Either of us can pretty much blanket vouch anything Sadly, No! does (in my case, the only exceptions have mostly to do with China), but this is a particularly magnificent study in presidential shitheadedry and worth reading and savoring, like a fine wine - woody, with a faint savor of maize.

(An addendum to Der Ewige Türke.) Read more »

The following, to believe Wikipedia, is an ‘oft-quoted excerpt’ illustrating the ‘rhetorical strength’ of its source: Read more »

When the sun rises again today, it’s certain to shine a little bit less brightly - for we have lost not just its worthiest follower but a man who pierced the darkness of vanity and self-righteousness like no other. A world without him to balance out the evil, self-important assholes - the ones who took ‘politically incorrect’ from him, back when it meant something noble, and twisted it into a badge to crown their shameful, petty tribal hate - is going to be just a little bit darker for it.

Parker and Stone and every other dour fascist who TV execs who still don’t get you signed to ride on your coattails are still around, metastasizing, bound for the Medal of Freedom and old-age home that eluded you, punishing us all for our horrible taste while you rot. I like to think you’d find it funny. You always were a motherfucker.

Rest in peace - and here’s to hoping if there’s anything after this life you’ll figure out how to freak ‘em out there, too.

Urgent news for right-wing negro-monitors: chocolate is delightful. It comes in many flavors, all of them delicious, and is appreciated by everyone.

I really never thought I would be in a political dispute over ‘chocolate is delightful’. God knows what else is upside down in that wacky universe of yours.

Djur adds: See this, and also this. The objection to “chocolate city,” in this case and when Ray Nagin referred to New Orleans as such after Hurricane Katrina, is usually justified by claiming the term amounts to reverse racism, but the real motivation is less rational. First, the idea that American cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Washington, and Atlanta could be majority black is terrifying for your average honky racist. Second, to ofays who resent losing the ability to freely use racial slurs in mixed company, a black man using jocular language to describe his brothers is an affront. “If James Brown can be black and proud,” quoth whitey, “why can’t I be white and proud? Why do we have a Black History Month but not a White History Month? If pro is the opposite of con, does that explain why my neighbor’s dogshit is so tangy? Did I just blow your mind or what?”

Of course, I hear this bullshit from professed liberals as well. The answer is simple: there is no white identity outside racism. There is a black identity because of racism. Community among the oppressed is admirable and necessary; community among oppressors is an abomination. As long as the term “chocolate city” has any meaning, it cannot be offensive. Whitey delenda est.

I respectfully disagree. While I can’t vouch for the original author, I do feel that two things are both very true and very alarming:

a) The new mode of political discourse involves a replacement of class and race struggle with ‘culture struggle’, and
b) Taking their cues from every other group to consider themselves locked in a culture struggle, the Enemy of the right is a hodgepodge of accusations of elitism, defeatism, and radicalism which smells an awful lot like the ones that used to dominate the negative stereotyping of the Jews.

While the Clintonites’ ‘creative class’ nonsense is more or less innocent of first-hand anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said of the wider conservative culture they take a page from - in which ‘latte-sipping intellectuals’ are closely affiliated with Hollywood and high finance, George Soros is a liberal mastermind instead of a normal philanthropist, and almost every debased coin of the anti-Semitic realm has ‘degenerate/Aryan’ overstruck with ‘elitist/Patriot’.

The ‘creative class’ is a way for a movement that’s always been deeply affiliated with the Little People to avoid alienating the people that keep them little - that is, to pretend that the ‘average American’ matters not because she is poor, but because she is a boor. And it is much easier for the high-powered lawyers and corporate professionals who form the political base of the Clintonites (especially the Clintonites-cum-McCainiacs) to aim for the interests of the boor than the interests of the poor. All they have to do to sastify the boor is to call black people nasty names - and hell, they were doing that anyway.

‘Latte-sipping elitist intellectual’ is a couple of notes away from ‘radical elitist degenerate’, and whether you like it or not someone who believes in the former is usually willing to accept most of the premises of the latter. The only reason that widening ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so repugnant lately is because the main agitators for that widening are jackasses who believe setting fire to Palestinian orphans is an integral part of Jewish identity. Der Ewige Entartete has gone hand-in-hand with der other Ewige for a century now, and denying that is disingenuous.

I promise not to do this too often (and the source’s willingness to jump aboard the Natural Birth bandwagon seems like a matter almost as damnedable), but this NYT article, via Broadsheet, is breathtaking.

Some of you might have known women growing up that had to live through the pre-Roe period. It’s worth bearing in mind that for us (born in 1987 and 1986, respectively), even our grandparents were pretty young when Roe was decided.

Good on the NYT for publishing this. We’re much too blasé about what the Republicans want to take away from us; allowing them to remain as coy as they are about the kind of world they want to see is despicable, and our peers’ children (2002-) need to have something to remind them the consequences of reactionary excess.

One of my favorite little hobbies is language usage as a sociological instrument, especially political. The topic of dog whistles is especially amusing and diverting to me - but not exactly what I primarily like to look at.

Some words, or some usages of words, are so unusual outside of the context of a political fringe that using them almost immediately identifies you as a member of it, or at least someone who spends time primarily around members of it. This occurs by one of two ways: either it is from popular literature in a certain circle or it is based on a shared ideology that doesn’t really exist outside of that circle. The closer one is to the fringe when learning English (be it as a child or, more prominently, in ESL), the more identifiable one’s politics are this way.

There are a few favorite examples of mine, and I’ll leave aside the growing collection of hobby-horses ridden by over-enthusiastic Slavic neoliberals (’communistic’ and such dated usages clearly denoting a steady diet of Voice of America) for now. My single favorite is the equation to suicide - it’s not a single usage so much as a chain of them (’philosophy/culture/etc. of self-destruction/suicide/etc.’), and it’s very popular among Randroids because Rand herself used it. One of her pithier little bits of nonsense attempts to prove it, and Rand being who she was, you know exactly how this ‘proof’ reads: written with the formal structure and pompous tone of the ancient Greeks the Randies love so much, intending an aura of intellect by cribbing obsessively from these gayest of history’s men and instead falling into ridicule.

To cut it short, she calls capitalism the stuff of man’s nature (invoking Darwin - albeit, and you’ve got to love these people’s relationship with ‘reason’, in a pretty confrontational tenor), considers self-interest vital to survival, and then poses that altruism is self-negation, ergo death.

There is a gaping hole in this argument so simple that only someone with a sexual fetish for the pretenses - that is, that capitalism is reasonable and reasonable self-interest is the only way to survive - could ignore or attempt to work around it. That is: everyone dies. Everyone. Carnegie? Dead, sure. But J.P. Morgan? Also dead. Rockefeller? Dead. The women who made his morning coffee? Dead, and probably later. Bill Gates? Not gonna see 2050.

If you’re religious, and also you have a really warped concept of righteousness, I guess there’s a way around that. But ‘rational’ argument, without recourse to an invisible man who loves the wealthy, fails decisively on this point. If they are cornered with it, they’ll generally gamely struggle for a few minutes before calling everyone else in the room a bunch of suicidal Marxists. And speaking of -ists, there’s another uniquely ideological usage: Day By Day’s brilliant ‘Kantian nihilism’, a phrase that would make any student of philosophy past his sophomore year laugh and which makes no sense outside of the deliciously absurd world of the Randroids - where Kant and nihilists, being mutual enemies of the purely rational St. Ayn, were clearly cut from the same collectivist cloth. (And don’t even get me started on Ayn Rand’s enemies. I’ve got a lot to disagree with Kant about, but her puerile squabble with his legacy over ontology is amazing in its brazen illiteracy - only a peasant who had by some cruelty of fate acquired letters would devote serious energy to slapping at Kant’s nebulous-where-not-banal ontological ramblings, and in doing so think she had given herself the air of a thinker.)

Ah, I could go on about Randroids all day, but that’s not what Djur is paying me for. (Evidently, he is paying me to fight high-powered insiders like Barack Obama and his discouraging lack of a tough foreign policy to fight our homeland’s enemies - probably why I haven’t gotten a check yet.) Allow me to share with you one of my favorite odd usages of the political right: ‘pimp’.

There’s no one specialized form of this, but - true to their hideous nature - the most common one one encounters from wingnuts is ‘welfare pimp’. (I guess some stereotypes die really hard - for instance, all of them if you’re a bigot.) This, which seems to be the horrible, racist ur-form, implies that any politically prominent member of the black community is simply finagling welfare payments for them to ride their lazy race’s decadent, leeching satiation to office. Never mind that in a literal reading of this the only person who could possibly be tarred as a welfare pimp would be history’s most crooked Welfare bureaucrat, for legislators have fairly limited street-level visibility and almost no power over the comings and goings of their local constituency. (Besides the power to get pork funneled - but pork typically being white as the driven snow, you never hear about pork pimps.) This term, which only really makes sense in the first place if one’s definition of ‘pimp’ is ‘cunning and/or exploitative black man’, slowly generalized to imply anyone in the black community doing anything (one heard of ‘disaster pimps’ after Katrina), and later to more general, less specifically racist ends.

I can get behind the usage of ‘pimp’ in a manner so as to imply the pimp to be an exploitative, destructive asshole. And in the Candyland the Republicans inhabit - where you can live like a king on less than $10,000 in a big city, tax cuts increase government revenue, and Party can always find you - anyone basing their political appeal on welfare could indeed be classified as that. But the more general use of the verb to imply any kind of exploitation has to keep in mind that it’s attached to a very, very ugly reality for men, women, and other; black, white, and Jewish; young, old, and fat alike.

You have to be inundated in a world where ‘pimp’ refers to uppity serviles using their limited resources in a shady, devious way to worm their way to the top for the word to completely lose its meaning. It is actively disgusting to refer to a woman pimping her own daughter, and all the more so because the image fixed in many people’s minds of the now-adult Chelsea Clinton is the gangly young girl noted pill enthusiast Rush Limbaugh referred to as a dog. (I remain convinced Oxy is the sort of drug you pop before a high school policy debate in eager anticipation of calling your opponent a statist for refusing to admit ’separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, but I digress.)

David Shuster is not just an asshole. He’s a crazy, illiterate asshole who let his attachment to the worst political scene in the 20th century override his common sense. Only in the fevered imagination of such a cretin could the standard relationship between a 28-year-old woman and her politically ruthless presidential candidate mother be described using the word ‘pimp’.

Then again, only in that same imagination could the aforementioned mother be considered the same threat to the conservative order of things that the people 'welfare pimp' was shot at represented. I don't know if anyone is ever going to make the vapid beltway heads eat the shit they've been giving rave reviews of for the last eight years, but the optimist in me says they will. I like to think that the plain wrongness of everything they've had to say will eventually bite them in the ass - but then again, I always was a shameless reality pimp.

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee sweep the Iowa caucuses. Exit polls cite the primary motivator as a desire for “change,” further cementing the nation’s awful stereotype of Iowans as easily-led hayseeds. Next up is New Hampshire, a state so blessedly deranged that John fucking McCain is the man to beat. Dodd and Biden have both apparently dropped out, feeling the change in the wind — no more is it the day of the merely bland honky with suspicious hair.

There’s going to be some entertainment in watching the bloody fight within the Republican party over “conservative” priorities. Obviously, they’d prefer a candidate who slashes taxes as readily as he kills Haji and praises Jesus, but what can be sacrificed? Will the squat little psychopath Giuliani’s white-hot desire to exterminate the Saracen be enough to make up for his crippling association with Jew York? Can a Smithite queer-lover like Romney adequately defend America from the looming threat of dhimmitude, even if his economic record in fell Taxachusetts is admirable? Could Thompson perhaps fit every Arab in the entire world into his baggy, Aqua Velva-scented jowls?

At this point, I’m just half-heartedly pulling for anyone who won’t bomb Iran, which in this post-NIE environment appears to be anyone but Clinton and the Republican war party. A federal subsidy for Oregon hops growers would probably buy my vote, or else I’ll have to switch to Budweiser.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been alternately busy, drunk, and unwell, and Alec has been fucking bears. I hope to get back to a more normal schedule shortly.

This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

Read more »