Philosoraptor

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Hate '08:
Just the Beginning

Anti-Obama vandalism in Orlando.

Not the first, not the last. Get ready for a long election season--and, even if we're lucky, a long 4-8 years.

Winston Smith

¶ 11:43 AM (3) comments

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Most Idiotic Recent Terminology: "Brand"/"Branding"

Look, Barack Obama is not a @#$*%@ brand. Neither is 'Barack Obama', America (or 'America'), nor John McCain (nor 'John McCain'), etc. In a world filled with moronic terminology, witless and artless neologisms and linguistic abominations of every sort, this has got to be the worst to come along in quite some time.

Needless to say, the terms 'brand' and 'branding' aren't new. But now the terms are being used loosely or semi-metaphorically in particularly irritating and objectionable ways. So now we're subjected to yammering about, e.g., Obama "risking his brand" by moving to the center. This stuff is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Seriously--every time I hear this kind of thing I get one of those little squiggly black clouds over my head and want to throw something at the t.v..

Look: people are not brands, and they do not have brands (unless they manufacture something and, you know, have a brand). But this way of speaking is not merely imprecise and aesthetically bad. It is associated with an actual, substantive cultural problem. Specifically: business is such a dominant part of current American culture that many have, apparently, begun speaking and thinking of all institutions as if they were businesses. Terms and concepts that are appropriate only to business have creeped into, for example, government and academia--to their detriment. One of the most nauseating and harmful examples of this from academia is the current fad of thinking of and referring to college students as "customers." They are, of course, not customers, they are students. My students are no more my customers than a doctor's patients are his customers. Now, obviously, there are certain respects in which students and patients are like customers. They pay, for example. But to see them only in those ways (which is what we are invited to do when they are so referred to)--is to ignore what is most important about them.

These uses of the loathsome "brand"/"branding" terminology are not only annoying and inaccurate, but they promote a false and pernicious view about the primacy of business and, in particular, advertising and marketing. Obama, to return to our original example, does not have a brand, and, so, a fortiori, he is not risking his brand when he makes a controversial decision. If he is risking anything, he's risking his good name and his reputation--things which are, of course, more important than any mere brand.

Winston Smith

¶ 4:24 PM (5) comments

Friday, June 27, 2008

Rove/GOP's Latest Anti-Obama Slur/Fabrication Test-Balloon

The GOP is (a) frantic and (b) well, the GOP. So I probably don't need to tell you that somewhere the Republican slander/libel workshop/think-tank is working overtime trying to fabricate some kind of slur about Obama that the public will find plausible. Now, of course, being slanderous, it'll be false. But--again of course--they won't care about that. What they want is some kind of smear that voters will buy. Truth is irrelevant. What they want is results. The way to get this, it seems, is to think up some animadversion that can plausibly be tacked onto some characteristic he actually has.

He's charismatic...so he's shallow!
He's idealistic...so he's naive!
He's optimistic...so he's unrealistic!

See how we play this game?

Kos has a--in my opinion, very partial--run-down of the slurs here.

KKKarl's new slander trial-balloon?

Wait for it...

Obama is...

Self-centered!

Yes, the guy who took his Columbia B.A. and put off Harvard law school to do community organizing in Chicago is self-centered.

Thanks for playing, KKKarl! And thanks to the loons who are playing the home version of our game...

Jeez, if only Obama had used his powers as Darth Rove has, to selflessly promote ee-vil.

O.k., so this game should obviously have a name, and since I'm too lazy to think up a good one, let's call it the, er...Republican anti-Obama Vilification...er...Enterprise (ROVE, natch').

As Kos notes, they've already tried 'inexperienced,' 'elitist,' 'unAmerican,' and, now, 'self-centered.' So what's next? You make the call!

(Note: I saw today that Krauthammer--getting really desperate now--is saying that Obama is "ever- malleable," a "flip-flopper," an "opportunist" who might ultimately make the Clinton's look scrupulous. And--heavens!--Obama has begun his "long march to the center." Needless to say, that fills me with dread.

Chuck has never been the sharpest tool in the shed--nor, let's be honest, the most stable--and I reckon the recent Colorado and Michigan polls (not to mention the Wisconsin and Minnesota ones) must have hit him pretty hard.

But listen, Chucky boy: if you pull out all the stops now, what'll you have left for October? Think about that, hmmm?)

Anyway, some guesses about the next moves in ROVE:

(a) He's a pointy-headed intellectual!

I mean, he's just offensively smart, right? And that in and of itself is a sin.

(b) He's really just Bill Clinton redux!

Clinton loved the ladies, and the ladies love Obama...so...if '...loves...' were transitive, and if we then confuse it with the identity relation...Obama would be Clinton! See?!?!? Clinton felt your pain, and...and...oh, whatever...he's BAD.

(c) He's black.

I mean, let's just cut to the chase, shall we?

(d) He wants our women!

see (b) and (c).

(e) He's thoughtful and reflective, hence indecisive!

(f) He's a Cylon.

Winston Smith

¶ 8:14 AM (0) comments

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Obama on the Outs With the Nutroots?

So says this, anyway; it's from the Huffington Post, so make of it what you will.

In case it isn't clear: being on the outs with the nutroots is a plus in my book, even if caving on FISA isn't.

And, in case--somehow, some way, there is someone out there to whom it is not excruciatingly obvious--anyone who has any chance of winning will be at odds with the nutroots. If such folks demand ideological purity, then all they're doing is working for the GOP.

Winston Smith

¶ 9:44 PM (0) comments

How I Got CyberBalkanized Despite My Good Intentions

One reason I can't stand politics is the pervasive intellectual derangement/dishonesty of the whole thing. Now suddenly everybody on my side of the aisle is twisting and spinning and nipping and tucking everything John McCain has ever done so that he comes out done up as an idiot, a crook, a monster. And, of course, derangement and dishonesty have run fairly rampant among our friends across the aisle for at least the last fifteen years or so. And everybody acts like this is normal and just peachy. Cripes.

I'd bet a good bit of money that all this has lasting negative effects on our rationality. It breeds and reinforces bad epistemic habits. If you knew an individual who believed all the kinds of things, say, that show up as headlines on the Huffington Post, you'd correctly classify them as a political loon. Most of the crazy people I know are crazy because of the extraordinary one-sidedness of their beliefs. They seem almost constitutionally incapable of understanding or even considering the other side of the argument.

I find myself falling into these bad habits, too, and not entirely for bad reasons.

Some folks (myself included) worry about cyberbalkanization, i.e. the tendency of denizens of he political blogosphere to separate into isolated, relatively monolithic communities of opinion. But traditionally the worry has been that cyberbalkanization would be the result of intellectual vice on the part of the balkanized--tending to seek out confirmation and avoid intellectual challenges, they settle into congenial echo chambers. So pre-existing intellectual vice is amplified.

I'm not saying that that's not part of my problem, but it's not all of it. I used to make a serious effort to seek out opinions from the rightosphere as well as the leftosphere. But the irrationality on the right eventually became so angrifying that I found it driving me farther left. In particular, the slavish Bush worship of so much of the rightosphere is what did it. There are folks over thattaway who are, well, pretty much completely out of touch with reality on the subject of the current occupant of the White House. It takes a great deal of dishonesty or delusionment to even argue that the guy has been merely a bad president rather than a terrible one; but it's not that uncommon for folks over there to, even to this day, say or say things that presuppose that he's a downright good one. Because of my undiagnosed ODD, such bullshit just pushes me even farther in the anti-Bush direction. And lord knows I'm far enough down that road as it is.

So, in order to prevent my judgments from being distorted by anger induced by mindless pro-Bushism, I find myself avoiding that world almost completely.

And, so, here I am, despite my best intentions, becoming ever more isolated in the group-thinky echo-chamber, just like a garden-variety Kossack.

Anybody has an idea how to cure this, please to cough it up.

Winston Smith

¶ 10:57 AM (7) comments

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Still More Corruption in the Bush Administration: Corrupt Hiring at DoJ

Here.

Which once again raises the question: are these people even capable of being honest? This stuff barely makes the front page anymore. It's hardly even possible to be outraged. My outrage module is just about worn out--and I've got a pretty high-capacity outrage module.

It's the Reagan administration strategy: be so damn corrupt that you just wear most people out--and make the people who are still outraged by the outrages look almost nutty, since they always have to be going on about some damn thing or other.

But, of course, to point any of this out is to be unpatriotic. True patriots apparently look the other way when their country's sacred principles are being violated right and left.

Winston Smith

¶ 10:29 PM (4) comments

Sunday, June 22, 2008

John "The C-Word" McCain

This is very funny, and very NSFW.

Does anybody doubt that if Obama had done this, it'd be all over the news, every freakin' moment of every freakin' day? Seriously.

Winston Smith

¶ 1:12 PM (0) comments

Scalia, the Boumediene Decision, and the Infamous 30 Terrorist Recidivists

It's false.

Man, the right-wing seems to have a particularly hard time separating fact from fiction. I mean, it's a problem that no one is immune from, of course, but the wingers seem particularly prone to building policy on urban myths--welfare queens with Cadillacs and so forth.

Nice work, Fat Tony, nice work. I mean, it's no Bush v. Gore, but, seriously, who could top that?

Winston Smith

¶ 9:16 AM (2) comments

Friday, June 20, 2008

Water Ice on Mars!!!!

W00t indeed.

Note: not "ice water," as the scientifically betarded Huffington Post reported.

I read that and I was like "ice water? huhwha?..." but immediately realized they must mean water ice--hooray!

What can you expect from a site that continues to insist that an actual man is actually pregnant (when, of course, it's just a person in the midst of a f-to-m sex change)? Cripes.

Er, why was I reading the Huffington Post...? Um... Hey, look over there!
[runs away]

Winston Smith

¶ 4:55 PM (0) comments

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