Obama is impossibly tainted by his support for the war is this: Obama’s been actively supporting a national-service program designed to work as a lower-middle-class answer to the Peace Corps. The Army is the main way you get to college if you have no way of paying off the loans later and your family couldn’t afford it otherwise; until the neocons hijacked it to be a tool in our Forever War against Oil Fascists, it was a vital part of the American economy.
I like to think that by creating a program alternative to the army – one primarily devoted to reconstruction and aid and other kinds of soft power – that Obama’s doing something no other Democrat in the running could hope to with respect to America’s fondness for paying the poor by the forearm. You can’t use the Army as the Peace Corps, and Obama’s been surprisingly low-key but extremely consistent about saying that and following through with it.
oh yeah, and try telling us something we don’t already know for a change, you simpering twat.
Many, many years ago, Garry Trudeau drew a cartoon where college-aged Boopsie
I am glad that it’s not only me who much of the world through the lens of 30-year-old Doonesbury cartoons.
Incidentally, on the subject of pederasty: my guess as to why McCain and a number of kulturkampfers want to make kintergarten bad-touch education a contentious issue is that they’ve always been most comfortable with pedophiles as the Other, a lurking menace requiring neighborhood watches, gated communities, Rent-a-Cops, and public vigilantism. When you turn the paedos into a demon, you make them politically and socially useful to the most nasty, regressive people in society.
Mind you, that keeps any actual sex offenders from being sequestered and corrected; America’s strident belief that you can solve the problem by keeping the degenerate paedos away from all children, who they are in league with each other to sexually destroy, is maybe the single biggest factor in keeping our children unsafe. Molestation is almost always a family issue, and where it isn’t it usually comes from nearby authority figures. Teaching children that, and teaching them not to let the people close to them exploit them, is something that a nasty subculture of evangelicals – quite desperate to become the majority among those authority figures and family members – consider dangerous. How dare they teach children that they can avoid being hurt by not obeying all of Youth Pastor McFeely’s solemn commands? Everyone knows the paedos are the ones named and shamed by respectable men like Archbishop Glitter.
alec, while I agree with Mikey along with everybody else, I don’t worship the ground he walks on, nor do I think he says anything a lot of other people don’t also say.
I don’t get the hero worship though I think it may have to do with respecting his war experience. Which I do as well…but let’s face it, Mikey jumps the gun sometimes and puts his foot in it. He sometimes overreacts and takes people the wrong way. Then he gets all pissy and walks out of the room like someone’s done him wrong. Not that some of us also don’t do that, but what’s with all the grand apologizing and bending over backwards to make it all better?
This is not anything against Mikey or even particularly personal. I hate most hero worship. Particularly the kind that is pretty much baseless. It’s a fucking Internet comment thread.
I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this…
lesley:
i’m sorry that my name isn’t familiar to you. Perhaps it should be. Perhaps not.
my point was, and is, that you can’t change the system if you’re dead, or if you’re an authoritarian banana republic. if obama in any way will retain more of the democratic character of idealized american life than the alternative (McCAIN/PLAIN), then it means i, and you, should vote for him. i never said he can get the democratic republic thing breathing again, but if he can perform CPR on it for just another election cycle or two, then we can still hope.
and all this “omg obama is not perfect!!!11!1!1one!five!three!%!51%!!” shit is just a half-breath away from the “a pox on both their houses!” horseshit that closet republicans and megan mcardle like to offer as proof of their thoughtfulness.
so, in conclusion, cram it, fuckwit.
‘OG’ ain’t hero worship, it’s a statement of fact. I wanted a hero to worship, I’d find a Debs biography; I want a guy to comment on Republican toilet sex, I find Mikey.
We’ve had our disagreements but the guy’s a bad-ass. Simple as that.
alec:
hear hear
Shit. I really wish I hadn’t watched that video. I’ve been a moral vegetarian for over 40 years now and every new cruelty I see leaves me with deeper and deeper scars.
As to this “lesser of two evils” horseshit, WTF?? Either Obama/Biden wins or our only certainty is that it is over for us in the U.S., and probably the rest of the world too. There isn’t any choice, folks, so let’s stop pretending that there is. If McInsane and his ignorant galpal are installed in office, you might as well take the old Roman way out by slitting your wrists in a warm bath, because the fallout of it will be too grotesque to survive. Obama/Biden need to get ahead by 20 points to keep the whole Diebold game being played on us again, so double your efforts, double your donations and double-down on the bet on whether you’ll live or die because of the potential shitstorm that 4 more years will bring. Lesser of two evils? Who in the fuck has he luxury of playing THAT game at this point in history?
I guess I should ask what OG means.
I just don’t understand all the patronizing and fawning because of one spat Mikey had with two commenters who weren’t really at odds with anything he had to say in the first place.
But to each his own.
I do appreciate and admire those who take risks, go an extra mile for others in their lives. They seem to be few and far between. (Lots of talkers though.)
Orange Tom, I’m still flabbergasted that it’s even a contest. I can’t believe McCain has even a slim chance never mind a serious one. If he and that hick from biblesville get elected, America will be the laughing stock of all other western democracies and Osama will be blowing candles out on his victory cake.
Though I have no right to sneer since Canada’s on the verge of an election and we have our own neocon devils to deal with. It’s as if they were all sprung like zombies on the population a few years ago and now, no matter what horrible things they do, they can always find people to support them.
I’m with Werebear. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
You find a candidate you agree with on 100% of the issues: kill it. It’s a Pod Person.
Support the candidate that drives you less insane, and do it with gusto. And work for a better one next time around. Look at how far we’ve come in just the past four years.
Sarah Palin looked in a mirror and saw…Monica Goodling.
Would anyone in their right mind vote for Monica Goodling to be vice-president, someone a heartbeat away from being president?
Well, Sarah Palin IS Monica Goodling.
Just like Goodling, Palin abused her position of public trust, using her public office for personal/religious vendettas.
Just like Goodling, Palin lied, lied, lied, while claiming to be a follower of Jesus Christ, who I really doubt is the Prince of Lies.
Just like Goodling, Palin is unqualified to hold any government position, especially not vice-president or (God help us) president.
Palin equals Goodling, with the same disdain for the rule of law, our Constitution, the will of our founding fathers to keep church and state separate.
Palin equals Goodling, with all the horror this entails for the freedom-loving women of our nation.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
In a normal election year, you would be right. But this year the enemy of good is also Team Rape.
What in the Hell is wrong with us?
Indeed. The trouble is that great many of us regard this whole thing as a one huge game. They will simply turn a blind eye to any problems their own candidate has.
The fact that our side is even having this debate heartens me. It tells me every one of us will go to the booths in November, saying “All right Mr. Obama, you’re a far cry better than the alternative, and there are many issues I agree with you on, but I’ll be DAMNED if I’m going to afford you the same blind loyalty the idiot right heaped upon their dimwit emperor manchild for the past eight years. You screw up, you WILL be hearing from me.”
…And THAT’S how democracy is supposed to work.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Why do people characterize this as “supporting Obama” when it’s wanting to get him elected?
G** F***ing Damn It.
This is an election. It is a f***ing rational choice between two options.
One option makes my life better. Yes, I said better. Not perfect. Not f***ing paradise on Earth. Not that the wrongs of history would be righted. Not that what ought to happen would happen, and that an upper-class dominated society would suddenly become a non-murderous, peace-seeking libertarian socialist participatory democracy.
This isn’t about getting Obama elected for Obama. I want Obama elected for my interests. I’m “supporting” him not because he’s “him”, but because of what you can rationally and probabilistically predict he will do in office versus another, actually existing option.
There’s no guilt whatsoever about that. I’m sorry that I don’t get to choose between moral perfection and ultimate perfidy. But I don’t. I get to choose between a lot better and a lot worse.
I’m sorry that “better” is, at best, getting fewer people killed than getting more killed. I’m sorry that “better” means getting average Americans to be better off versus economic collapse, instead of somehow dramatically transforming all Americans into sharing what they have to reconcile 500 years of exploitation of this continent.
Hell, I’m sorry that my current job has all sorts of awful, sh*tty aspects to it. But a few years ago I had the choice between my current job and a previous, vastly sh*ttier job. Am I supposed to feel guilty, or lacking proper aspiration, because I accepted ‘better’ over ‘my fantasy career’?
I don’t begrudge anyone’s moral prerogative to speak plainly and bluntly about how things are. Thank God I’m not a campaign worker or director, so that every word out of my mouth has to be a directed turd of helpful PR. But neither do I feel right now like the biggest part of my energy and time and what tiny public impact I might have on friends and neighbors ought be spent on how Obama would come far, far below what I would wish to have on the planet.
This is a real choice, between much better and much worse. Is it the positive end of human development, the height of human achievement, the apogee of all human civilization? No. But I’d like to think we edged a little closer to that than that we threw soiled underpants at a better future and ran away san-culottes.
Leave not poop in punchbowl X
Lest ye lose rock and drugs and sex.
Instead leave poop in punchbowl Y
And be acclaimed a stand-up guy.
Thanks for the story, John O.
And you’re right: It was a test.
And you passed!
Yes, if you frame the debate as “I don’t want to vote for a war-monger” American elections will make you go live in the woods with a bag of salt.
Because I agree with a lot of what Kucinich says doesn’t mean he has a prayer of getting elected, as we saw quite clearly. But while I admire FDR for his tremendous accomplishments in both peace and war, he was a politician. He was very good at it.
And that’s how he got into a position where he could do some good.
It’s not difficult to understand these kinds of compromises. We all do it. The question becomes, How well do we do it?
We’ve had thirty years since the Reagan revolution. Enough time for a whole generation to get screwed by Republicans and told it was the Democrats who did it. And I blame the very circumstances we are fighting for.
The past was not perfect, but the progressive gains after WWII created a strong and lively middle class where aspirations were possible. And so people cruised along thinking “This is the way it is.”
And voted for idjits, thinking, “This won’t change the way it is.”
Well, the veil of complacency has been ripped away. I haven’t seen this much mass sharpness and enthusiasm since, ever.
It’s there. It’s being hidden, the same way they don’t cover the stormtroopers in Minnesota and the big anti-war rallies.
But it’s there.
There’s no guilt whatsoever about that. I’m sorry that I don’t get to choose between moral perfection and ultimate perfidy. But I don’t. I get to choose between a lot better and a lot worse.
The first sentence is of course a strawman. But the third, where you’re being serious, is where I really disagree. He’s not even “a lot better.” He’s crap — even when he doesn’t have to be. The qualitative difference is substantial enough to merit a vote for him considering the context, but not nearly enough — not even in the same fucking ballpark, much less in the entirely different sport (as it were) of “moral perfection” — to merit anything more. Certainly not fanboyism. Certainly not, “yes, he sucks but he’s great!”
Thank God I’m not a campaign worker or director, so that every word out of my mouth has to be a directed turd of helpful PR. But neither do I feel right now like the biggest part of my energy and time and what tiny public impact I might have on friends and neighbors ought be spent on how Obama would come far, far below what I would wish to have on the planet.
Why can’t you split the difference? Or why can’t — shouldn’t — one at least try?
All the boosterism is coming from idiots who really think he’s awesome, or from the chronically (self-)deceptive who at a deep level know better but have been faking it for so long that their moral identity is so perverted they’ve basically absorbed the lie. Or drank the Kool-Aid. However you wanna put it. Both make me shudder. What can I say? I’m a negative creep. I’ll bash rightwingers til the cows come home. But I can’t abide the adulation, the hero worship, the boot-licking going on in the other direction. I don’t like that kinda servile shit anyway. But I really don’t like it when it’s so undeserved. Invert the Warren Harding formulation, plz: Don’t boost; knock!
18 year old morAns now voting for Obama will grow up and tell their kids how “radical” they were back in the day when they voted for Mr. Hopey. Not that it’s their fault that their youth has been cynically exploited by Mr. Objectively Center-Right, but I don’t exactly feel sorry for them either.
Maybe that’s what’s really bothering me: so many unreservedly claiming Obama as “leftwing” has legitimized the wingnuts’ moving of the Overton Window. I dunno. But I’m really fucking disgusted, which is why I’ve been a lazy sack of shit around here after going to Denver, mailing in Shorters and not even looking at the notes I wrote on my trip which I’d intended to develop into something amusing. Except for Michelle Obama and the daughters, pretty much everyone involved in politics right now makes me want to vomit. Even the trolls are getting to me now — and I’ve lived through Goldstein, Tic-Tac, and Grampaw! Which makes me want to puke at myself for being such a loser. Whatever. HOPE! CHANGE! ONLY KILLING A ELEVENTY THOUSAND PAKISTANIS IS SO MUCH AWESOMER THAN THE OTHER GUY KILLING ELEVENTY THOUSAND IRANIANS!!! I’M A BELIEVER! DONATE TO MY.BARACK.OBAMA!! JOIN MY FACEBOOK GROUP!!!
Josh, it’s 99th percentile.
It’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that you see things 99% of the population doesn’t.
It’s like the math people staring at blackboard full of symbols and saying, “Of course, it’s obvious!”
The Stupid will always be with us. We need to find a way to make them get it. It’s an uphill task, but somebody has to do it.
And I’d rather see people fired up about hope and change and better than fired up when a Republican talks about killing people.
And I’d rather see people fired up about hope and change and better than fired up when a Republican talks about killing people.
I think that’s kind of meaningless when they don’t get fired up negatively when Mr. Hope and Change talks about killing people, which he has and on several occasions. He just wants to do it “smarter.” No, thanks.
I’m sorry that I am actually willing to be optimistic about, rather than properly bitterly leftist disappointed, about the actual measurable differences which could come into play between an Obama administration and a McCain administration.
Then again, I’m a stupid simpleton, willing to occasionally be momentarily pleased when my life gets somewhat better instead of screaming about how it ought be much, much, much better.
This doesn’t make me a fanboy; it doesn’t make me a fool; and it doesn’t make me one less iota able to play the “who’s more anti-imperialist” game with you for hours and hours and hours and hours, as long as the winning qualification isn’t “who’s got a more revolutionarily bitter attitude”?
I haven’t for one moment found myself pushed to characterize Obama as anything other than what I accurately analyze him to be — a mainstream Democratic politician who is a bit more on the liberal side than I expected at this moment. Now, certainly I could approach that same analysis from a very different angle.
Good grief, if I were to spend all my time getting freaked out because politicians attract fanboys, I’d be stuck in a time loop because I remembered things like there were weirdly excited fans of Paul Tsongas.
Dude, it’s not you. And it’s not just that politicians create fanboys. It’s that this particular politician’s fanboys (both them and the process that created them) cheapen the ideals we here are supposed to have.
I resent my shit being co-opted by fakes. You should, too.
(Troll prophylactic: Yes, all politicians must make compromises. I understand. No shit. My complaint isn’t about purity; it’s about false claims of near-purity.)
(Troll prophylactic: Yes, all politicians must make compromises. I understand. No shit. My complaint isn’t about purity; it’s about false claims of near-purity.)
Who made that claim?
.. and misguided optimism. The more people acknowledge that he sucks, that the LOTE means exactly that, the more people will resist despair and yes, bitterness and misunderstanding when the inevitable backstab comes. The last thing I want to do is hear people complain, in good faith, that Hopey would’ve been a success if only he weren’t so leftwing and partisan when coming into office. Yes, I mean that instead of Obama moving the Overton Window left, I think there’s a huge danger, based on his penchant for creating fanboys and the other ways in which he’s conducted his campaign, that he’ll instead have the effect of moving it right.
I miss my old snarky s,n.
This election is driving us all nuts.
I have been a Kucinich supporter for years even though i know he will and never can be elected in this country. But as a leftie you learn to live with the possible, not the ideal.
At the age of 52 I am well accustomed to choosing between two piles of shit on Election Day and pulling the lever for the pile that stinks a little bit less. Such is my lot in life. If I go Peace and Freedom I am splintering the opposition and frankly even if you argue that McCain is only slightly worse than Obama, slightly worse is to worse for me, thank you.
Posts that begin with jokes tend to be more fun.
I dunno, RB, I guess just pulled it straight out of my ass. There are not, and never have been, any glassy-eyed nimrods uttering superlatives about Obama. It all comes from that Disneyland between my ears.
Fuck this. See y’all in the funny pages.
Ok, wait:
I am well accustomed to choosing between two piles of shit on Election Day and pulling the lever for the pile that stinks a little bit less. Such is my lot in life. If I go Peace and Freedom I am splintering the opposition and frankly even if you argue that McCain is only slightly worse than Obama, slightly worse is to worse for me, thank you.
Moar like this, plz. This is exactly right: acknowledges the awfulness but recommends the right course of action. Nothing mention, thank God, of “optimism,” “hope,” “change,” or “much better than.” Just right.
I dunno, RB, I guess just pulled it straight out of my ass.
Come on coward. Who here made the claim of purity or near-purity?
Ah. Good point.
That would be a Republican thing to say!
At least, that’s how I’m handling it.
I’d like to see their brand destroyed, along with all the stupid ideas that rode into town on that horse.
Of course, the one problem with bipartisanship is that the other side has been clinging to truly bad ideas.
If the R’s want to be competitive, they will have to toss a lot of baggage overboard. I don’t see them doing that. They will fracture, and Bob Barr is helping that process.
In fact, I predict the South will see a kind of Christianist party; they have strength there. Though, thankfully, it seems it is confined to that area. And considering their strong secessionist sympathies, we might have to deal with some kind of whacky stuff coming out of that.
Without the metric tons of air conditioning, which will become less and less sustainable, I don’t see the Sun Belt staying Luddites if there is a true push for alternative energy templates. One of the things I’m planning to be most vocal about is that energy has to be decentralized. We should work towards self-sustaining buildings and communities, with small scale tech that people get tax breaks and outright rebates for setting up.
If we let the corporatists monopolize energy, again, we will not be changing masters.
Er, “No mention,” I mean.
Oh, right, because if I find any reason, any personal reason whatsoever, to feel any “optimism” and use that word, then suddenly I am inferior and leaving streaks on the Overton Window because I’m not appropriately sadly bitter at all times.
Come on coward. Who here made the claim of purity or near-purity?
First, fuck you man. Second, I didn’t say “here.” Third, fuck you. Fourth, I think the difference between a pattern of negative posts and/or comments on the depravity of Wingnuts apropos the campaign, and a pattern of positive posts and/or comments on Obama’s “merits,” implies something, a very meaningful something, and not just about style. Fifth, fuck you.
Second, I didn’t say “here.”
Then go and fucking argue over THERE. Truisms about the disappointments Democrats bring are perhaps news for middle-schoolers.
Well, tell us what it is, then. Since I’m not getting it.
Let me take a moment though, and agree with Josh’s fifth point, but in general, and pretty much to everybody. And hey! Gas is $4.99 a gallon here in Joh-jah!
Sixth, I’ve always understood “troll prophylactics” to be used in anticipation, not for a passed event. I was pre-empting the “OMG don’t you understand politicians must compromise!” banalities I was sure would “rebut” my comment. But you chose to see it as an attack on something someone already said, just so you could call me a coward when I couldn’t or wouldn’t name a specific person I of course never attacked. Thanks. Eat me. Fuck this place.
CNN has a banner up: High gas prices? Blame Ike!
Sixth, I’ve always understood “troll prophylactics” to be used in anticipation
Yes, because folks who disagree with you are always trolls.
Posts that begin with jokes tend to be more fun.
I know! Who kicked off all this earnest hand-wringing shit in the first place?
Oh, so you do disagree with what I just said, which a few posts above you approved of (albeit dismissively) as a “truism.” Yeah, I think that qualifies as trolling. But whatever.
I know! Who kicked off all this earnest hand-wringing shit in the first place?
I shouted out,
Who killed the funnies
When after all it was you and me
Without the metric tons of air conditioning, which will become less and less sustainable …
Microstaq’s Silicon Expansion Valve. (End randorm product plug transmission.)
Well, it’s possible people were reacting to the raw emotion in the ad at the top of the thread.
It’s as though we are embodying the Descartes mind/body split. Republicans run on fear, Democrats on wonk.
And wonk doesn’t win.
We have to have both. Because we are not rational beings. We are rationalization beings. Even trying to adopt a Vulcan emotional distance does not change that.
This thread is like S,N’s own ‘A Very Special Episode’! I like it, then I hate, then I like it, then I’m passed out on the couch surrounding by empty beer bottles and a tub of melted ice cream!
Fantastic.
Oh, so you do disagree with what I just said
What I object to is a fight being picked over the adequate level of disdain for something everyone appears to agree needs to be done and the doctrine of Pre-Emptive Troll Callouts.
We even got some Stranger Danger stuff going midway through. A very Very Special Episode.
We are all in an elevator and I am having a baby.
We even got some Stranger Danger stuff going midway through. A very Very Special Episode.
Alright, someone get Mr. T on my lap, folks. We ain’t got all day.
And we all join hands as the lesson is learned.
Gotta do laundry. Oh, the mundane, how it presses upon me!
Comedy from the past:
http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2007/11/if_kucinich_wins_nomination_ro.html
Apologies to Josh Marshall just because.
The more I read crap like the morally-inverted, mush-headed drivel by the genius Mikey quoted above, the more firmly committed I am to keeping Democrats and Leftist as far from power as possible.
You people are beyond stupid, you’re mentally ill.
the more firmly committed I am to keeping Democrats and Leftist as far from power as possible.
This’d be the place to accomplish such a mission. Welcome back!
Let me put this in terms you’ll understand, kiddo.
DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL; ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS
9/11 = ZIONIST HOLOCAUST LIE
NO BLOOD FOR MEAT
You about ready to squirt yet, ya desperate creep?
alec,
Charming.
The fact is, Hitler. Democrats are worse than him.
You people are beyond stupid, you’re mentally ill.
I don’t know, “mentally ill” is starting wars just for the hell of it, showing callous disregard for victims of natural disasters, and assuming that your “legacy” of violence and cynicism will go down in history as a good thing.
I don’t live in la-la land, but you obviously do!
Shorter Ringo the Gringo: Hi! Would you piss in my mouth?
Ha! I now have a girl-crush on you, Brandi.
I read this blog every day but don’t comment much, so maybe I don’t have much standing but here’s what I think:
1. The Defenders of Wildlife “wolf” ad is very powerful for some people. And it’s a done deal, created and aired by people who care about this issue. Debating whether it’s true to the kind of campaigning we’d like to do is pretty much moot at this point, unless you’re in a 527 and considering what kind of ad you want to mount.
2. Telling people who react powerfully to the sight of living animals being used for target practice like they were pixels in a video game, and to the sight of them dying in agony in the snow, that they’re “overreacting” is unfair and counterproductive. Not everyone responds to everything the same way. How about if we honor the feelings of people who are all on the side of the angels by allowing them the reality of their reactions?
3. I’ve sobbed and raged in looking at the images of dead babies half-buried in rubble, or hanging limply from their agonized parents’ arms. Killing innocents is the reason I oppose war in general, and this war in particular. I’ll take whatever help I can get, in whatever form it comes as long as it’s honest, to elect someone who has stated that ending this war is a top priority.
Ringo everyone certainly see hows tough you are. Killing wolves from a plane is so brave. The plane might crash!
The fact is, Ringo is right. We were correct to arrest protestors and demonstrators in St. Paul, they are terrorists, and we will do it again. Freedom of speech does not exist in wartime. You liberals should all be in jail for opposing McCain and Palin.
Much more efficient too. Don’t even have to break a sweat!
The fact is, the children being killed in Iraq are children of terrorists. You would rather they be orphans?
Gary, you didn’t use the word “SAINT” while talking about Johnny. That will get you sent to Iraq!
Most of them already were orphans Gary
The fact is, each American is worth about 440 Iraqis. Do the math. We are almost avenged for what they did to us on 9-11 .
Sarah Palin is that you?
The fact is, Freedom isn’t free. I notice that not enough liberals observed 9-11, but all conservatives in the Heartland did. You are not even Americans, liberals. You deserve to be put in camps and deported.
Way to go, Mikey. That’s exactly my thoughts.
Adding, this is why I couldn’t get caught up in all the Obamania that swept over the blogosphere a few months back. Is Obama a good candidate? Sure, and he’ll get my vote in November. Is Obama someone worth freaking out over and trolling endlessly on the internet for? Eh, not really.
Anyways, just sayin’.
GOO GA GA Ack Pht Patui!!
Freedom isn’t free.
Oh my god, if I hear that STUPID FUCKING SENTIMENT one more fucking time, I’m going to go ballistic.
I know that retards love slogans they can chant mindlessly, but give it up already.
#
D. Aristophanes said,
September 13, 2008 at 9:30
(cf. Nietzsche’s syphilitic insanity’s onset coming when he stopped a man in the street from beating a horse).
Wasn’t that Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ or a vision from the Brothers Karamazov?
I get my Eatern Euro morbidity lit confused sometimes ….
Crime & Punishment, Dostoyevski indeed.
Where did the funny go?
Where did the funny go?
How can anyone laugh after the events of September 11th 2001?
Where did the funny go?
Shot from a helicopter.
“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.”
There seems to be a consensus that the Overton Window has moved so far to the right that Obama would’ve passed for a moderate Republican just a couple of decades ago. Perhaps in some respects.
Maybe I’m a Pollyanna, or maybe I just like being contrary, but I don’t entirely see it that way. I mean, we’ve got a black guy getting standing ovations while he thunders about universal health care, and he might even get a chance to do something about it. I remember back in ’92 knowing for absolute certain that Hillary Clinton’s “reforms” (tepid as they were) would never get off the ground, because opposition was too strong and the usual idiots said it was too “radical”.
Obama was also not afraid to use the word “gay” in the biggest speech of his life. In addition, he not only acknowledges global warming, he says he’ll do something about it. Again, I remember when Al Gore was dubbed “Ozone Man” and ridiculed for the very idea. He’s unequivocally pro-choice, and at least talks a good game about equal rights for women.
Yeah, all of the above is a no-brainer to all of us, but we’re not the whole country. In many ways, this is a far more progressive climate than I’ve seen in my voting lifetime (about 25 years now). And I’d take any of today’s young people over the worthless, pig-ignorant yahoos I graduated with in ’83.
this is a far more progressive climate than I’ve seen in my voting lifetime
Absolutely. All this hand wringing is over shadows in the Disneyland between one’s ears. Hysteria is a way of not confronting the world. It’s important to gain a little distance, to stop the endless chatter in our minds and to then come back a little bit stronger.
Hey mikey, I’ve got news for you. The so called “human beings” that our troops are bombing from the air are the same blood thirsty savages that danced in the streets when 3000 innocent Americans were ruthlessly slaughtered on 9/11.
What do you have no shame? You have sympathy for these barbarians from the dark ages yet none for the citizens of your own country? President Bush has done a excellent job of keeping our nation safe since the 9/11 atrocities. We have not had another attack on American soil in 7 years. No one could have predicted that kind of success, myself included.
But you basement dwelling liberals who do nothing for America but mock our President and our brave men and women fighting for our freedom, dare have the tenacity to demand that we stop bombing the cities of our enemies who have sworn our destruction. You demand that we give habeus corpus to captured terrorist scum when they behead our soldiers, blow themselves up in market places full of innocent women and children and dance in the steets at every attack on the West.
Good thing John McCain is going to be elected in November. He will continue Bush’s legacy of taking the fight to our enemies. And I for one hope we continue to bomb those savages back to the stone age. They are worthless and have contributed nothing to civilization in over 1000 years.
By demanding that we give these savages rights, you jerks are no better than the Europeans who collaberated with the Nazis during the Second World War.
The so called “human beings” that our troops are bombing from the air are the same blood thirsty savages that danced in the streets when 3000 innocent Americans were ruthlessly slaughtered on 9/11.
We know this to be true because there are no children in Iraq that were born since then and all could dance prior.
To the now departed Mr Marshall – jeez, if you’re the TPM JMM then I hope you don’t publish over there until you get over your hissy fit. I mean, where is Captain Obvious when you really need him? Either way you vote you will ‘agree’ with millions of morons, dope dealers and assorted scum. And no matter how much you argue with *us* them about their deep philosophical defects, they will remain scum. I know we’re all using recycled electrons here, but man, what a waste.
Good stuff, Robert White. We’ve all been waiting for someone to really shed the “crypto” qualifier from “crypto-fascist” … btw, stomp on any necks lately?
The fact is, terrorists, and their defenders, The Liberals, do not deserve human rights. Only extermination, for if we do not, we will get hit again. John McCain will keep us safe, Obama will be an invitation to attack us.
I remember back in ‘92 knowing for absolute certain that Hillary Clinton’s “reforms” (tepid as they were) would never get off the ground, because opposition was too strong and the usual idiots said it was too “radical”.
One point to remember is that millions of people who opposed the “radical” notion of universal health care in 1992 are now 16 years older. The graying of America has ensured that health care is an issue that now has tremendous traction with the voters.
“By demanding that we give these Jews
savagesrights, you jerks are no better than the Europeanswho collaberated with the Nazisduring the Second World War.”Fixed.
By demanding that we give these savages rights, you jerks are no better than the Europeans who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War
1) I fixed your spelling mistake.
and
2) This is exactly what’s wrong with right-wing nuttiness now. “Savages,” really? Just admit it, you hate brown people.
Why aren’t you over in Iraq right now? The military could certainly use the help.
kill whitey
that is all.
Eat the rich before they eat you.
We gave Julius Streicher a fair trial, you fucking worm.
the problem with the phrase ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’ in the context of the US elections (most.important.eVAR!) is that
a) there is no perfect and
b) there is no good.
Obama’s economic advisors are U.Chicago(of the Milton H. Friedman fame) economists and has chosen Joe Biden, D-MBNA as his VP. if you think that’s good, then boy do YOU have another thing coming
The fact is, caring about the suffering of living things (particularly those with the capacity to truly suffer) is NOT a zero sum game. I can and do profoundly care about innocent Iraqi children caught in the crossfire, as well as wolves and bears cruelly shot from planes. My caring about the suffering of non-humans in no way diminishes my caring about the suffering of humans. If anything the two complement each other.
Not to put words in his mouth, but my biggest beef with Mikey is that he often seems to argue that we need to stop killing people before we can even think about stopping animal cruelty, and that people who care about animals don’t care about people. Fuck that.
I feel that you do not truly appreciate how BAD McCain is.
And FDR was a rich racist. Doesn’t mean we’d be as well-off with Lindbergh.
‘Perfect is the enemy of good’ can be restated as ‘good is the enemy of tolerable’ in this case. Obama is tolerable, or only marginally less than it. McCain isn’t, and Palin is, somehow, even worse.
If the race were Obama-Romney I’d be thinking seriously about voting Socialist, because Romney hasn’t spent his entire career trying to turn America into shit. But McCain has.
I would gladly phone-bank for Lieberman to keep that terrifying honky jackass out of the Oval Office.
a) there is no perfect and
b) there is no good.
Yes, we know. In fact, nobody claimed either. Your superior attitude is amusing given your lack of situational awareness.
The country needs Obama in order to move to a better place. That seems to be the consensus 195 comments in.
Pretty goshdarn simple, really. Did you read or did you skim?
And our other choice:
McCain’s economic advisors include Phil Gramm (of “mental recession whiners” fame) and has chosen Sarah Palin, R-Nutcase as his VP.
Any questions?
I’m not getting the incessant need for hammering this point over and over like we’re kiddies in the lecture hall of politics 101. Who here isn’t already aware?
Yes, there are two piles of shit. One is a whole lot smellier than the other. Pick the less smelly one. DUH.
No one’s worshipping Obama here that I can see.
why is Josh Marshall’s link sadlyno.com?
———————————
why is Josh Marshall’s link sadlyno.com?
He is now a former zionist centrist.
Hey mikey, I’ve got news for you. The so called “human beings” that our troops are bombing from the air are the same blood thirsty savages that danced in the streets when 3000 innocent Americans were ruthlessly slaughtered on 9/11.
You mean the “Dancing Israelis” that were celebrating and videoing the falling buildings? When the fuck did our troops start bombing Israel?
Shit. I need to pay more attention to the news.
I’m intrigued by the idea that if people danced in the streets on 9/11 that this forfeits their lives and it’s okay to blow them to bits.
One might think there were worse offenses worthy of the death penalty than gross insensitivities.
But I guess we’ve advanced.
El Cid, that is because you do not recognize nothing is more important than the crime of hurting peoples feelings.
Well, the right sort of people anyway. Liberals and fags and Communists and Muslims the like clearly do not count.
The fact is, “Josh Marshall”, aka HTML Mencken, has been quibbling about the just-so-correct amount of enthusiasm to display or promote about the Dem candidate given the reality of what Dems usually do in office, which isn’t sometimes very different than Republicans.
Whatever.
Perhaps HTML could provide us some kind of fucking meter or gauge that would let us know the appropriate amount of “optimism” we should have that we might just win this time, and that that means progress away from bombing children again just a bit more than the other guy. Otherwise, maybe he should shut his fucking morally arrogant and high-horse mouth, chill out, and come back when he’s ready to completely get behind electing the lesser stinking shitpile, and go along with whatever mania the youngsters feel about Obama for the more grounded purposes of getting him in the damn White House.
We’ll worry about the Overton Window later, after we’ve made at least some fucking progress.
The fact is, also, liberals bashing the hell out of their own candidates. Wow. I guess we never learn.
God I hate that “Overton Window”. I wish someone would smash it. It’s bullshit.
No offense to Anne Laurie, but I’d just like to mention that Thomas Jefferson was infamous even in his own time as a savage abuser of horses…
He also took sexual advantage of at least one of his female slaves, treated his own sons by her as livestock, emotionally abused his “legitimate” daughter (“If you do not work hard at your studies I shall not love you any more”), and went through a whole lot of other people’s money without ever admitting that he thought of it as the natural tribute due America’s First Geen-Yuss. Thom was the very archetype of the “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand” political philosopher — he treated other people badly as well as abusing animals. The Adams, from what I’ve read, considered him a total solipsist, incapable of understanding that other Beings had any worth (or even existence) outside of their use to Thom. I get the feeling that Abigail, at least, felt sorry for him because of this. But Jefferson certainly can’t be considered an “exception” to the rule that people who abuse animals will also abuse other people.
All the boosterism is coming from idiots who really think he’s awesome, or from the chronically (self-)deceptive who at a deep level know better but have been faking it for so long that their moral identity is so perverted they’ve basically absorbed the lie… I can’t abide the adulation, the hero worship, the boot-licking… 18 year old morAns now voting for Obama will grow up and tell their kids how “radical” they were back in the day when they voted for Mr. Hopey. Not that it’s their fault that their youth has been cynically exploited by Mr. Objectively Center-Right, but I don’t exactly feel sorry for them either.
Three words from an Old Phart, sir: Premature mid-life crisis. I agree with you about the whole Magical Unity Pony phenomenon, but if I were your mother, I would nag you to get your health checked, or at least start taking a good multi-vitamin on a daily basis. The raw physical stress of surviving in the America of Darth Cheney and the C-Plus Augustus is going to take years off all of our lives, but I would be very unhappy if it actually kills someone I’ve come to care about so much!
Werebear: I predict the South will see a kind of Christianist party; they have strength there. Though, thankfully, it seems it is confined to that area. And considering their strong secessionist sympathies, we might have to deal with some kind of whacky stuff coming out of that.
Sarah Palin didn’t grow up in the South; apparently her parents moved from Idaho to Alaska because the Aryan Nation State was being overrun by non-Christianist and similar doubleplus ungood sorts. As a New Englander by choice, I can certainly appreciate the irony that the next American secessionist movement is liable to come from the LEFT end of the spectrum, but there isn’t a corner of our country entirely immune to the “Jeebus loves me, but only if I hate you” poison.
And Alec, that was a very perceptive discussion of authoritarianism and pedophilia.
Thank you, Anne Laurie. That’s what I wanted to say, but couldn’t find the words.
Josh/HTML, you’re a helluva smart guy, and I admire your analysis and appreciate your truly unique point of view. But I don’t quite see the point of sparring with your fellow Sadlynauts over this. Seems to me that 90% of us agree with you on 75% of what has to be done now. Seems to me that in politics, that’s pretty damn good. So why not just accept it for now, say you feel a little different, and leave it at that?
Also, seconded on Alec’s chilling description of the usefulness of fear of pedophillia to certain elements.
It’s so cute that Americans still think they have a democracy. “One last push towards the finish line, team!”
ManOnBlog: Well said.
Vote for king of the thieves and you get a thief, not a saint. That’s how it works.
In the UK, there is no “better”. It’s evils all the way down and many people of goodwill no longer bother with it. You’re just about there, but I think the frank fascism of the Republicans is worth opposing. I agree with Josh though: Obama is basically where the Republicans were 30 years ago, not a liberal saviour.
Well, I’ve learned today that talking about Obama reduces HTML to the level of ‘Fuck you, that’s why’. Something new every day, or not, I guess.
hey people chill the f out ok. you can vote for obama, just realize that he is not ‘good’ in the sense that the offending phrase means it. (and many of you do, which makes you much more sensible than a lot of americans but only just)
i was only posting that comment (after a long time.. probably not been around since early ’07 if that) because i hate that turn of phrase with a passion and i thought the Sadly No! commentariat would be smarter than using something as utterly lame as that.
I’m sort of baffled at the idea that one has a quota of empathy which gets used up on Iraqi civilians, leaving none for wolves just farting around doing wolf-stuff … & I suspect a few REAL hunters would secretly harbour fantasies of hunting these sky-sniper dickheads from their OWN choppers. To reiterate, it isn’t hunting, it’s culling, & Alaska had to construct a loophole just to make it legal … but can I worship mikey anyway, just to be a freak bastard?
Ooga booga, send more nymphos & weed my way, oh grand poobah mikey, my horn o’ plenty be hurtin’ hollow! O mikey, mikey, why hast thou forsaken me?! Quit being such a buzzkill, you stupid fucking god! Come ON! Hmm … do I have to burn more incense, genuflect due south, or what?
Frankly, I’m seething with jealousy here. Now I’m jonesing for my OWN post, something along the lines of “one joke over the line: jim’s latest anti-troll hate-speech” or “ZOMG: which intestine did jim pull THIS one out of?” or “jim & his misanthropic frothing: to ban or not to ban?” … hey, any press is good press – just ask Madonna!
I’m tellin’ ya, just as soon as Canada declares war on someone, I’m gonna be all OVER that shit, & I’ll be in like Flynn! That’s the ticket! Yep … any time now … won’t be long … uhhhh …
you’re all a bunch of fucking jerkoffs.
But at least we know when to change hands. Sweet-talk me some more, you silver-tongued rascal. Gosh, you really know how to win people over, don’t you? You must be a real hit at parties too.
my point was, and is, that you can’t change the system if you’re dead, or if you’re an authoritarian banana republic.
The people of Chile, Venezuela, et al, will be very surprised to hear this – your wisdom has been duly noted.
What in the Hell is wrong with us?
8 years of high-octane GOP psywar does some funny things to people. Not funny haha, funny WTF.
By demanding that we give these savages rights, you jerks are no better than the Europeans who collaberated with the Nazis during the Second World War.
First 8 words could be right out of “Mein Kampf” – a winnar iz u!!!11!
it’s much easier to get away with not worshipping Obama than it is to not worship Hillary Clinton. God am I glad that’s over.
“Josh Marshall” was html? I should have picked up on that.
OT: Why is HTML still using Josh Marshall’s name? It was kind of a cute joke weeks ago when he was pretending to be Marshall to get into the Dem convention, but it’s not funny anymore. It’s stale as hell, in fact. Probably actionable as well.
Using another blogger’s real name as your own pseudonym is a cute joke if done once in a while for a single post. Keeping it as your blogosphere identity for weeks is neither cute nor a joke. You’re not even trying to imitate or satirize him. You’re posting your own opinions and presenting them to any newcomers that happen by as if they were his.
If I were him, I’d have a lawyer drawing up a cease-and-desist letter pretty soon.
Oh and this: you can be a real asshole when you’re not being funny. Ooh, look! Some folks (not here) actually like their candidate! Others think he is, in fact and despite his numerous faults, a damned sight better than McCain! Someone’s got to shit on all of them immediately! I’m just the guy for the job!
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. You ain’t leading and you ain’t following.
“Now, perhaps some of you (who obviously know better) have some advice for them on how not to alienate the many sensitive assholes in America who are offended by the word “savage” because sheeeeeit, these are just wolves after all. Not women and children.”
The problem is the opposite – the word “savage” is cool to much of america. Not offensive. Not knowing that by itself is a disconnect between the announcer and the potential audience.
No one who cares about wolves is voting republican to start with. This commercial is an opportunity to denigrate the practice as cruel and lazy and stupid and cowardly, and those who support it by association. The commercial is too soft, though, and its one really hard point isn’t going to make the inroads into people’s psyche because “savage” was an awful choice of words and the tone of delivery reinforces a negative stereotype. It could have been a chance to piss off a lot of hunters in the battleground states like Pennsylvania and ohio and west virginia and florida, to make them hate that these lazy assholes make them look bad by association, much like Cheney’s caged hunts played awful with blue collar hunters. Turning those people against Palin is critical, because she is the perfect pander to them on paper.
Its not about appealing to bumpkins who would never vote democratic. It’s about appealing to blue collar democrats who sit on the fence every election, balanced between union and economics and religion and rural politics vs urban politics (which tend to dominate the democratic party) and gun rights and education, a mix so complex and immediate in their lives that many of them won’t make up their minds until the last second, and then it will be on gut-level emotions and likability because there is no way to resolve all of those conflicts, especially in the shitty atmosphere of disinformation that hangs over our political system.
I’m not saying the commecial is a bad idea – I’m saying it failed because it wasn’t aimed well.
Thanks for the advice, Ms. Althou — er, Rob. But shouldn’t you be somewhere else declaring jihad on looksism or purging Markos because he ran an ad that shows cheesecake or some similar shit? I understand it’s already a tiresome refrain, but: Fuck off.
AL:
Thom was the very archetype of the “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand” political philosopher — he treated other people badly as well as abusing animals.
True enough on the kind of philosopher he was — and I admit to much sympathy with his stance — but as far as his abuse of people goes, well… he was pretty normal for his time and place. The point is that whatever his faults, he most definitely wasn’t a sociopath, which is how the cliche’ now goes: a guy who kicks a dog or kills a wolf tends to become a homocidal maniac almost inevitably. But then I’m pretty militantly centrist on the animal rights issue. I’m a big fan of a local lady judge who *likes* to throw the book at animal abusers. But I also have a friend who is a hyper-abrasive misanthrope (to the point of violent tendencies), in both the “fuck this specific person” and “to hell with all mankind” senses of the phrase, who collects adopted strays and constantly frets over and spoils them — indeed, it’s about the only sort of affection he shows. K-K-K-K-Ken from A Fish Called Wanda types really exist (though they are seldom so funny) and it bothers me when people pretend they don’t. As you know, I don’t take a shine very often to moderation. But on this issue I feel there really is truth on both sides. Ted Nugent is a psycho. But hunting is not a psychopathic endeavor (actually, it’s often *necessary* to benefit the hunted species in question). Meat-eating is *not* immoral; factory farming is. Etc.
Three words from an Old Phart, sir: Premature mid-life crisis. I agree with you about the whole Magical Unity Pony phenomenon, but if I were your mother, I would nag you to get your health checked, or at least start taking a good multi-vitamin on a daily basis. The raw physical stress of surviving in the America of Darth Cheney and the C-Plus Augustus is going to take years off all of our lives, but I would be very unhappy if it actually kills someone I’ve come to care about so much!
Thank you (and you too, atheist) much. I hope to meet you both some day, so I can tell you that your feedback — especially when you disagree with me — makes all this worth it. Really. Because even when I’m being a dick, you always know where I’m coming from. Like this comment here — you acknowledge the Magical Unity Pony phenomenon exists! And is repulsive! Yet you can also tell that I’m at my wit’s end and it’s an ugly thing. Yet, there is also your implicit assumption, quite lost on the likes of Rob, that assholishness is not a negation of a position’s validity. I’m really weary of the “someone’s being mean on the internets” whining, and thank Jebus H. I don’t have to hear that from you. Anyway, I’m not gonna post anything for a while because I’m too fucking disgusted and (this is quite lost on RB), I make myself be vague about the direction of my ire a lot of the time out of a desire to avoid flame wars with people I must get along with or to avoid mentioning things I “hear” in private. (Don’t laugh; I’m serious.) But because I’m vague, then I get accused of pulling strawmen out of my ass. When something deeply offends me (not because it was stated in “mean” terms, but because it is in substance wicked or stupid), then like everyone else here who comments or posts, I have to say something about it, which is what the internets is for, after all. Very frustrating.
As for that physical stress, well, I smoke two packs a day, mostly live on junk food when I do happen to eat, and devour every opiate I can get my hands on. Like The Dude, I find ways to maintain — or hasten the inevitable (is it not the same difference?). But it’s hard. I should like to be an alcoholic but since my early twenties the hangovers just haven’t been bearable enough to endure on more than just the odd occasion. And despite my stoner looks, I haven’t been able to enjoy marijuana for years. One of the highlights of the Denver experience was when some of the ladies in the tent would ask, “Now, where is it you’re from?” And when I’d answer there’d be a round of sympathetic sighs and comments like “you poor thing.” If they only knew!
(Sorry if this is more than usually incoherent, but I’ve been distracted by Hurricane Ike’s remnant pounding my house and not letting me get much sleep.)
Freedom isn’t free
No there’s a hefty fuckin’ fee
And if you don’t chip in your buck o-five
Who will?
Yeah, buck o-five
Freedom costs a buck o-five
Oh, for a more civil era, when polite paragons of moderation like Buckley could call opponents of lynching cock-suckers without using any of the filthy, filthy words that children today are taught in kintergarten alongside the Kama Sutra and popery.
It affects your mood doesn’t it. It’s been a steady rain for the past two days up here in Chicago (the remnants get up here too) & I find it hard to stir myself. I imagine that it’s more intense by you.
Anyway, I’m not gonna post anything for a while because I’m too fucking disgusted and (this is quite lost on RB), I make myself be vague about the direction of my ire a lot of the time out of a desire to avoid flame wars with people I must get along with or to avoid mentioning things I “hear” in private. (Don’t laugh; I’m serious.)
It’s clear that your concern with getting along with people is inhibiting your ability to tell it like it is.
He can go fuck himself with his self-righteous bullshit
He expect american soldiers to calmly let themselves be shot at without returning fire for fear of hitting civilians.
We’ll probably never find out, if someone was shooting at Mickey and his boys while hiding among civilians, how quick he would blow those civilians away to protect his own ass.
He expect american soldiers to calmly let themselves be shot at without returning fire for fear of hitting civilians.
Where, pray tell, might these American soldiers be?
Where, pray tell, might these American soldiers be?
You expect someone to say “well, since other people sent us here illegitimately, I guess I have the moral obligation to let myself and my friends be killed”?
Fail
Cheezus. If I was on a fast connection I’d give you the links.
You expect someone to say “well, since other people sent us here illegitimately, I guess I have the moral obligation to let myself and my friends be killed”?
You expect that’s the argument?
HTML: Seriously — if you don’t have the means to see a doctor right now, at least start taking multivitamins from the local grocery chain. Yes, as the someones-on-the-internets will assure us, mere proprietary tablets from a soulless manufacturing company are nowhere near as Life-Fulfilling as eating a healthy organic diet & maintaining mindfulness of our stress levels, but in this imperfect society, you can at least eat the dam’ vitamins, okay?
You expect that’s the argument?
Kind of. I kinda figured that someone who would characterize Obama & Biden’s refusal to swear off bombing in any case where civilians could be hurt, regardless of the purpose for doing so, as advocating the bombing of civilians and as a parallel to trophy hunting, probably doesn’t have much use for allowing the bombing of enemy strongpoints when there is a chance of killing civilians and that means they would have to be cleared room-to-room and that means more casualties for the guys who have to do the clearing.
I also kind of expected the rest of it to go like most others have gone:
1) Assert the absolute prohibition on killing civilians and mockingly dismiss the notion of any difference between deliberate murder and “collateral damage” in pursuit of legitimate targets, without any real examination.
2) Acknowledge that absolute bans on killing civilians paralyzes legitimate fighting too, including “resistances”, and especially when fighting against an opponent – be they terrorists or imperialists – who is willing to use civilians as hostages and hedge the previous assertion by making exceptions for killings that are unavoidable and in the pursuit of a righteous struggle that will save lives in the long run.
3) Ultimately end up with the same old “but our cause is legitimate and their cause is not” argument which everyone fucking uses all the fucking time.
Thanks for the advice, Ms. Althou — er, Rob. But shouldn’t you be somewhere else declaring jihad on looksism or purging Markos because he ran an ad that shows cheesecake or some similar shit? I understand it’s already a tiresome refrain, but: Fuck off.
Hey, no problem. I’d have been more polite about giving it if you hadn’t spent so much time acting like an asshole. Aaaaand we’re back to the classic HTML refrain: “You’re all a bunch of idiots. Oh, you don’t like being called an idiot? Well, these thin-skinned politically correct pussies can all just bite me. Wait, you say I’m being an asshole? Well Fuck Off.”
For crissakes, dude. You do this every time. Go off on a stupid and insulting rant about all the morons and fuckwits who count themselves among your own readers. Someone calls you on it and you accuse them of political correctness or some such bullshit. If your response to being told that you’re acting like an asshole is simply “Fuck you” that doesn’t actually negate the premise that you are, in fact, acting like an asshole.
And apparently it’s some kind of mindless PC bullshit to call someone out for acting like an asshole to his own friends and allies, even.
Were the commenters here insufficiently respectful of your awesomeness and deferential to your brilliance that you had to repeat your point in increasingly insulting terms to provoke a reaction?
This is your pattern- you toss out insulting language like it’s nothing. Someone says, wtf? You attack them for being PC. Someone else says, wtf? You whine about how you’re being repressed or something.
Yet, there is also your implicit assumption, quite lost on the likes of Rob, that assholishness is not a negation of a position’s validity.
I never said you were wrong or that your position was invalid. I said, or meant to say, that you were shitting on people for no good reason and acting like an asshole, and I was trying to say that it was counterproductive. It is. You can’t figure a way to make your point to your allies and friends, people who generally respect your opinions and actually like you, without treating them like a bunch of fuckwit morons? Nope. You can’t.
Nor can you have an argument without it disintegrating into personal attacks. “You’re wrong, because fuck you” is where you always seem to end up whenever someone disagrees with your sneering cynicism.
So your point is about the Magical Unity Pony and how it annoys the hell out of you. Got it. Got it the first time, in fact. So, why the continuing tirade against regular commenters on your own damned blog who generally agree with you? Especially after you’ve already acknowleged that the MUP-believers aren’t actually here?
How is it relevant to the question of how to prevent McCain/Palin from continuing the Bush Administration? Do you disagree on the importance of that?
Maybe you do, since you attack the only the alternative to McCain/Palin we’ve got left. And you even use the Rovian technique of attacking his biggest strength- his popularity and the enthusiasm of his supporters. You realize, right, that this is the GOP line on Obama? He’s a fake, his supporters are blind idiots, and there’s something unseemly and even dangerous about the fact that so many people actually like the guy. Oh and those Obamabots are so fucking PC, you should just vote for McCain- that’ll piss off those pantywaist liberals.
(If you can call me Althouse, I’ll call you Rovian. Seriously, wtf? The “fuck you” was more coherent and apt. FWIW, I don’t think you’re actually Rovian- but maybe, just maybe, Rove’s political method has been effective on you: depress the opposition’s turnout by demoralizing their base and discredit them through attacks on their strengths.)
For the last time, Obama is a typical centrist Democrat politician.
He’s also sane and competent. These qualities, centrist Democrat, but especially sane and competent, do in fact make him a much better choice than McCain. Who is neither sane nor competent, let alone that he’s a rightist Republican and an idiot to boot. Another term of GOP idiocratic rule would be worse than disastrous.
I am optimistic that we can prevent that this time around and enthusiastic at the prospect of preventing that. I’m also enthusiastic at the prospect of restoring sanity and at least some competence in government. It’s kind of important.
Will Obama be an imperialist? Of course he will: we are an imperialist people- it is our history and culture, has been from the beginning. America is an empire. Changing that is something that is, I think, outside the possibility of what can be accomplished in our archaic and outmoded pseudo-democracy- and certainly above Obama’s paygrade.
The question that this election addresses is what kind of empire are we? One that the rest of the world can deal with, where people within it are reasonably prosperous, reasonably secure, enjoy civil liberties and a functioning government that at least tries to make life a little less shitty? Or one run by McCain.
Obama’s no revolutionary and I don’t think anyone seriously expects him to be. He’s simply a competent imperial manager- and compared to the current leadership and to McCain, that IS IN FACT a huge change.
Nice to see that, fuck you, you’re not interested, fuck you, in flame wars, though. Fuck you. You’re above that sort of, fuck you, thing.
But hey, I’m just an idiot because for the first time in years, I’m feeling a slightly lower sense of doom than usual. Maybe the coming collapse can be delayed a few more years, maybe the landing can be softened. Or maybe McCain will win and the landing will be a tailspin crash.
But let’s not actually do anything ourselves to effect anything either way, and by all means let’s disparage, ridicule, and hold in utter contempt anyone who does. Cynicism is such an effective means of achieving progress. Some people haven’t given up completely on their hope and others who’d lost it have had some restored- bunch of fucking PC morons, right?
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Ok, look. Just finished reading the rest of your recent reply. I really am sorry that you’re down. It sounds like depression. I get depression, I really do. Been there. Hell, am there most of the time. When I get there in a particularly bad way, one of the first things I do is lash out at folks around me to the point where I barely have any friends left. And one of the things that can get me to that point is politics. And stress. And people I like acting like assholes.
It sometimes gets me riled to the point where I waste an hour of an otherwise lovely Sunday afternoon writing a rambling blog comment.
And I know that hearing someone say, lighten up, doesn’t help but still- lighten up. Or just stew in resentment over political correctness or something.
Ok, that’s it for me. I need to go hike up the canyon or something. Days like this I wonder why I ever gave up getting high.
Peace. Take your vitamins. Go outside and play.
RobW, there are people who would say that you’re not arguing with HTML, you’re arguing with the spectre of your own depression. I think that’s one problem with the Global Internet Village: Here in the virtual world of endless mirrors, we sometimes find ourselves arguing with our own reflections rather than our blogging ‘opponents’.
Of course, it’s even more depressing when one finds oneself arguing with one’s own reflection and losing….
Anne, you’re right on, as usual. Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to shrug off HTML’s occasional descent into despair- it tends to trigger my own.
I promise I’ll stop baiting him; next time he goes off like that I’ll just let him rant, understanding that we all hit our snapping points, and hope he gets through it ok.
Nothin’ but love for all y’all. Thanks.
Say, what was this thread about anyway? Oh yeah- cruelty to animals compared to general indifference to human suffering, or something along those lines, right?
I’d tend to agree with whomever made the point that we tend to think of humans as being ultimately responsible for their own fates no matter how illogical that seems in the face of gross injustice and the obvious innocence of “collateral damage” bombing victims. I blame Calvin, I guess. We’ve all apparently absorbed into our culture this sense that everyone’s a sinner and deserves what they get.
Nobody can make the same argument about the “charismatic megafauna” except of course for the deluded assholes who claim the wolves pose a threat to Alaska.
Oh, and according to the Palin Baby Name Generator, I’m Flex Gunship. This is so going to become my new handle.
Glennzilla: “The fact that Obama has committed himself to more imperialistic and militaristic approaches than many people would like doesn’t negate the fact that McCain has explicitly embraced the underlying premises of the Bush foreign policy — the Bush Doctrine — and Obama hasn’t.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
and Obama hasn’t.
then what the fuck was that surge turned out better than my wildest dreams shit about? and his profound belief in the war on terrrraaaaa!!!!1one! which of course informs his actions on FISA. and the selection of Joe-Sold-my-soul-for-zero-percent-loan-Biden as VP.
the only difference with Obama if he wins will be the Afghans will get more aerial poundings from drones, possibly with LAYZERZ!! and maybe Pakistan too. As an Indian, this worries me plenty. the Pakistan army is pretty weird by itself, but when you mix the CIA or other state dept stooges in there things can go south pretty quickly.
of course Latin america will continue to get screwed, as Bolivia is experiencing right now, and Africa will probably get ignored slightly less, which can at best be called a mixed blessing.
i realize that for some americans, maybe health care is a great thing that will help you sleep better at night. maybe knowing that a pro-corporate, wall street funded african american can make it to the seat of the presidency keeps some hope alive in you. maybe the prospect of electing supreme court judges who are not total corporate cobags soothes an ache in your tummy. if so, i am not going to convince you with a few internetz links and personal rants. i hope you get here on your own.
Don’t mind me, I’m just going to stand in the corner and punch myself in the groin for a few hours.
(thud) OW!
(thud) OW!
(thud) OW!