Hi there. I’m HTML Mencken. You might remember me from such Sadlian posts as “Wingnuts In Party Hats” and the Wingnut All-Star Series of reichwing character assassinations assisted suicides.

I haven’t been around for a while. I could say I’ve been busy, and it would be partially true but still too cliche, so instead my excuse is that I’ve been forced into hibernation by the coldest fucking blackberry winter I’ve ever endured.

In lieu of a post that would, you know, take effort and shit to compose, with a lede and then sustained blahblahblah followed with a succinct conclusion, instead I’ll offer you this steaming pile of links to entertain you while I go back to …zzzzzzzzzz. Enjoy:

An old aquaintence from baseball message board days, IronChef Chris Wok, offers this bit of WTFery. I provide this link, along with extended middle finger, to horrible pooptard troll Grampaw who delights in smearing as racists those who do not share his free trade dogma. Who are the racists now, biatch?

This is a cool site for we awful people who do not belong to the old boys’ Expert Omniscience Club, do not think kittens in baskets are the coolest shit evar, do not knee-jerkly sneer at accusations of Republican election theivery, are not so pig-ignorant and ideologically fickle as to praise the consistently horrible Jonah Goldberg to the skies a couple years before calling him the worst wanker in history. Another word for us is ‘autodidacts’; we like to read — and read about the reading of others. ‘Cause after all, such efforts help us stay on the side of decency (even if we do use a word like ‘philistine’ on occasion) rather than, say, come to decency (kicking and screaming) only after the most gigantic pile of political shit squittered in the last 30 years has hit the fan and sprayed the country.

Chef Rob Farley: Yes, more please; thank you! Delicious! Umm, but not that, though. Take that back to the Centrist/Interventionist/Inevitably-fall-for-another-Vietnam-or-Iraq kitchen, thanks. No, don’t throw it away — I’m sorta glad you can make it — but it’s not something I like to see on the menu.

Maybe I remember this series as better than it was (the ‘Condominimizer’ was genius), or maybe not, but I wish it were on DVD so I could find out.

Sweet Jesus!!1!!! This article is about ‘looksism’!!! Worse, it argues, sickeningly, that there might be a scientific basis for the looksism we all engage in everyday! The author does not mention that ‘looksism’ is just bigotry ‘cut from the same cloth’ as racism, sexism, etc. Rather, he argues that it might indeed be a sound basis for rational choices! Sorry, this argument will not do. It hurts feelings! So to the gas chambers, Tim Harford, go!

Speaking of ‘looksism’, here are some funnies at K-Lo’s expense. Obviously, Clif, the author, is a horrible person — worse than Pol Pot, Gilles de Rais, Ben Affleck and Chris Truby combined. Awful.

I forget who sent us this (claim it in comments and I’ll update to give you credit and a link) but — bwahahahahahahahaha.

This is more true than not, I think.

Brad DeLong: intelligent, decent, dogmatic, stubborn, confusing, Christian (in the best sense of the word), maddening and because of all that, interesting. Here he deplores Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed on the grounds that it is angry and nihilist. More specifically, because he thinks it is unfairly critical of government. I don’t remember the thrust of the book being quite like that, but no matter. Assume that he’s right. Well, why wouldn’t it be critical of DeLong’s neoliberal ‘welfare state’? It’s not much of a welfare state at all precisely because of people like DeLong, whose preferred policies have continually sold out the types profiled in Ehrenreich’s book. DeLong still doesn’t understand that the working class will never trust his kind again (though some neoliberals are trying to offer, used car salesman-like, promises in the hope that they will), that the working poor are right to be angry at what the Clintonoid 90s did to them (and what the Bush 00s continue to do to them).

On the other hand, why DeLong, almost alone among ‘Sensible Liberals’, did not fall for the Iraq War is conveyed in this passage:

Would Richard Nixon and company have forged evidence against Alger Hiss if they had had the opportunity? Yes, at the drop of a hat.

Post-Clinton, too many decided that character was irrelevant. DeLong’s old enough to know better. (DeLong is also a tireless autodidact outside his professional studies.) The above is the right estimation of Richard Nixon’s character: assume the worst. I think DeLong was smart enough to also assume the worst about GW Bush (of course, only an idiot could not after November 2000 especially, but then most ‘Sensible Liberals’…); opposition to the Iraq War followed naturally from this assumption. (Admittedly, my thesis runs into the shoals a bit when one considers that along with personal character, which DeLong is adept at judging, there is also ideological character, which DeLong is — like most ‘Sensible Liberals’ — terribly naive about. Cf. his ongoing tolerance of such creeps as Tyler Cowen.)

Incidentally, the linked post is about Kai Bird on Alger Hiss. Now I could give a shit about the Alger Hiss story, but I am familiar with Kai Bird and I wonder… what does DeLong think about Kai Bird’s work on Truman and the nukes dropped on Japan? Apparently DeLong considers Bird reputable enough to quote on Hiss; does this respect extend to Bird’s other historical investigations? Because if so, it’d be kind of funny: Bird, along with Gar Alperovitz, are often citied by Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal (in other words, the sort of folks DeLong calls ‘intellectual totalitarians’) when they condemn Truman’s atomic genocide-as-diplomacy.

Goodies.

Classic.

Yeah.

Very good.

Blargh! It is not a MYSTERY!! Cautious and prudent do not necessarily mean ‘reactionary’. GMOs are new. If we don’t take the laissez-faire attitude the Randroid-Propertarian-Glibertarian fucks want us to take, all that’s lost is a crapitalist corporation’s money. If we do take the laissez-faire route and we find out later GMOs are hazardous, we’ve lost much more than money. People and the ecosystem (which is, after all, what humans must maintain for their existence) are more important than money — or at least, our side thinks so. On the other hand, if we are wrong about Global Warming, all we may have lost is money (“growth” — which means for some, a more luxurious lifestyle. And to forestall the inevitable, wankerific replies, subsistence isn’t awesome by any means, but at least it’s living.) But if we are right, we’ve saved the planet. We’re simply better and smarter utilitarians, and that’s regardless of the ethical and aesthetic issues of gene-splicing. The fuckwits at Reason aren’t revolutionaries; they’re just crass and $uperficial.