Stop Me Before I Vote Again

[sputter]

Excuse me. Laughing forever at the phrase "Woody Mattchuck."

ms x :
credit electric Al

The pwogs and wingers love their kulturkampf. It's wonderfully emotional, in a sleazy greeting card way, and the intellectual content aspects of the war are easy to master. Any idiot with a woodchuck sensibility can do it, and as there is no establishment-approved socially meaningful way for Harvard grads to spend their time, every idiot eventually dips a paw in the kulturkampf's discursive sewage. They literally have nothing better to do. If they look for something, they'll never get their money's worth from the degree. It's an intellectual race to the bottom.

I hate to come off like a grumpy reactionary, but the Devil does find work for idle hands, and even more work for idle brains. Poor old George Lakoff is a case in point. He's become the poor man's Sara Robinson; yelling at chop-shopped cars abandoned in the street; telling them they're symbols of their own failed ideology. He's disgraced himself, and I feel sorry for him, but this is what happens when you bite the heads off chickens and try to "frame" it as social activism.

Sara Robinson! Is she ever the pits. Back when she wrote on the execrable Group News Blog, shortly after the economic shit really hit the fan in 2008, she started a thread dedicated to listing all the wonderful costly belongings she considered The Real Deal, specifying that each must be "the original one of its kind", "incredibly well-made and durable" etc.

She ran off a huge list of things from Cowichan sweaters and squash blossom necklaces to Burberry trenchcoats that she just couldn't do without. Most posters happily chimed in, babbling about Coach bags and baby alpaca swing coats.

A solitary commenter questioned the appropriateness of the discussion on a progressive political blog. She called Robinson out for assuming that every reader could afford things like Vuitton bags and Rolex Oysters and was sniffily informed "You seem to have misunderstood the purpose of this thread." "And how would you propose to discuss the topic? I'm asking honestly, as outside of sliding wholesale into a discussion of strict communism, I don't see how."

Then they all went back to chatting about Limoges boxes. The party of the people, indeed.

Thank you for allowing me to vent some of my bile toward the pwoggie scum known as Sara Robinson.

The meritocracy hasn't got anywhere else to go. In education, their solution to the "achievement gap" is to reward those "honors students" who become just as technologically apt and socially vapid as they are. Unlike the test mania gurus, who just want to downsize everything in education and put black kids in jails, the "progressives" have a better idea. In true Nixonian form, they're going to offer everyone a "piece of the action" and make black kids better jailers. That's what Obamadunc's "Race to the Top" hustle is all about. It's got to be okay, after all, some of their best friends making upwards of six figures a year are black, therefore they know what's best for the inner city and urban education.

So if you're not interested in being part of the Limoges discussion, well, like fuck you. What's that you say? You know that they're stupider than posts? There's bound to be a hypodermic needle with court ordered anti-depressants in your near future.

Social vapidity is indeed the great core of the "gifted" track of our educational order. Do you think Yggie has ever spent more than 10 minutes pondering the last Great Depression and the explanations provided by Keynes, Kalecki, Baran/Sweezy? No way. To him and his fellow honors students, Keynesianism is something you need to to know a passable definition for, but not something one studies. Why would you? That gets a person nowhere.

The tragedy is that any kind of social democratic presence in the system could have a field day clarifying the Tweedle-nomics of the "two parties."

The facts in the press are so damned stark, it screams volumes about the totalitarian nature of the power structure.

1. The rich are sitting on more cash now than ever, since statistics have been kept.

2. The share of wages in personal income is now at its lowest point ever, since before 1929, when economic stats came online.

3. Government tax revenue is at its lowest share of government spending ever.

4. Private enterprise has had the freest possible reign for more than a generation to run its experiment in proving its core claim to being the best of all possible organizing forces.

5. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sara Robinson! Is she ever the pits. Back when she wrote on the execrable Group News Blog, shortly after the economic shit really hit the fan in 2008, she started a thread dedicated to listing all the wonderful costly belongings she considered The Real Deal, specifying that each must be "the original one of its kind", "incredibly well-made and durable" etc.

She ran off a huge list of things from Cowichan sweaters and squash blossom necklaces to Burberry trenchcoats that she just couldn't do without. Most posters happily chimed in, babbling about Coach bags and baby alpaca swing coats.

I'm pretty sure Naomi Klein runs the same game, although without logos and with more focus on quality consumer goods that she can buy when on her shopping sprees amid lecture and book tours.

While pretending to criticize capitalism.

Sorta like Michael Moore.

...and I'd be an even bigger slacker than I am already if I didn't join in Al's poking at The King of Framing. I wonder if there's a bigger charlatan in academia now, among those who get pwoggie/Donkle praise, than George Lakoff.

"Hi. I'm Professor George Lakoff. I studied with Noam Chomsky.

(Never mind that rhetoricians have been "framing" their arguments for millennia, just credit me with the shit and be done. After all, I'm cuddly, rotund, with a beard, like an academic Wilford Brimley. Worship me.)"

If you check the now-defunct Orcinus, the blog that taught the pwoggie world the phrase "eliminationist rhetoric", you'll see that the last post is by Sara Robinson. In it she argues that we should bring back sedition charges, and apply them not only to groups like Hutaree, but to mainstream Republicans generally. In other words, the use of sedition law would once again, just like during the Palmer Raids, have a politicized meaning.

But don't worry about this massively expanded ability to prosecute people for thinking bad thoughts, because this is Sara Robinson! Writing on Orcinus! This is the group of writers that established their own purity of heart by spending years comparing Republicans to the Sturmabteilung! We know they'd be careful stewards of the right to prosecute people for holding the wrong opinions, don't we?