digs
December 21, 2017, 2:46am
36022
I’m a teacher. Please don’t take mockery from me. It’s one of my most effective tools.
(Well, my students think it’s hilarious. They’re college students. But it really does motivate them…)
septimus
December 21, 2017, 5:23am
36023
computergeek:
With all the stuff that the GOP was and is doing with or without Trump, including things like trying to kill Obamacare without a plan to replace it, this tax bill, obstructing Obama from sitting a Supreme Court Justice and other Federal judges and then working very quickly to seat their judges once Trump became President, it’s pretty clear that the Republicans will continue to be obstructionist, vengeful against minorities, and extremists even if Trump were to go away. The party needs a real cleansing
Let’s remember this when people start calling John McCain, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski et al ‘moderates.’ Betsy DeVos was the only one of the dreadful cabinet to get two GOP Senators to say ‘Nay.’ The entire Party is awash in stupidity, hypocrisy and evil.
septimus
December 21, 2017, 5:33am
36024
eschereal the seriously twisted:
I find it pretty hard to laugh at that. Denigrating people with disabilities is not helpful in any way. But, really, compilations like that, with no balance or offset, make it feel like there are scads of people like that, when the reality is that the more scaddy portion of society are not like that.
Well, morons are much smarter than idiots, if that’s your point. But look at the recent Liberals hanging with Conservatives thread. At least three right-wing posters don’t even grasp the concept of government funding … and they probably have three-digit IQs!
septimus:
Well, morons are much smarter than idiots, if that’s your point. But look at the recent Liberals hanging with Conservatives thread. At least three right-wing posters don’t even grasp the concept of government funding … and they probably have three-digit IQs!
Heh, 3 digit IQ’s split between 3 posters, you mean?
Steve_MB
December 21, 2017, 1:55pm
36026
On which side of the decimal point?
Roy Moore’s Senatorial campaign tweeted a link to an article in The Advocate about Doug Jones’s gay son, who has nothing to do with the campaign. Moore’s campaign left it up to his followers to post the disgusting comments. But after a while, the campaign deleted the tweet.
I wasn’t sure where to put this. I found this link on a wonderful site called Arts & Letters Daily, an aggregator of many, many publications and interesting sources. I warn you, once you go there, you’ll get lost in all of the topics.
This article stopped me in my tracks today.
The Forgotten Man – On Murray Rothbard, philosophical harbinger of Trump and the alt-right
[Trump’s] presidency and political style were imagined by one man: the libertarian economist and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard, who died in 1995. Not long before his death, Rothbard rejoiced when he saw in the emergence of David Duke and Pat Buchanan, in 1992, his long-held vision for America’s right and concluded that what was needed was more of the same:
And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.
Despite the eerie accuracy of his vision and his prolific writing on every subject from contemporary cinema to the Federal Reserve system, Rothbard’s name is not widely known. It’s not likely to be found in bibliography of a contemporary economist’s paper, but you will find it scrawled on the seamy underbelly of the web, in the message boards of the alt-right, where fewer voices are more in the air than Rothbard’s. One can look at the recent profiles of neo-fascists to find the name Rothbard, and that of his favorite pupil and protégé, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, again and again.
…
How did this Jewish libertarian from the Bronx, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, a self-professed anarchist (or anarcho-capitalist in his chosen term) whose entire life was dedicated to destroying the state, end up on the reading lists of so many would-be fascists? And how, as some of his followers protest, could any aspirant jackbooted thug be attracted to the thought of a man whose main contribution to discourse, as far as they are concerned, is the “Non-Aggression Principle,” where, it is thought, all political and ethical questions can be solved simply by reference to the axiom that one must never, ever violate the person or property of anyone else? (Violence can only be initiated in self-defense.) Well, with a man like Rothbard, the boundaries of the self tend to become mutable and expansive.
…
This is a really LONG article, but fascinating. indeed, Rothbard seems to be the wellspring of the attitudes we are witnessing in the Republican Congress and on the right today.
…The writing Rockwell produced on behalf of Ron Paul in the 1980s and early 1990s is quite frank in its racism, homophobia, and paranoia about AIDS—part of what Rothbard described as an “Outreach to the Rednecks.” By 1990, the Ron Paul newsletters started discussing David Duke in favorable terms. But it was in 1992, after David Duke’s failed presidential run, that Rothbard in an article entitled “Right Wing Populism,” from the Rockwell-Rothbard Report, fully puts Duke’s politics in the context of his earlier articulated “populist short-circuit” strategy. There he encourages emulation of Duke:
It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians: lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what’s wrong with any of that?
Ultimately it was Pat Buchanan who was to be Rothbard’s man in 1992.
…
He applauds the book [The Bell Curve ] for destroying “the egalitarian myth” that “has been the major ideological groundwork for the welfare state, and, in its racial aspect, for the entire vast, ever expanding civil rights-affirmative action-set aside-quota aspect of the welfare state. The recognition of inheritance and natural inequalities among races as well as among individuals knocks the props out from under the welfare state system.” Rothbard continues:
If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance . . . In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
Here what Rothbard meant when he talks about non-aggression and self-defense is made plain: the ideological rampart of the post-welfare order against egalitarian attacks would have to be scientifically dressed up racism, defending the “property rights” of the rightful masters, sorted to the top by the ineluctable logic of the market. At this point his appeal to the alt-right shouldn’t be much of a mystery.
In July 2016, [Justin] Raimondo wrote in The American Conservative, “Rothbard, who died in 1995, would’ve loved Donald Trump, and he seems to have foreseen his rise as if in a dream.”
I’d encourage anyone who has the time and interest to read the whole article.
silenus
December 22, 2017, 12:19am
36029
Is this the place to note that the founder of Papa John’s Pizza has been forced out as CEO because of his idiotic comments about the NFL and “Take A Knee?”
Pig-fucker.
Sounds like a Smart Republican Idea(assuming the Board is Republican).
I’m hoping the company buys big red markers so his face can be “X’ed” out on the boxes.
j666
December 22, 2017, 4:38am
36031
silenus:
Pig-fucker.
I am always amazed when someone else uses this epithet. (It’s great to say, isn’t it?)
Sure is the place, 'cause I didn’t know! Gouda gumdrops!
Taste the sweetness of Destiny, fascist pig! - Trashman
Rick_Kitchen:
Roy Moore’s Senatorial campaign tweeted a link to an article in The Advocate about Doug Jones’s gay son, who has nothing to do with the campaign. Moore’s campaign left it up to his followers to post the disgusting comments. But after a while, the campaign deleted the tweet.
I saw that. My first though was ‘Roy Moore reads The Advocate?’
Maybe Roy Moore should pay less attention to other peoples kids, way less in some cases…, and pay attention to his own. His son is 27 and has been arrested 9 times.
silenus:
Pig-fucker.
Not only is it great to say, it helpfully differentiates them from the goat-felchers.
j666
December 22, 2017, 6:12am
36035
That doesn’t sound near as much fun to say, but I will try it.
If you’re into tongue-twisters:
I’m not the fig plucker nor the fig plucker’s son,
But I’ll pluck those figs 'til the fig plucking’s done.
Orrin Hatch tweeted, “Grateful for this great Christmas honor from the Salt Lake Tribune.”
He obviously hadn’t read it, because, although the headline says, “Why Orrin Hatch is Utahn of the Year”, it then goes on to criticize him viciously and begs him not to run for re-election.
These things are often misunderstood. So, lest our readers, or the honoree himself, get the wrong impression, let us repeat the idea behind The Salt Lake Tribune’s Utahn of the Year designation.
Rick_Kitchen:
Orrin Hatch tweeted, “Grateful for this great Christmas honor from the Salt Lake Tribune.”
x.com
He obviously hadn’t read it, because, although the headline says, “Why Orrin Hatch is Utahn of the Year”, it then goes on to criticize him viciously and begs him not to run for re-election.
Tribune Editorial: Why Orrin Hatch is Utahn of the Year
It’s been 19 hours since he tweeted. I’m astounded he hesn’t read it/had it brought to his attention.
Agreed, hilarious.