Things I Have Said Of Which There Is Now No Public Record But This
This was on a thread at Crooked Timber which has since disappeared:
At the same time, as individuals, we reject the collective nouns which define us negatively, we apply them, all over the place. "Right-wingers" aren't a collective, "Europeans" aren't, "Americans" aren't, "Jews" aren't, and "anti-Semites" aren't. No monolithic enterprises anywhere in there.
Lots of energy's being expended to create and maintain the illusion that George W. Bush is responsible for this presently tottering republic and an anxious world on the brink of the verge.
Would that it were so.
That that notion gives a free pass to a craven Congress and a bought-and-paid-for political landscape generally just muddies the waters. Add in a media that's obviously jumping to a called tune from somewhere, though no one seems to be able to pin it to anything more accurate than nebulous "corporate" interests...
Well, it does get somewhat resistant to clarity and purposeful description. Which is probably not co-incidence.
How about the "right-wingers", in England and the US anyway, don't like the idea of a European Union because they aren't in a position to take control of it; since they do control things in those two countries already, an atomized Europe is much less a threat than a united one.
Pretty much a parallel to the labor movement, whose history most youngsters know nothing about, believing as they do that the 40 hour work week and existing safety codes were a gift of the benign and enlightened "corporate" interests.
Rather than the hard won and paid for with blood sweat and tears victories they in fact were.
These were on a thread at Crooked Timber which has since disappeared:
(a)
Oedipal submission. The phallic aspects of cigarettes and hand-guns need no elaboration. The suffocating dominance of patriarchal monoliths like MS shouldn't be too hard to grasp.
Oedipal confusion. Want the gun, want the father, want the mother, want the whole world groveling at my sandaled feet.
The dynamic is all skewed toward individual power and yet at the same time individual freedom is seen as dangerous if it unites.
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Some of this is a substitution of public argument for private conviction. Someone who feels they are personally safer with handguns will argue that everyone else is too, even if the facts are against it. Coercive argument isn't always truthful representation, n'est-ce pas?
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grothar-
It's insane to believe anything "may or may not be". That is, that's more a case of suspension of belief, of indecision, of not believing either way. Calling that "belief" is mildly crazy.
But sadly, weather records are relatively accessible, the graphs and staistics easily understood, the pattern clear.
Couple that with the Mini-Me whimperings of Big Tobacco, and their decades of blockading and duplicitous maneuvering, you should be able to see the template. Big Oil and Big Auto run America, they have for years and years, that has not changed except to grow in power and control. Tobacco was a midget in that landscape, and look what they accomplished.
Big Oil and Big Auto, and their executives over the years, are responsible for the thing we were calling "global warming" until recently.
It's only reasonable to expect them to resist facts which accuse them of destroying the world. The beauty of it, from a criminal justice standpoint, is they can only be accused, they can't be convicted until it's too late.
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(b)
grothar-
My apologies, I should have labeled the absurdity more plainly for what it was, a goof. It's always a mistake to assume nonsense won't be taken seriously. And vice-versa of course, of course.
The primary logical fault that I can see in your response is something like -
I say -
"The epidermic hole and the hemorrhaging artery, the feathery pulse and lack of response, the lump of misshapen lead lodged against the vertebra, all point clearly and directly to serious gunshot trauma. The fact we all heard a loud bang right before the victim fell, and that that man in the three-piece suit with his face in the shadow is holding a gun whose barrel emits a whisp of smoke, appears to confirm this."And you say -
"Without a full understanding of human anatomy and firearm ballistics we can't discuss this with anything more valid than conjecture. And you(me) are not a doctor so you(me) should shut up."Dude, glaciers are melting world-wide. Fast.
I don't see them from my window, but I read reports of them from people whose voices I trust.
People like you are in the way, obstacles, and it's getting critical. You're hampering public dialog, and what may be even more important, the reshaping of public attitude.
Eventually it will be clear, not that climate change is commencing and that it's going to be disastrously great, that's already clear enough, but that its cause, and the blocking of its remediation, were the responsibility of people who benefitted in the short-term from the long-term destruction of life itself, and their apologists.
People like you ate the world.
Once the simpler public gets that figured out, I'd be a little more cautious with the anti-Luddism, if I were you.
This was on a thread at Crooked Timber which has since disappeared:
The mass media's expressions of grief at the death of the first Stepford President is sort of like an alternate world, as though McVeigh had run for Congress, or the Presidency, instead of being executed.
Reagan's body count was immensely greater than McVeigh's, and the suffering he caused, if suffering can be measured in degrees, greater still.
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Moqtada al-Sadr's father was murdered by Saddam Hussein. I find it most curious this is never mentioned in the American press.
This was on a thread at Chun the Unavoidable, the whole site of which has since disappeared:
I was talking back at the radio one time? Because some nit was being egregious? And it talked back at me a little?
I hated that. I still hate that.
It makes the whole rest of the attempt obscene and compromising. But like those guys with the bags over their heads in the pictures, some day the bags will come off, and we will go home to some kind of a life.
We go on.
Clarke makes money therefore, in the land of single-motived televised reality - where the villain is always a villain and the hero can do no wrong - he only did it for the money.
The question in its particular form, no, no support that. But then I don't and didn't support anything done by most any of the actors involved in any of what's been masquerading as politics for decades now.
Like little slaves in our little rooms we make deals with what is; we are here. We are here. And we accomodate to that. Hoping it won't hurt so much this time. Hoping if we smile hard enough we won't have to go to bed hungry again.
The right hand/left hand scam, like the fundamentalist duality, if you're not one of us you're one of them. Only them runs both hands, now what?
Like sports teams, on the field. Cowboys, 49ers? Lakers, Detroit?
Owners?
Who you for in the game?
The owners?
Whaaaat?
