Various Random Convention Thoughts
[To be fascinatingly updated periodically]
1.
The Dems have some rockin' tunes alright, as you know if you've been watching it on C-SPAN, tho probably can't tell from the networks. The GOP will, no doubt, try to appeal to the youth with, e.g., the Macarena. The Dems also will obviously have better movies. That Spielberg movie was really, really great. Whatever else you might say about us, we've got the best musicians and movie guys. I mean, who do the Republicans have? Leni Riefenstahl?
2.
Susan Eisenhower makes a good point that others haven't exactly made: Obama has the right temperament to be president.
3.
Putting Barney Smith before Smith Barney...excellent!!! You go, Barney Smith!
[To be fascinatingly updated periodically]
1.
The Dems have some rockin' tunes alright, as you know if you've been watching it on C-SPAN, tho probably can't tell from the networks. The GOP will, no doubt, try to appeal to the youth with, e.g., the Macarena. The Dems also will obviously have better movies. That Spielberg movie was really, really great. Whatever else you might say about us, we've got the best musicians and movie guys. I mean, who do the Republicans have? Leni Riefenstahl?
2.
Susan Eisenhower makes a good point that others haven't exactly made: Obama has the right temperament to be president.
3.
Putting Barney Smith before Smith Barney...excellent!!! You go, Barney Smith!
posted by Winston Smith at
7:19 PM
24 Comments:
Nice Nazi reference, O sophistry prof. Some things never change.
"Leni Riefenstahl," BTW, for all your adoring sophomores. They should google it. My pal DA got it, I'm sure.
I check in now and then, WS, and this was prime time, so it felt right. Over the past few days, looks like you ran through a full package of Depends.
I liked your laughable explanation of what you "meant" by calling out Mukasey in a previous post on the "not every violation of the law is a crime" thing.
[The Good] Anonymous called you out on logical principle, and your lame backtrack ["I'm not a lawyer"] was reputed when hotdog Chuck Schumer didn't press it, tacitly admitting there was no crime.
Your sophomores might have bought your explanation.
But no, I don't think they did. You were wrong conceptually and you were wrong factually.
Sophomores may be "wise fools," but they're not fools. I suspect even Mystic isn't going to fall for your "Leni Riefenstahl" crap, once he sees it for what it is.
I still love you, WS. Politics is artificial; love is real.
Behold, he returns! Full of sound, fury, ignorance...the usual.
And, um, why exactly do I care whether you believe what I meant about Mukasey? This matters to me exactly...why? And who on Earth has to Google 'Leni Riefenstahl? Jeez...
But why the return? Didn't that one leave, slamming the door long ago?
Well, he's sounding a bit desperate...checking in after our nominee showed, yet again, that said nominee is stronger and smarter and better than anyone the GOP has had to offer in my lifetime. Think the Great Communicator, but several notches better, and with brains.
(Oh, and: no inclination to sell arms to terrorists to fund other terrorists.)
So he comes to rage and spew and howl at the moon, and say it all ain't so--it ain't it ain't it ain't!
Why not go back to writing your pseudo-intellectual adorations of your boy the Worst President Ever, and defending the shredders of the Constitution? School kids of the future will want the completest possible record from the legions of amateur autocrats who argued that Bush's main problems were that he had broken to few laws, consolidated too little power in the presidency, started too few foolish and disastrous wars, divided the country too little.
You're the kind of folks who would have written impassioned homages to King George, and the divine right of kings during the revolution, or angry defenses of Nixon.
So get to it, man! History can't fill its own dustbin with tortured rationalizations of the inexcusable! What're you hanging around here for?!?!?
Well! After googling Leni Riefenstahl, I can say with confidence, WS:
You BASTARD!
If it hadn't been for Tom, I wouldn't have bothered to look up the actual right-wing director actually affiliated with the Nazi party! If I hadn't looked it up, then I wouldn't have known that...uh...that...
Wait..
Tom, you're going to have to help me out here. Were you saying that joke didn't make sense, or what? Let me know ASAP so I know when to start yelling "You BASTARD!" again spontaneously in my sleep. I know enacting spontaneous rage is a big part of your life, and I want it to be a big part of mine!
As for Mukasey, you see, WS, this is where you and Tom differ. Whereas you depend on things like "fact" and "what was ACTUALLY said" (psh), Tom, in his brilliance, depends on his sense of what's in man's heart! He can tell you really meant that every single violation of the law is a crime because he can see DIRECTLY INTO YOUR SOUL.
I mean, sure, you could be all like "But Tom, you said previously that you would never venture to guess what was in Bush's HEART of HEARTS! Why is it that now, all of a sudden, you venture to guess what is in mine!?" But that would only prove that you fail to acknowledge the extent to which you are a lesser human being than our glorious leader. That's another one of your problems.
So don't try any lame backtracking here. And now, of course, you're going to ask "Well, even if I did backtrack, which I did not (and that is quite apparent to anyone who actually reads and understands English), isn't admitting fault when it becomes apparent to one that one has made a mistake a mark of a reasonable human being?"
HA!
Haven't you learned ANYTHING from Tom? If you've only learned ONE thing from our lord, TVD, it should be that good people are NEVER wrong. Only horrible idiots are occasionally incorrect! That's why, even if you are wrong, you MUST FIGHT TO THE DEATH to prevent your opponent from pointing this out, less you be instantly relegated to the caste of the untouchable morons! If you don't believe me that that's how you ought to behave, well then you clearly didn't read Tom's 200 comment dissertation on refusing to admit fault even at the hands of unprecedentedly clear and obvious evidence that you are, in fact, wrong.
Poor, poor WS. When will you learn? Nazi jokes? *sigh* Try some random Depends jokes. That's where the real money is.
I gotta start reading Tom's blog more often. That guy's like...Locke or something! I mean, if I could give his writings a title...I might call it like... The Reasonableness of Christianity! I'm just thinking off the top of my head here, but now that I think about it, I mean, it's so similar in style and brilliance, after all. He'll certainly go down in history as one of this era's greatest intellectual players as soon as historians get around to analyzing the blogosphere - where the REAL intellectualism is happening EVERY DAY. One day you'll realize your folly, WS, and when you're old and dying, you'll crack open a history textbook that our modern eight graders will be using, and there'll be this huge picture of TVD on the front, proudly looking forward to a better future. The only reference to you, of course, will be a passing statement about the way you repeatedly failed to see TVD's superior intellectualism and the hypothesis that the world's shortage of Depends was your fault. HA! See, THAT'S how to do jokes! HAHAHA! DEPENDS! HA! Oh man.. Nazi jokes just don't compare to that stuff. That's gold right there.
God, I could just go on and on, but I can't waste any more time here! Off to american creation to learn about Tom and the wonderous world of the enlightened! See you in this history books, POOPIE-HEAD! HAHAHA POOP JOKES!
oh MAN! I'm so effing FUNNY!
Legate Van Dyke is an expert on sophistry as a practitioner, so it's natural he demonstrates it while attempting to denounce WS for it at the same time.
No substance here, just the pot in front of the mirror calling it black.
TVD is on the record somewhere on this blog stating that to admit mistakes is to display weakness, no doubt this accounts for his nihil obstat approach to his screeds that he leaves here.
TVD, why do you come here when seeming all of us are unworthy to unlatch your sandals?
Oh man, if you could find that quote, that would make my day.
Well, even amid TVD's normal GOP-true-believer, kool-aid-drunk nonsense...
Don't you think this is a plausible thing to say:
(JRN)It's not o.k. to make jokes about Republicans being Nazis.
?
I mean, I know it's hard to be objective against the big backdrop of GOP insanity and crimes of the last 2 decades+, and the smaller more local backdrop of Tom's true believer sophistries...but let's try anyway.
I don't think it's prima facie unreasonable to think that (JRN) is true.
(A wee prediction about Tom's response: "You are so stupid and evil, WS--that was no joke, and this, just like your Mukasey explanation, is blah blah blah."
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of (liberal) men? TVD knows...)
To be fair(which Legate Van Dyke claims I never am) he didn't espouse it as a principled response, merely an explanation as to why a certain behavior was observed.
WS,
That's the other puzzle, since he has us all figured out, why bother with coming here to the inevitable slings and arrows of our responses to high-wattage thinking?
Aenar have a strict law against reading the minds of other people without prior consent.
Memory Alpha
Would that this applied for all civilized species............
Mystic, I sure hope you do track down my quote re admitting error. My theme at AC is to read the original for yourself. Often, things are misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented by people with agendas.
My other theme at AC is that people should consider the evidence and think for themselves. In the realm of ideas, and even in the study of history, nothing is ever really "settled." In the current day, we're either too close to the forest and the trees or too far away to claim possession of the "truth." The best we can do is try to persuade each other, which I believe Immanuel Kant admitted somewhere.
I still have faith in and hold out hope for you too. And you love me too, let's face it. ;-[D>
DA---and WS---I don't "read" your minds. Wouldn't know where to start. I read your self-revealed clues closely, because I came here in the first place not to argue with you but to understand you. Not Kreskin, Sherlock Holmes. That's what bugs you.
My theme at AC is to read the original for yourself. Often, things are misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented by people with agendas.
Actually, you wrote your comment here, and you can settle the question on the subject of admitting error anytime you feel like it when you post here.
My other theme at AC is that people should consider the evidence and think for themselves.
Yes, and derogatory language is so good at getting that point across.
I read your self-revealed clues closely, because I came here in the first place not to argue with you but to understand you.
As for clues, you made a prediction which came out the other way, so I would think that you're more of an idealist version of Inspector
Jacques Clouseau than a philosophical Jacques Cousteau in the way you follow your 'clues':
He is a bumbling and incompetent police inspector with the French Sûreté, whose investigations are most notably marked with chaos and destruction that he himself largely causes. Immensely clumsy, his various attempts at solving the case frequently lead to misfortune for himself and others;
Tom, you've really got to come to terms with the fact that you are NOT a dispassionate, fallibilistic, scientific/philosophical inquirer when it comes to religion and politics.
But we've had this discussion before, and such discussions rarely go anywhere anyway. But I know you like to say the words and pretend. People rarely say: "I'm a proud dogmatist!"
You're a Bush apologist, and, apparently, a conservative apologist more generally. In order to make dialectical progress, people at least need to be able to point to evidence that they can agree about. If trying to steal an election, using 9/11 as a political weapon, letting bin Laden get away, lying us into a distracting, disastrous and unjustified war, dividing Americans against each other, politicizing the DoJ, destroying our moral authority, making torture our policy etc. do not count as being a bad president in your book...well, what I'm wondering is what *would* count. If we can't even agree on what seems to me to be approximately the clearest possible case of presidential awfulness in modern history...well, what, exactly, do we have to talk about?
See, I don't think it's funny, and I don't think it's cute when you and others try to spin the destruction of the heart and soul of the country I love just because you can't admit that you were wrong and you picked the wrong man.
In fact, it's nauseating.
So please, take it somewhere else. I'm a guy who's willing to entertain the possibility that I'm a disembodied brain in a vat being fed sensory data by a computer.
But even I have to draw the line somewhere...
Actually, I'm using your own system of brainless ad hominem attack, and it drives you berserk when the shoe's on the other foot. Not that you're not berserk anyway. I gave up on Bush with you many months ago and you never even noticed.
Still, I can't help slipping a little substance in, although you resist the temptation quite well, like with your foggy Mukasey attack that couldn't stand up to any examination whatever.
And you draw the line at all opposing viewpoints, always have. You mock them, shout them down, and now try to exile them completely. Berserk. The only smart thing you ever did with this blog was write it anonymously, so only a few people know how entirely unreasonable you are. You'd get murdered outside your safe little cocoon of vitriol here if you were forced to make honest arguments.
Man, that's pretty belligerent for someone who thinks that human rights come from jebus.
I love how you suggest that WS refuses to consider opposing arguments. Yet again, this demonstrates your inability to understand how to analyze evidence and form a rational conclusion accordingly.
See, if you look at this blog's history, you'll note on occasion WS admitting that he's incorrect and either modifying his claim or abandoning it completely as a result.
However, if you look for any such behavior from you, you'll find that there's actually absolutely zero instances of it. Now, you can draw one of two conclusions from this. One is that you're actually, in fact, never wrong. The other is that you are wrong on occasion and you simply refuse to admit it, demonstrating your inability to be the rational inquirer you desperately want others to see you as.
I presume you believe you are simply never wrong (on this blog)?
If that's the case, one can quickly and easily find evidence that can be used to dispatch that laughable, obviously incorrect claim. To keep it as simple as possible, I'm going to use only one example:
..................
Ok. I just went back, looking for examples to use here. I happened upon the thread where you attempt to defend the assertion that religion is necessary to justify human rights in a society. I was going to use that as a demonstration of you being so obviously wrong and failing to acknowledge it but then I saw something I said repeatedly, and it struck me as what I should tell you now:
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, JUST STATE YOUR ARGUMENTS FORMALLY.
Why can't you do that? See, I think your confusion arises from your own attempts at eloquence. You keep trying to write like a crusty old british guy because you think it sounds attractive. The problem is, you seem to confuse yourself in the process, perhaps accidentally generating different theses continually.
Just say something like this:
1) Socrates is a man.
2) All men are mortal.
3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
How about that? Huh? How about it?
And don't give me the same old "Oh what good would it be?" or "Oh I've tried that before.." or whatever. You've never done it before. Ever. Not once. If you start doing it now, maybe we'd actually get somewhere rather than just listen to you bitch and whine about having your ideas "shut down".
Maybe you'd see when you're wrong why that is, and maybe we'd get some benefit out of you if you could formulate some correct arguments that way.
How about it?
Oooh, temper, temper. Peculiar how rapidly you oscillate between proclaiming how rational you are and flying into a spittle-flecked rage...
So here's the deal: how 'bout you go away, for real this time?
I've put up with your ceaseless ad homina, your thorough-going irrationality, your two-bit sophistry and your dogmatism for too long already. But the one thing I really will not put up with is you projecting your own pathetic vices onto me.
And I've got say, the frequent professions of love, closely followed by frothing-at-the-mouth, panties-in-a-wad, shrieky temper-tantrums is just flat-out bizarre.
You claim to be revered elsewhere. So I've got an idea: go there! If there's nothing "smart" here, then don't come around. It's a fairly simple problem to solve.
And think how grateful I'll be not to be regularly crushed by the weight of your mighty intellect! I mean, you think it's easy to be shown up to be a fraud again and again? To be flayed by your incisive wit? To tremble in the very shadow of your philosophical superiority? Oh, lord, think of me, won't you?
I've tried to be fairly good-humored with you, I've given you several chances, and I've tried to gently urge you in the direction of actual, reasonable discussion and inquiry. But, as we have learned, that's not someplace you go.
So why not take your BS and your wingnuttery and your pathetic dreams of bloggy grandeur elsewhere. I don't know what kind of weird obsession you've got going on here, but how about you just take it elsewhere?
Nice Nazi reference, O sophistry prof.
This is all I needed to know the author. TVD's dream: to be mentioned in the same sentence as Tucker Bounds and Eric Fehrnstrom, maybe even Ari Fleischer.
Tom's love for (some of) us is structured similarly to his adherence to reason. His ideology tells him they are the principles to live by, so he asserts that he exhibits them, even though he can't make them stick in actual practice.
I know, right? Like: Google the Nazis! Google the Nazis! There were very bad people, as you'll discover, if you Google the Nazis!!!!11
I'd have left quietly awhile back but you couldn't resist spitting on my grave, WS. So now I'll come back to haunt you now and then.
Think of me every time you start to post more of your poisonous nonsense. I might return to show it for what it is, as I did twice this past week.
Oh, I get it! He's a miasma.
you couldn't resist spitting on my grave
And can you cite the precise post or posts wherein said 'spitting' took place?
Because I've been here since you took away your marbles and left, and I recall nothing like what you're describing here, Zombie Legate Van Dyke.
your poisonous nonsense
Yes, it's infected the mystic, loveable liberal, and Heaven alone knows how many others. A virtual
meme version of the Black Death, if you ask me.
I might return to show it for what it is
Zombie Legate Van Dyke, Mother Avenger once told me that people who are crazy usually see themselves as sane and everyone else around them as the 'crazies'.
You really should find a more productive use of your brainpower, you produce nothing here but ill-will with your ill-tempered philippics denouncing all and sundry of intellectual crimes that you seem unable or unwilling to define in specifics, let alone your chain of reasoning in formulating your charges.
Poor Zombie Legate Van Dyke. Like some paranoid 50s' sci-fi movie protagonist, unable to convince anyone of the menace, no doubt act three will be when he blogs from the Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous and blames WS for his confinement.
Just keep this in mind:
The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
Does that give you any insight, Zombie Legate Van Dyke?
I would just say, as rudely as ever, since I don't suffer fools gladly any more: That liquid you felt? That wasn't spit.
Bwahahaha! NOW I AM FREE to spew my POISONOUS NONSENSE in a LARGELY UNRESTRICTED manner!
BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!
(Oh and: "Zombie Legate van Dyke" really DID make me spit Gatorade, DA. Nice work there.)
But mostly I'm trying to figure out WHICH two piece of my poisonous nonsense he "showed for what [the are]"... I mean, really, I do spew so much poisonous nonsense...and an evil genius such as myself can hardly be expected to keep up with every bit of poisonous nonsense he spews, can he?
I mean, lessee, I've said that the President should be bound by the Constitution, that the rule of law is crucially important, that civility in public discourse is of enormous importance, that lying to get us into disastrous and unjustified wars is bad, that it would be good to blow bin Laden into tiny, tiny bits...gosh, all of those things seem to be poisonous nonsense from TVD's perspective...
No, wait! I think one must be the Mukasey thing he was going on and on about--there we see TVD Rhetorical Tactic #4: choose the most uncharitable interpretation available and stick with it... But he wasn't really in on that discussion except as kibbutzer, so I'm not sure...
But what was the other one? What? What?
Oh, yeah, I think he means the Leni Riefenstahl joke. Hahahahahah... LOOOOL...
Oh, wait.
We never did figure out whether Nazi jokes are o.k. or not. O.k., so, yeah, that may or may not have been poisonous nonsense, though I guess the jury's still out on that... We really ought to figure that out sometime.
But, as I was saying:
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Without TVD's superior intellect to keep me in check, now I will RULE THE BLOGOSPHERE!!!!!!!!!!!11
Oh, and, for the record: I'm sure that "spitting on his grave" means *not giving him the last word.* You KNOW how he hates that.
...choose the most uncharitable interpretation available and stick with it... But he wasn't really in on that discussion except as kibbutzer, so I'm not sure...
That would be your cowardly "friend," the loveable liberal, who has never posted an intelligent thought at the beginning of a "discussion," but reliably appears at the end to kick whoever's down, i.e.,, me, when the coast is finally clear.
If I were you, WS, I'd have noticed that and been embarrassed by it, but I'm not you.
I'm not a kibitzer, I'm front and center.
And actually, I've been quite charitable in our years together. You never noticed that either.
TOM!
You're full of shit!
Go away!
How many times do we have to go through this? Seriously. You have virtually nothing intelligent to contribute, you can't be civil, you just dogmatically beat the same drum over and over and over again, fishing frantically for something, ANYTHING you can whine about or accuse me of. (Your Mukasey blathering was particularly foolish even by your standards--which is saying something...)
You want the drama of announcing your permanent departure, but you want the drama of the return, too.
Nobody freaking "spit on your grave" after you left last time. Nobody freaking cared enough. Nobody has even mentioned you since you left. Left the first time, that is. Or was it the second...?
So don't go away mad, dude.
Just go away.
I've been quite charitable in our years together
Get some help, dude, or find another outlet for your talent for your
flummery.
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