Who's Running For President?

I don't give a flying fuck. All of the Republicans are demonstrably batshit crazy, in a willfully evil way. All of the Democrat have a vanishingly tiny chance of affecting my life in anything but the most infinitesimal way. And are not meaningfully less willfully evil, if that. The amount of noise generated by this would drive me bugfuck, if I allowed it to. Some beloveds have already allowed they to become bugfuck. This is a sad. They should take drugs for it. I should take drugs because they're big grownup beloveds and I have no control over what they do, or any ensuing sad.

Will I vote for Her? Not in the winnowing, no. In the Big One? I don't give a flying fuck. You, personally, I give a flying fuck, beloved. All the beloveds, even the ones who can't read. They don't give a flying fuck either.

By the way, they're not typos. And that was a pome, maybe. Shorts. Yum. Landru out.

The Decline of Honesty

Others, including Himself, seem to agree that George Zimmerman can be both legally not guilty and morally totally wrong in the matter of Trayvon Martin's death. I think this is pretty clear. I ignored the contemporaneous trial coverage, which would have required far more time and energy than I had available or willing, but what I've read in the aftermath--at least, that which seems trustworthy and not overly afflicted by obvious agendae--seems to support a conclusion that the prosecution didn't do Trayvon Martin any favors, the defense didn't have to work very hard to create reasonable doubt, and the judge's jury instructions left them very little, if any, room to convict Zimmerman of anything.

Now let's be honest. I'll go first. George Zimmerman is, in fact, a creepy ass cracker, a cop wannabe who deliberately stalked Trayvon Martin because he was a young nigger in a hoodie, and at the least, deliberately provoked a situation where he was able to gun Martin down. Of course that's not a statement about the law, and if you try to answer it with a legal argument, you're not being honest.

Here's a statement about the law: It's unfortunate, to say the least, that the state of Florida was unable to come up with a charge to fit the crime, or to competently try the charge that it chose (I mean manslaughter, under Florida law--I don't think they ever had a chance of convicting him of second-degree murder). And it's really bad that while our nation's legal principles and George Zimmerman's rights as a defendant were upheld, justice was not, in any way, served. You might be honest if you answer that with a legal argument. Maybe. That won't make you right. But I titled the post the way I did, didn't I?

Let's discuss some people who really aren't being honest--or, if they are, they're so ignorant and/or prejudiced that their views on this case aren't worthy of the public discussion. Let's start with CNN's vaunted juror number B37. Here are some (admittedly selected) samples of her patter:

"I think all of us thought race did not play a role," the juror said . "We never had that discussion."

...

 She believes he thought Martin was suspicious because of the way he acted. "Anybody would think anybody walking down the road, stopping and turning and looking -- if that's exactly what happened -- is suspicious," she said.

...

Juror B37 said Jeantel was not a good witness because the phrases used during her testimony were terms she had never heard before. The juror thought the witness, "felt inadequate toward everyone because of her education and her communication skills. I just felt sadness for her."

...

The juror said she did not think the term "creepy ass cracker" was a racial statement. The juror said this was the way Trayvon and Rachel spoke to each other, "I think it's just everyday life, the type of life that they life and how they're living, in the environment that they're living in." [My note: she didn't say "Trayvon and Rachel." She said "they."]

Holy crap. Okay, I'm willing to concede the possibility that Juror B37 is honest. But if she is, she sure is one ignorant creepy ass cracker. Race didn't play a role? Suspicious? "The type of life that they live"? "Creepy ass cracker" isn't a racial statement? Holy fucking shit. Actually, it's that last one that strains my capacity for belief in Juror B37 most of all.

Look, in addition to the top-line reasoning--bad prosecution, adequate defense, judge's instructions--do we seriously believe that this verdict has nothing to do with the jury being composed of six white women? I mean, aside from known problems with verdicts in six-person juries (Google it), a racially and gender-homogenous jury? In Florida? And race didn't play a role? Oh my paws and whiskers, it strains credibility to believe that this woman is honest, but sure, it's theoretically possible. I didn't hear all the evidence, what the fuck do I know?

Let's move on. I was sitting in a doctor's office--and, full disclosure, my pneumonia is weakly relapsing and I'm doing another round of medical shit and another round of heavy fucking drugs and another round of attempting to rest, this attempt much less successful than the first, but I just started that, so cut me a break, but the point is I'm in a really bad fucking mood, and I'm not really predisposed to give anyone talking about this any more than reasonable doubt as to their honesty, so it's really kinda surprising that I went so light on such a disingenous piece of shit as Juror B37--actually, it was the radiologist's office, and CNN was on the big teevee in the waiting room, tuned to CNN, which is actually how I even heard any of Juror B37's line, because I would ordinarily and otherwise ignore CNN fapping. Anyway, it was whatever CNN polished media tart comes after the Noon of the Wolf, and she was talking to the President of Morehouse College, and some media blonde who founded the Daily Download and now whores for the Daily Beast, and Emily Pinchface-Whitebread, who is as I understand it the head of opinionation for the Washington Moonie Times, who argues that obviously Zimmerman was innocent, Florida should never have charged him, of course Trayvon Martin was a brutal criminal, and the President is a nigger. She cut off the President of Morehouse College, called him irresponsible for even discussing race in this context, and blasted the Daily Beast broad when she accused Ms. Pinchface-Whitebread of not discussing the matter civilly.

Okay, now I'm cherry-picking obvious examples of extreme dishonesty. Kinda like every fucking creepy ass cracker who's reading about one low-grade near-riot in LA and screaming, "Look, niggers are violent, we told you so!"

But wait, there's more. And no, I'm not going to start talking about Edward "I Am Not An Attention Whore" Snowden, famous attention whore, or Glenn "I Have Never Been Wrong and You Are Morally Reprehensible For Disagreeing With Me" Greenwald, famous Brazilian correspondent for a famous British newspaper known for its unerring accuracy (okay, you got me: actual British people mostly refer to it as "The Gruniad").

Yeah, fine. Cheap, tangential, opportunistic, and a little dirty. Like I said, bad mood. Sincere sorries.

But there really is more. Loomis, who some of you don't actually understand, some of you willfully so, points to Dick Cohen's breathtakingly racist column in YFWP. From Cohen: 

I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

...

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? 

...

After all, if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk. [My note: This based on an NYPD statistic that 78 percent of shooting suspects are black.] 

Loomis' added value:

Where is the politician who will openly race bait? Where is the politician who will call for racial profiling? Where are our leaders in this time of political correctness, where blacks have everything handed to them on the plate? 

Yup. I think it's pretty clear that Richard Cohen is, in fact, being dishonest. Maybe that's his job. Loomis also hat-tips Atrios' previous ode to Cohen's racism. And of course, Cohen is a go-to for every leftish blogger who wants to talk about racism in media. Just being honest.

Let's sum: failing to acknowledge that race has a role in this discussion? Dishonest. Shut up and go away. A particular verdict was necessary or legal or correct? Dishonest. Shut up and go away. Zimmerman utterly blameless? Dishonest or ignorant. Shut up and go away. "I understand George Zimmerman"? Definitely too fucking stupid to opine, possibly dishonest. Shut up and go away.

I think there's plausibly reasonable doubt about most of the rest.

[Edited 90 minutes later to fix background problem in block quotes. Which were appearing as a total whiteout. Heh. I made a funny.]

Information Free

Beloveds know I've been recovering from pneumonia for over two weeks now. Please focus on "recovering" rather than on "pneumonia." Thank you.

Items and judgments:

The Surveillance State: Yes. Of course it's bad. You think it's news? Holy shit, how do you keep from drowning when you look up in the rain?

Glenn Greenwald: Shut the fuck up and enjoy the Confederations Cup, you self-promoting bitch. Or the protests against it. I don't give a fuck. Just shut the fuck up.

VRA: Holy shit. What a pack of fucking tools.

DOMA: Isn't John Roberts a fascinating human being? Savior and tool? Jeebus.

That'll do. Vamos United.

Paul Ryan: Actually Dumb Enough To Drown Himself By Looking Skyward With His Mouth Open When It's Not Raining

Thanks to TBogg and others for this bit of idiot fuckery from union-hating Paul Ryan:

"Did you guys watch that Packer game last night? I mean, give me a break. It is time to get the real refs."

Why, yes, Representative Ryan, it is time to stop locking out the real refs in an effort to bust their union and save the NFL a few pennies. Can we expect you to take a similar position on far more significant union employees, like, say, teachers?

Ryan followed that bite with some incredibly retarded and baldly meretricious analogy to President Obama's handling of the economy. Ryan is an embarrassment to fascism, unable even to do that right. 

The motherfucking scab referees have been awful, it's true. And Roger Goodell shoulders enough of the blame to condemn him to a hell he's already going to. But let's not ignore the cocksucking scab motherfuckers their own selves. No one's making them go out there and do the NFL's union-busting bidding.

As awful as the refs are, and as deeply loathsome, as despicably reprehensible as their scabbiness is, there's one bit of heinous referee fuckery thus far this season that didn't bother me a bit, and that's those scab shitmuffins outright robbing the motherfucking Green Bay Packers last night.

So fuck you, scabs, you amoral sacks of striped toolage. But thanks for buttfucking the Packers. And thanks to you, Paul Ryan, for letting me stretch a meme for one more day.

Mitt Romney: Actually Dumb Enough To Drown Himself By Looking Skyward With His Mouth Open When It's Not Raining

Thanks to Sasha for a tip to this, from The Hill and the LA Times. As you may have heard, Ann Romney's plane had to make an emergency landing last week, because of some electrical issue that may or may not have been a fire. Willard was concerned:

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

That's right. Mitt Romney thinks that: airplane windows should open, and that oxygen puts out fires.

Rock on, Republicans.

Of Course Their Opinion Is Intrinsically Every Bit As Valid As Yours

The Face of Communism

Hat-tip.

Ha! Made you click, hope you feel dirty. But if you ignore my little joke on some few of you and take a look at the substance, you'll get to how some right-wingers think that citing "This Land Is Your Land" means Communism. I'm not joking, and if you think they are, you're dumber than I look.

Having sat in a rural Waffle House just yesterday, suffering through "God Bless the USA" as I et my delightfully greasy, exquisitely American brekkies, all I have to say about this is:

Fuck You, wingnuts. You're too fucking stupid to be allowed to have opinions; perhaps you should just love it or leave it. Really.

Fucktards.

But Happy Fourth, and remember kids: Fuck Jefferson, that slavefucking piece of shit.

Happy Mothers Day, or, No Will for Outrage

There are two things really severely annoying me now, and I really only have the time to acknowledge them because not farting about this will rankle all weekend when I should be helping Data and Bam honor their mother, and of course honoring my own sainted mother, the She-Nurse of the SS.

Now, it's no secret that those scheming and selfish gay folk have monopolized the news this week, what with setting themselves up to be bashed in North Carolina (sadly enough, the home of the She-Nurse, though of course she did the right thing, because if she didn't I'd hate her too much to show my love with that nom d'blog), and then deviously gangfucking Barack Obama in his tight preznitential ass with their big gay dicks until he submitted and put on leather chaps and admitted he's been lying for years about loving the ghey and that Sasha and Malia were only procreationalized because Bill Ayers milked him into a bottle and sold the precious jism to Michelle for her nefarious use.

Damn them. And damn him for loving them. Y'know who almost always says it pretty well? Dahlia, that's who. So yeah, what she said, plus, special to everyone who wants to pretend that BarryO publicly stating, as Preznit of the Motherfucking United States, that he supports gay marriage, isn't good enough, because W: just fuck off. I mean, seriously. No one is saying that his support for gay marriage wipes out his warmongering, so quit fucking shitting up the Internets with that fucking strawman, and the other one about how "I support gay marriage," which is what he unequivocally said, badly mangled though it emerged from the newly christened preznitential cocksucker, somehow isn't good enough and he should personally assfuck every state legislature and cracker until they submit to ghey onions.

Furthermore, I'm fucking sick of you. Yes, war is bad. Killing people is bad. Fucking with the Constitution is bad. Therefore, shit on him at every fucking opportunity, keep fucking pretending about the black Corporate helicopters, keep pretending there's no difference whatsoever that's good enough. Keep up the fucking playground taunting of anyone who doesn't accept your absolute stance, who rejects that compassionate Mittens, the gay preppie's worst delayed-time-bomb nightmare, would be demonstrably worse, because there's some alternative that prevents all death and inequity.

Fucking sophist bullshit, objectively no fucking better or more intellectually sophisticated than...

Jonah Goldberg. No, I'm not fucking kidding. But just typing that name illifies me, so let's let Susan do the heavy lifting, and really, she does that lifting very well. I'm leaving all the thinking to her, thanks. Okay, not all, because Alex Pareene did a pretty awesome job, too.

Yeah, okay, I guess I lied. Three things. And I suppose I do have the will for outrage. My bad.
Oh, and fuck Blogger.

Fuck You, You Rapist Pigs

I'm sick to death of this nonsense. If you give a flying fuck about other people having consensual sex, then drop dead puking, screaming, and bleeding from your fucking pores, you insufferably evil bag of censorious shit. I really can't conceive of anything more indecent than passing laws requiring women to be medically raped for any reason, and denying women health care coverage based on your concept of morality is the fucking nadir of theoretically free thought. Die. Just die.

Also, what Digby said.

Also, h/t to Tbogg for the Digby and for this:

Fucking assholes. Just die.

Followup Hypotheses Designed Solely To Piss Off My Friends

Exhibit: Tim Thomas.

Monday, makes a flaming unsportsmanlike jackass of himself, letting his team down. Team patiently--and unnecessarily--doesn't fine or otherwise punish him for putting himself above the team by refusing to visit the White House, then spewing batshit fucking crazy excuses on his FB page. But wait!

Tuesday, gets benched in favor of Tuukka Rask, a goalie with a vastly inferior winning percentage against the opponent of the evening (do you even need to ask?). Coach Claude Julien did not give a reason for Thomas' benching, at least not that I could find, though it may well have been part of a normal rotation (Thomas has played about 2 of every 3 games this season) and Rask has a very good save percentage this season.

But let's not let facts get in the way of flagrantly abusing correlation/causation logic. Obviously, Tim Thomas' politics caused the Bruins to lose 5-3, a humiliating defeat for one of the hottest teams in the league, on a night when the Caps' three best players weren't dressed and a midget named Scrappy snagged his first career hat trick.

What more evidence do you need? Hypothesis confirmed, it's a theory. Just like gravity.

A Three-Way Dead Heat for Asshole of the Day

In chronological order (of when I saw each story):

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky and Mars) was not allowed to board his flight at the Nashville airport this morning after he declined a patdown (known in TSA parlance as "secondary screening") to resolve a scanning anomaly. He (and his father) characterized the incident as "detention" and set about making as much noise as they could about it. The noise continued through the day, with nutters claiming he was being illegally arrested en route to Congress (he was heading to a Roe v. Wade anniversary anti-abortion rally in DC), the Pauls repeating the word "detained" to anyone who would listen, and a statement from the Senator implying that white people shouldn't be screened (that wacky, not-at-all racist Paul family!). The capper comes from Sasha, who sent this lovely demonstration of what a total fucking wackjob Senator Paul is: he thinks that TSA has rigged the machines to trigger random false positives to give TSA an excuse to pat people down. Holy fuck, this man is a United States Senator?  Fuck you, Rand Paul.

Next up is Boston Bruins' goalie Tim Thomas. Full disclosure: I make no bones about seriously despising the Bruins. That river runs real deep. However, Thomas declined to join his Stanley Cup champion team in a visit to the White House today, because he hates Obama. Puck Daddy Greg Wyshynski gets it as wrong as it can be gotten, claiming that Thomas shouldn't be demonized because this is a free speech issue. Holy fucking crap, Wyshynski. No one's passing a law restraining Thomas' freedom of speech. They're correctly noting that he's an unAmerican asshole, a shitty team player, and a graceless twat. Of course he's entitled to be all of those things, each of which has the consequence of making him look like a fucking jerk. Wyshynski is an idiot (and a unabashed Devils fanboy); Thomas is, in essence, a fucking traitor--by his own side's standards. Fuck you, Tim Thomas.


Finally, the NHL's uberreichsfuhrer of discipline, Brendan Shanahan. In the Capitals' overtime loss to the Penguins yesterday, Alex Ovechkin crushed the shit out of Pens defenseman Zbynek Michalek, leaving the ice by a few inches to do so. No penalty call (it probably should've been called as boarding, and it's stunning that it wasn't, given that midget bitch referee Kelly Sutherland demonstrably despises the Capitals). About 5 minutes later, Michalek crushed the shit out of Matt Hendricks, not quite leaving the ice to do so, but elbowing Hendricks in the head. Two minutes, elbowing. After the game, Michalek admitted that the penalty call was correct and that his state of mind was such that the infraction was related to the uncalled offense of a few minutes earlier. Ovechkin and Michalek had disciplinary hearings today, with Shanahan the deciderer. Guess who got a three-game suspension and who got no supplementary discipline? Fucking Shanahan even admitted that Ovechkin got slammed because he's a repeat offender--even though, under the NHL's rules for administering supplementary discipline, Ovechkin had accumulated enough good behavior time to be outside of the window for increased supplementary discipline. Fuck you, Brendan Shanahan.

Strategy

Okay, so contra this, Hogeland (actually, Martin Luther King, channelled through Hogeland, and furthered by some logorrhea I read regularly) has convinced me that my thinking was pretty lazy when I wrote that, if assaulted by police for even minor violations of bullshit laws:

your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.

It's not the first part that's lazy. The lazy and problematic bit is that resisting police instruction, legal or illegal, does constructively invalidate the movement. My problem, in addition to some inherent intellectual laziness, was that I was being far too nice. Hogeland quotes King:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Anarchists (I include faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, partial anarchists, and mere sophists, without classifying named individuals) will quibble, but King disposes of that pretty neatly; of course they'll quibble. They're against law. I'm so dramatically unconvinced that the answer to lawlessness by power is anarchy that I've just flatly abandoned most of my reading in that realm. I recognize that this puts me squarely in the camp of faith in due process. Is that a religion as dumb as any other? Might it be my downfall, our downfall? Sure. History and math say it's more likely #Occupy's downfall, unless so-called civilization is doomed to fail anyway, and if that's the dilly I'll go apologize to all the faux anarchists, pseudo-anarchists, and partial anarchists if I''m not too busy or too dead. Sophists I'll still shoot, since the collapse of order will leave me free to do so without legal consequence, pretty much the only thing that restrains me now.

A beloved says that all publicity is good publicity. Decency forbids me from going too far with this, but the fatal flaw here is that this maxim goes for pigs as well as for protesters. Would pigs make shit up whether or not protesters are pure? Of course they would. But you have to give them the chance to fuck up thusly, and it's very clear that #Occupy isn't doing so.

To the extent, of course, that #Occupy can be said to be an entity capable of doing one thing or another. But that's a strategic fail that belies more than I'm willing to concede without a fight at this point--and I'm not yet intellectually equipped for that fight, which I might, after all, lose.

Oh, For Fucks Sake

Twice.

First, there's some lunatic who decided that it'd be fun to hit #Occupy protesters with his car down by the Convention Center in two separate incidents on Friday night. Accounts differ sharply about what happened, though the police are investigating one incident as a hit-and-run and cited or arrested six pedestrians, Occupiers all, in the other. Apparently both incidents involved the same driver. DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who is usually a pretty reasonable egg (and her position here is disappointing, though unsurprising despite her usual tendency toward reason), has had enough of this; her press statement today called the Occupiers "increasingly confrontational and violent," belying my earlier conviction that MPD would be smart enough not to engage.

I have no trouble believing that the following things are true:

-Some asshole wanted to commit vehicular assault against Occupiers.
-Some Occupiers were dumb enough to believe that no one was crazy enough to commit vehicular assault against them.
-The Occupiers were in a particularly irritable humor that night, since the event they were protesting at was an Americans for Prosperity dinner gala.
-MPD is pretty fucking tired of this shit, and also, two different sets of cops, of varying levels of sympathy, handled the two different incidents, five minutes and no more than two blocks apart.

Of course, if I'm right, it doesn't negate vehicular assaults. Nor does it negate the consequences of violent protest, if that's in fact what was occurring. To be clear, my opinion is that probably both of those things occurred. My opinion, my asshole, right?


But it's not doing anything to improve my humor about the mass of dickweeds who are expressing unbridled joy that maybe some protesters got assaulted for the crime of creating an inconvenience, or their fervid wish that these unwashed loser hippies would just get jobs, which are of course plentiful, except when we're talking about President Negro. In fact, it in no way makes motherfuckers who need to shut the fuck up a whole lot any less motherfucking tiresome.

Second, there's the growing parade of women who've allegedly been harassed or assaulted by Herman Cain, and the legion of retards suggesting that they're all whores, that Bill Clinton was worse, or that liberals are responsible for the sudden outpouring of information about candidate Cain's behavior as president of the National Restaurant Association. I'll go all in on Dahlia Lithwick; my lede for this item goes way too easy on lying motherfuckers, because what they're really saying is that sexual harassment doesn't exist.

I don't profess to know what happened, but actual legal settlements by the candidate's employer sort of point to some conviction on their part that something did, in fact, actually happen. Contemporary witness accounts--attested by affidavit--also tend to militate toward the notion that this isn't bullshit. Conservatives' conviction that Monica Lewinsky was the last victim of sexual harassment need to be met with punches in the mouth.

I've read a lot about how the shadow of sexual harassment has permanently changed workplace social dynamics. I have something to say about this. I've been wrongly accused of sexual harassment. I've been rightly accused of sexual harassment in one instance, at least in the sense that, while my actual behavior was unthreatening, inoffensive, and irrelevant, I damn sure wanted to do something inappropriate with the accuser, and while I didn't overtly manifest that, my behavior was probably such, in some way, that she picked up on that vibe (I beat the rap, which didn't negate my Carterian heartlust). And in another instance, I was involved in a wildly inappropriate relationship with a colleague that she could easily have perceived as harassment, had she chosen to do so (she didn't, and in fact wallowed willingly in the inappropriateness, but that doesn't change what could easily have been).

This shit's real. It was a long time ago. I was younger. But it's all real. I was a dick. I got better, at least I think I did--my last brush with a grievance was over a dozen years ago (it was wrongful--the righteous one was farther back, and to be fair, I got out of the business of managing people for about 7 of those years). Does the shadow of those happenings affect the way I act now? Fucking A. I examine my behavior in the light of my past. But what casts the shadow is my behavior, not the threat of what people might do if they don't like me. And what that shadow darkens is any intention I might have of being a dick. This cannot be construed as a bad thing. It provides additional internal motivation--as if I need any--to not be an asshole.

My past has convinced me that truth will out. Herman Cain's behavior is a perfect model of a guy who's scared shitless that truth is outing.

Why I'd Really Like Some People To STFU About #Occupy

I'm not gonna lie; #Occupy annoys me. Not because I disagree or anything. And certainly not because it's physically or logistically inconvenient, though my job will take me to the neighborhood around the World Bank one day this week, which may well be entertaining. But it's not like #Occupy Gaithersburg is on the way. No one's dumb enough to try to occupy Gaithersburg.

Of course #Occupy is intellectually inconvenient: Though I try very hard to leave complicity-whinging to others, how guilty should I feel about the obvious need for massive wealth redistribution? Is my bank evil, and is the bank I'd switch to, if I weren't so fucking lazy, simply less evil? How will my autistic son fare in the new world order, which will presumably include far fewer of the processed crunchy, salty chip-type foods that are, along with pizza and McDonalds, the great mass of his diet? Can I just pay some more taxes and avoid actually getting lined up against the wall like the motherfucker that I am?

But I'm callous, and it's easy for me to give these questions (other than the one about Bam-Bam) only a few moments' thought before I dash off to the next part of the thrill ride that is my day-to-day existence. So that's not it. What annoys me about #Occupy is the massive outburst of fucktardery it engenders.

No Message:  I keep reading about how #Occupy is doomed to fail because it has no message. The level of lazy or obtuse it requires to not be able to discern a message here is stupefying. Look. My personal favorite, for reasons known to those of you who know me as something other than a cartoon Internet rock star, is "You Know Things are Messed Up When Librarians Start Marching." Super bonus points to the librarian in question for fucking up the capitalization, not that that's relevant to the matter at hand. "Close Corporate Tax Loopholes, Tax Religious Groups, End the Wars, Legalize Weed, and Bring Back Arrested Development" is also exceedingly awesome.

So the movement is stupid because not everyone is protesting about the same specific symptom of our culture, our economy, our governance? The movement is irrelevant because you're too lazy to read the signs and discern some obvious themes? Get bent, asshole, but more to the point, shut the fuck up.

The same goes for the linked complaint about the movement's lack of discernable leadership. Look, I think the Greek demos style consensus model is pretty fucking lame, and not tremendously effective in the sense of focus. So the fuck what? Friend Jack Crow makes, as a general proposition, some engaging arguments about power (I don't agree with him when it comes to function, but I find it hard to argue with him about the dynamic). What, exactly, is wrong with letting #Occupy experiment with actualizing shared power--especially when all it's sharing is power over how to protest? 

Dirty Unwashed Hippies: OMGWTFBBQ, how incredibly fucking dreary. Edroso does a better job with this than most of the other bloggers to whom I pay attention. Hippie-bashing (except as practiced by Eric Cartman) is every bit as massively retarded as it was when Richard Fucking Nixon pioneered it. It's especially totemic for fans of police riots. Like...oh. Nixon. Never mind. I don't know what it is about peoples' hair that makes other people want to shoot them. It's pretty fucking psychopathic, no? Unless you're talking about Kyle Beckerman. Someone hold that useless shit down while I shave his head, please.

The dirty unwashed hippie meme has begot the safety and sanitation meme that many cities are using as justification for their police riots. This is pretty fucking simple to me. The First Amendment does not guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you don't take a dump in the park. It doesn't guarantee the right of peaceable assembly as long as you leave room in the park for mommies and their baby carriages. Camping out at McPherson Square is not the same fucking thing as crying wolf in a crowded theatre. Using some turds on the ground as an excuse to suppress the Constitution is like...well, it's not like anything. It is what it is, and the notion that you're in the wrong if you're attacked by rioting police, that you deserve to be shot or gassed or beanbagged or whatever when you're attacked by the state is simply unAmerican. At least it is if you're the Tea Party, which is peopled by citizens who think that the Second Amendment is there to defend them from the government.

I happen to think that, if you're at McPherson Square and the police attack (they won't--it's not surprising or coincidental that DC is among the places where state-sponsored violence hasn't erupted, because My Local Law Enforcers, for all their flavors and stripes and kit, have Been There more times than I can count, and they're not dumb enough to be provoked, which is both gratifying and scary), your two reasonable and lawful options are to run the fuck away, or put your hands on your head and wait to be arrested. I'm not surprised that some people choose, under that particular stress, to throw shit at the cops, or otherwise resist violently. That they do does not obviate that they were, themselves, assaulted by the state on specious grounds, and it doesn't invalidate the movement.


You're Under Arrest for Closing Your Account: Yeah, really. I got to this at a chain of links that began at LGM and ended with a video from #Occupy Santa Cruz.  Two protesters entered a BoA branch in Santa Cruz to close their accounts. No following word on whether, when they left the signs outside the next day, they were allowed to close their accounts, but it says here at Alternet that BoA charges a fee for account closure.

The protesters in that video weren't arrested--in fact, it appears that the Santa Cruz cops, at least the two in the video, aren't stupid. Not so (allegedly) at a Citibank in New York, where Citibank officials (allegedly) locked protesters in and had them arrested as they tried to close their accounts. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people? How fucking stupid/arrogant is "I've got your money, shut up, I'm calling the cops"?

My question earlier was not entirely jokified; the money from which our family operates is in accounts at CapOne, which purchased Chevy Chase, a local/metro operation, a little over a year ago. We're credit union members (Ilse is, as you may recall, a unionized public employee), but that's a pain in the arse logistically. I'm also a USAA member, and I could bank there. While I have the impression that it's not in the same class of banking evil as the big fellas, I don't pay enough attention to know.


You're Fired: BFF and many others wrote last week about Lisa Simeone, who got fired by a production company associated with NPR for her #Occupy-related activities. She may or may not have been unfired; I lost track. NPR may or may not have gotten her fired; I'll never know. Lisa Simeone was no longer a journalist; all of her professional broadcast activities were about music.

More laterly, or maybe concomitantly, a journalist named Caitlin Curran went to an #Occupy protest in New York, and held up a sign, and got photographed, and the photo went all Internetty, and she got canned as a freelance Web producer by The Takeaway, a public radio production of, it appears, no consequence or integrity (hint: their Web site features a NYT semen-exchange widget). Pearl-clutching commentary on her piece on Gawker sets a pretty rigid standard for journalists, apparently allowing no research or opinion of any kind. Of course, we could just tell that to Fox News, but TBogg focuses it even better, reminding us that snarky, stupid #Occupy-basher Erin Burnett, of notoriously liberal mainstream newsfeces outlet CNN, is engaged to a Citibank executive.

Oh, snap.

In Conclusion: Of course, this is all just alternately formed, and better-formed, inconvenient intellect, so all that up top was a fucking lie, at the bottom, like it usually is. And of course I still have no desire to blow up our culture to fix anything. Of course I'm willing to have my life changed some--I'm serious about paying more taxes, about redistributing some of my wealth (which is not, to me or mine, substantial, but is far greater than that of a ridiculous percentage of humans) in some meaningful way, and assuming I'm not the only one going up against the wall--it's not like I'm even close to the one percent.

Here's the biggest intellectual inconvenience: Do those limits to my willingness make me a dick? I don't think so. I don't know if most Occupiers think so, either. But I'm watching and listening, because that's sure something I'd like to know. That others, many better off than me, some less so, are so fucking dismissive of the movement, is their poverty.

Crap Blogging

I am slowly recovering from the plague to which I referred in my last post. I'm loathe to say I'm recovered, though I am feeling considerably better and my body is not disrupting my life nearly as much as it was when I whined about all the disease vectors in my life uniting to liquefy my digestive tract.

Life advice: the way to rid yourself of an intestinal-tract bug is most emphatically not to get on an airplane two days after onset and take a 500-mile business trip. Just thought I'd let you know I did that science for you. Y'know, in case you were wondering.

I know that you are very happy to read this news, and I'm pleased to report that I'm not even tempted to simply leave this post at a single graf on the state of my bowels. Things happen even while I'm moaning, and many of them cry out for acknowledgment and validation:

-Awesome evening last night at the Plex, where United and the Phunions (TM) played a reserve game that also passed for a US Open Cup match. United won on penalties, having failed to assert a lingering lead after getting the high-school officiating crew to toss a Philly player (he deserved it, as did three Phunions who weren't tossed; we pass no judgment on whether Saint Piotr Nowak deserved to be shown red after Philly scored a tying goal as extra time waned, because we were on the other side of the field and don't know what magic words Saint Piotr said--presumably in pidgin English, as is his wont--to the incompetent boob of a ginger referee who very clearly had a short-man complex).

The Sons of Ben who showed up were fun--I shared smoke breaks with a few of them, a rare pleasure at the Plex, where stormtrooper poe-leece are not usually given to looking the other way over minor infractions--and they were sane, for a limited range of sanity that includes MLS partisans. It was touching that, in defeat, miles from home, they serenaded us with a few bars of "We All Hate Red Bull." It wasn't as much fun as when they were taunting us with "You're Moving To Baltimore" and I replied with "You live in Chester," but still and all, another unifying fan experience that demonstrates that we needn't all be lime-green retard barista-humpers.

Yeah, the game itself pretty much sucked--it looked mostly like an English Sunday pub league, and that may be an insult to pub leagues. But the weather was fantastic (Ilse will tell you her toes froze) and the company was magnificent--Himself, the Hamster, the much-beloved and too-long-unseen Planet, along with Ilse and Databoy, who actually spent long stretches of the game shutting the fuck up.

-On the topic of Planet, I don't recall mentioning this, but she made the right choice and will attend a small liberal arts college that I once half dropped out of (and half got tossed from). I applaud her good sense, good taste, and general sanity. I thought it might be the night that I'd finally start peeling off twenties to reward the kid for a public display of pottymouth, but no such love. I will not abandon my quest, though I suspect that I'll suspend it for our likely next encounter (her high school graduation), out of respect for her mother and her grandparents.

-I may or may not have a week off approaching, depending on how this week's round of congressional taunting and hyperbolizing and blame-shifting and other masturbatory activity turns out. The whole thing is appalling, though a good thing has emerged: Representative Paul Ryan's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. You wonder why it's a good thing? They finally came out of the closet, for reals. There is no backing away for the Republicans now. Ryan's outlandish rapestand proposal, embraced by certain completely retarded alleged moderates as "courageous," makes it clear that the Republicans are angling for no less than the repeal of all domestic support programs and the total subjugation of the poor to the idea that greater wealth disparity is not only nonproblematic but desirable. The math is clear, and there's no further argument about this. If you support Ryan's proposal and refuse to admit that it's about making the poor more so, you're a lying motherfucker, full stop. And if you can read about Ryan's proposal and continue to believe, for real, that there's no difference in the flavors, then you're a whole lot of things I won't go into, because I have a feeling my BFF is one of those deluded Tinkerbell-lovers, and honestly? I can't even begin to fathom their reasoning here, after months of committed attempts to decipher the sophistry.

-On the shutdown itself, it's more of the same. A minority is asserting itself as the true rulers and insisting that anything short of their way is unacceptable disrespect to a fantasy mandate. Fuck 'em. The appropriate way for this to be handled is thus: punch them in the nose. When they whine, punch them in the nose and tell them that it's their fault that God made you punch them. Repeat as necessary.

What? It's how they're treating you.

Rock the Constitution

Yeah, just go ahead and use crosshairs on a map to delineate your political opponents, former Governor Qutter. Everyone believes that you're not inciting anybody. Instaputz nails the logic.

My hero for today: Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous."

That's one righteously pissed off lawman, there. 


It's pretty clear that the guy who shot Gabrielle Giffords was sick beyond measure, in ways well beyond politics (I got a look at the guy's YouTube stuff before they pulled it down--he's a rambling, delusional, incoherent paranoid, and if any of my usual commenters want to pretend I have a sense of humor about this, try me.). Dumbasses like Sarah Palin, who lied about her "sincere condolences" in the wake of her now-successful incitement to criminal acts against lawfully elected politicians, need to understand that being a public figure doesn't grant the right to hate speech, the right to incite criminally insane persons to violent acts that transcend decent peoples' ability to comprehend. 

Fuck you, Sarah Palin, you ignorant piece of snowbilly trash, you fetid pile of diseased moose shit. Go to the fucking fiery Hell you deserve, and claim to believe in.

Please Accept This Olive Branch What I Has Lovingly Coated In Poison Ivy For Your Own Good. Bitch.

So...uhm...as you've no doubt heard, Mrs. Clarence Thomas left a voicemail at 7:30 AM on a Saturday at Professor Anita Hill's office number, gently suggesting that Professor Hill apologize for testifying about Mrs. Thomas' husband's sexual harassment all those years ago, and pray for some understanding of her own behavior. I'm sure you've read the details.

We know it was really Mrs. Clarence Thomas because she said so: “I did place a call to Ms. Hill at her office extending an olive branch to her after all these years, in hopes that we could ultimately get past what happened so long ago,” she said. “That offer still stands. I would be very happy to meet and talk with her if she would be willing to do the same. Certainly no offense was ever intended.”

Briefly: Yes, it was.

Less briefly: Really? That's an olive branch? How do you act when you're being a malicious cunt, then? I mean, seriously, we've got to be able to tell the difference.

Via LGM: Three Things to Remember When Clarence Thomas's Wife Calls You.

I've heard tell of the wingnutosphere going apeshit over Professor Hill referring the matter to Brandeis University Security, but can't find linkage, at least not without searching more deeply and hitting more wingnutty sites than I'd care to do.

Fine. Politics, Then.

I'm not giving to fondling my blog's navel like some of my beloveds, but I have given some thought, after my late summer outburst of rage on local politics, to what national stories might make me passionate enough to write. We have not one, but two winners.

Let's start easy: Joe Miller (Batshit Crazy-AK), Teatard candidate for Senate in the utterly insignificant¹ great state of Alaska, had some utterly insignificant² blogger/journalist handcuffed and illegally detained (one link of gajillions) by private security goons after the guy tried to ask Miller questions at a public forum. Seriously, Alaska? You might really elect this? What the fuck ever.

What's worse, people actually want to argue about this fucking nonsense. It was a public event. The guy was surrounded by security goons after he tried to ask questions. He shoved one of them. There's no assault here (Anchorage PD didn't arrest anyone, but referred the case to the local prosecutionary)--at worst, there is an assault with a far more serious countercharge of kidnapping against the goons. Let's stipulate to the worst, even. You think, in that worst case, only one's guilty? You're a partisan hack, shut the fuck up a whole lot.

Miller, a candidate for national office, refuses to answer questions about his background (which includes behavior antithetical to his professed beliefs). Blogger Dude pursued him. Shit ensued. Miller is a hypocrite running for public office. Case closed.

In other news of Teatards versus Reality (it's an ancient literary conflict device, they taught it to you in 11th grade, look it up, fool), Rand Paul (Seriously Certifiably Insane-KY) doesn't like that his opponent, Jack Conway (Smug Fratboy-KY) called him out on some alleged hypocrisy (other links ad infinitum), though he wasn't smart enough to deny the alleged hypocrisy that started it all. Paul is a racist creep, and a remarkably stupid one to boot. Conway is the elected nominally Democratic Attorney General of a state that couldn't be more in love with the Bible. Without party labels, I'd probably think he was a jackass. Because he's the only thing standing between me and having Rand Paul as my neighbor, I think he's the precious baby Jesus.

Oddly, enough, neither of them is the biggest loser moron in this whole affair. No, those were waved in by Senator Claire McCaskill (Prissy Pseudoprincipled Losercrat-MO), who called the ad "very dangerous" for reasons that escape me, as they might anyone with a sense of perspective, but then had the decency to say nice things about Conway. Senator McCaskill was the tip of an iceberg well-characterized by Jon Chait, who deliberately ignored every bit of context about the ad and Conway's tactic to try to appear to be reasonable, twisting Conway's attack on Paul's hypocrisy into a perception of religious bigotry in some tortured unintentional parody of trollish concern about means and ends. Except he wasn't smart enough to finish the equation. In a state like Kentucky, if you want to get elected statewide, you need to be a fucking Christian. That's not an appealing reality to those of us who aren't. But it is reality. Shorter Chait: An asshat racist Christian like Rand Paul is better than a mean Christian like Jack Conway, now watch me twist and flail to avoid looking like I just wrote that.

Fail. Politics are dirty, and Teatards have made them dirtier. It's time to pull out whatever can be pulled out (and shut up, multiparty Obamapostates, shut the fuck up a whole lot, stand on your dumbass "it's better to not vote for 0.00000006% better because they need to learn a lesson" horseshit and watch fuckwits like Rand Paul show you how hypocritical they really are). Jack Conway's a bit of a dick running as a Dem in a state where dicks get elected. He called Rand Paul on some hypocrisy. Case closed.

Is it? Of course not. I've reflected on this notion of hypocrisy quite a bit. We're all guilty of it, the kind of complicity that makes the aforemocked beloved throw up in his mouth a little when he looks in the mirror or stares at the fuzzy space in his blog's midsection. There's a valid question here: How bad is hypocrisy, compared to, say, beliefs underpinned by a black hole of moral values?

As it happens, I've got my answer (to a question that I admittedly framed to my advantage). It's not original; I stole it from one of my very favorite novels ever, Neal Stephenson's³ The Diamond Age:

"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
...
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices...Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy."
...
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
...
"It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human..."

Oops. I lied. I don't have an answer at all, I just really like that passage as an examination of the issues threading through the stories I've linked tonight. It doesn't work as my answer, because I'm almost certainly a moral relativist (and I say that as an observation of objective reality, not as the insult that some moral absolutists would pose). It works as my answer because I don't believe that Joe Miller or Rand Paul are bound to some strict code of moral conduct (or even, for that matter, to the Constitution, except as a thing of convenience--the very sort of hypocrisy that Lord Finkle-McGraw dismisses as uncommon in the prophesied New Atlantean society). They think their beliefs are underpinned by morals, but they're the same morals Thomas Jefferson had when he wrote the Declaration of Independence while banging Sally Hemmings like a screen door in a hurricane, and the same me-first horseshit that they espouse while accepting government benefits and decrying governmental solutions for brown people and rights for anyone not Uhmuhrukin. Their hypocrisy is repugnant, but their values are worse.

It sure lays it all out, though. Are Joe Miller and Rand Paul hypocritical pieces of shit? Yeppers. Is that the worst of their crimes? Fuck no, and both their values and their hypocrisy render them unfit to hold office. But hypocrisy is the crime that resonates, with two weeks left in an election cycle. Bang the gong, Blogger Dood and Precious Baby Jesus.


<sup>1 Fuck. It's the Senate.
2 Fuck. Every sperm is sacred.
3 And favorite book ever or not, Neal, fuck you to death with a splintered broomstick for The Baroque Cycle, one thousand pages of shriekingly bad navel-chewing wrapped around about forty nonconsecutive pages of interesting prose. Forgiven, of course, given what preceded it. But really, dood. Fuck you.

(Passages quoted from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age utterly without permission, without commercial intent, and only for critical purposes. I'll hope that's pure enough of heart to be legal.)

(Edited ten minutes after initial post to correct typos, complete a thought, and make the ending a tad more coherent, which is not to suggest that any of this post should be taken as coherent.)</sup>

My Turn At The Apocalypse

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Things That Trouble Me

Comedy Central's censoring of the latest episode of South Park certainly fits, and I don't have an easy point of view here. The sort of terrorism that led to the censorship is personal. That's a little different from my usual, cold, numbers-based approach to random terror. On the other hand, my view of religion is well-defined; keep yours out of my face, whether it's Jesus-based or Allah-based or Gummi-Bears-based. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have a pretty absolute free speech right here; the terrorists threatening them--or the terrorist wannabe douchebags threatening them in the name of terrorism--are pretty full of shit. On the other hand, Comedy Central ain't the gummint. Stone and Parker have a right to not be afraid. Comedy Central has a business. The Supreme Court of My Head is declining cert and wants to take a long nap.

I do not understand the current vogue for the phrase "epistemic closure," and while I probably have the wherewithal to search out the necessary reading, I certainly don't have the energy, because I know it will just sap whatever energy I have left. It appears to be some massive conflagration involving douchebags, some quite probably from my side. If anyone feels like explaining this in a paragraph or less, I'll be grateful. If not...well, you're not my monkeys. At least those of you aren't Ilse aren't my monkeys.

The Securities and Exchange Commission had 3,962 employees in 2008, according to its budget justification. 33 of them got busted for looking at porn on government computers, some while on work time. That's 0.8 percent. I defy you to find an organization where 0.8 percent of employees aren't looking at, or trying to look at, porn on their work computers. The issue has precisely nothing--possibly even less--to do with financial regulation or the pending legislation thereon. So shut up, Darrell Issa, you lying motherfucker. Of course people should be disciplined for looking at porn on government computers. Pretending that the impact of their behavior on the financial crisis had an impact greater than zero is fucking retarded. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good descriptor for Darrell Issa. Shut up, you lying motherfuckers.

Finally: the hockey. Capitals Insider gives us a brief video of one fan--ONE--staying positive. I've been lucky enough to spend most of my time in the Phone Booth down in the lower bowl this season, where one is a little better insulated from fucktardery. Last night, a kind friend gave me a free ticket (and a lovely date with Purple, with whom I had spent very little time of late) in the upper deck. Section 424 is considerably more proletarian than the lower bowl, and it showed in my neighbors' overall level of cognitive development (so did the amount of beer they had consumed). The appalling lack of knowledge about the rules of the game (no, fucktard, when a guy crosses the line ahead of the puck, it is, in fact, offsides, and a tripping call is not, in fact, appropriate every single time a warrior for the home team falls down on bad ice), its players (Mike Green is a motherfucking Norris Trophy finalist whether or not I think he should win it, you fucking dipshits, and even those have bad games), and reality in general (there are, in fact, more persons of Canadian extraction playing for the Capitals than for Les Mamafuckers du Froggerville, so stop fucking chanting "USA! USA! USA!", you fucking inbred cracker pieces of dysenteric shit), was pretty jawdropping.

The Caps lost to cut their series lead to 3-2, mostly because Les Habs wanted it more, a perfectly understandable, if loathsome, state of affairs. It's no big deal, however much we'd like it to be (I am contemplating the possibility that a depressive mindset that I've always attributed to Terps fandom may in fact be more broadly regional that I've thought, and I may or may not get back to you about that), though I will not be happy if we end up in a Game 7 (uhm, not least because it would coincide with a DCU home game, which I would most assuredly miss). And I really don't like it when objective evidence tends to confirm Steinz' recent assertion (affirmed by Himself, though I now can't find the post, which makes me think I maybe hallucinated that bait--what say you about that, dogma-N?) that Caps fans are teatards.

Baiting To Oblivion

I actually think Bob Somerby is a pedantic scold who knows better than most how to beat a dead horse to pulp. There are things I respect about him, which is why his site has been linked to your right ever since I figured out how to lay such things out. His neverending mewling over the rape of Al Gore is a fine example of my characterization; he's not wrong on the facts or the substance, and there's no statute of limitations on the crimes the media, Gore's political opponents, and the Supremes perpetrated against him. On the other hand, Somerby's nearly decade-old vendetta against his media contemporaries is getting a bit stale, and frankly, I'm not going to start liking Chris Matthews now that he sometimes pretends to be a liberal again. Al's rich enough to pay for his carbon offsets. In the scheme of preventable and rightable crimes against humanity, there's stuff I'd rather lose sleep over.

I've come close, a few times, to writing about Somerby and The Daily Howler, but on those occasions when I've felt quite nearly peeved enough to comment, my grievance has turned out to be reducible to triviality, not worth the effort to log in to Blooger, either to write about it or to take him off my blogroll. It's probably true that my reaction to Somerby is visceral; his tone and phrasing and emphasis sometimes--maybe too often--come off as pure-D concern troll. But I don't think that's what he is. He is genuinely a liberal, and the problem enters because he's ideologically, epistemologically, and dialectically pure. Admirable traits--but not qualities that make him seem like something other than a concern troll (and truly, it's not like he's looking for a fight, like a real concern troll--he has no comments functionality on his blog, and I haven't seen him turning up in other peoples' neighborhoods chiding them for not caring enough that Al Gore is leaking Naomi Wolf's bodily fluids).

Wow. Two introductory paragraphs on love and hate, just because I'm intrigued by an idea Somerby has. I guess I feel I need to justify--to myself, since I'm the one both writing and reading this--linking to the guy's major product. It's fairly obvious that Somerby has a knack for twisting my nads about my own complicity, as if I needed more help with that (and at a far more personal level than Somerby could provide) than I get nearly every day.

Anyway, Somerby is pitching the idea that we're killing ourselves by screaming that the Teabaggers (an epithet he hates, but he can, well, lick my bag, to make a related dick joke that he'd particularly despise, because his various forms of purity include a, well, puritanical streak and an obsession with fairness toward people who are completely unconcerned about being fair to us) are racists. I'm unable to conclude that he's wrong. It's hard not to conclude that Teabaggers are stupid--they are. It's hard not to conclude that they're largely racists--they are. There's simply no rational argument about either, and little or no point in engaging the argument. But Somerby is painfully correct when he calculates the political wisdom of banging on those two drums without far more substantial and compelling accompaniment.

Yesterday's post notwithstanding, I genuinely try not to scold for real. Anything I write about dogma-N isn't really a scold; it's another chapter in 40 years of rough-and-tumble, yet purely playful, oneupsmanship with one of my most trusted confidantes, and in a long process of trying to entertain one another. Seriously scolding Somerby for scolding me (and you) gives me pause; but like Celia the Sylph, he's far too impressed with how fucking right and pure and good he is. Which doesn't mean he's wrong about how we ought to discourse publically with and about pig-ignorant racists.