This post is vaguely amusing and somewhat worth reading. It makes fun of this article, by a woman who thinks she’s being radical and new agey by not taking her husband’s – I mean, “wusband’s” – last name. She considers herself a “hife,” and lists of some of the “wife” stereotypes that she doesn’t follow:
I’d argue that, for all of my wifely qualities (I can obsess over throw pillows with the best of them), I have an inner husband who tends to drive at least double the legal speed limit and leave socks on the floor . . .
Frequent readers (or passengers) will know that I’m not a slow driver. When my GPS is on, I will always drive above the speed limit, where the Garmin shows my speed in menacing red, as a point of principle. I think that the speed limit on most highways should contain three digits and only be enforced in egregious circumstances. When I got a warning for speeding back in December (my 4th in 26 months in Texas), I was advised that, “Eventually if you get enough of those, someone will write you a ticket.” Point being, the big side of the legal limit is familiar territory to me, and I have no objection to others driving fast.
But “at least double the legal limit”? That means 71 in a 35, or 111 in a 55, or 141 in a 70. If you can do that, either you or the person who set the speed limit is doing something wrong, and it’s probably you. The main virtue of a legal limit is that it causes traffic to flow at a predictable pace; if someone is driving a car twice as fast as the flow of traffic, even if that person is a good driver, it’s almost always not safe.
So perhaps this woman’s “inner husband” is allowing her to fulfill that most feminine of stereotypes: the bad driver. I presume her “inner husband” has other masculine traits, like liking large vehicles (her Lexus crossover), and electronics (the phone glued to the side of her head).
. . . to help me realize how much I like Obama, how much John Edwards deserves forgiveness [!!??!?!?!], and “What happened during the George W. Bush years was in its way as devastating as the earthquake in Haiti, or daily life for much of India — just as many dead, and a constitution nearly destroyed.”
Blech!
I didn’t know things were so bad for the LA Times that they were printing essays that were rejected from college newspapers. At least, I hope that’s where they got it: nowhere off a college campus have I ever read that much cooly idiotic condescension and ignorance.
I think Ann Althouse learned three better things by reading Lamont’s essay than Lamont learned by traveling to India.
My freshman year of college, there were two roomates, Nick and Ian, who lived on my floor and liked to play minor pranks on each other. One of my favorites was when Ian left the room, Nick would get on Ian’s computer and change the wallpaper to some sort of gay porn. When Ian would come back, everyone on the floor could hear him shout, “Whaaaaaa!!!!!”
What made this so funny is that Ian had the exact same reaction every time this happened. No matter how many times Nick did this – and he did it a lot – Ian would never see it coming.
I think of Ian when I read economic stories these days, because it seems that in every single one of them, the news is “unexpected.” No matter whether the news is good or bad (and it’s not at all clear that a month where 200,000 people dropped out of the work force is good news as that story says it is), “experts” and “analysts” never see it coming.
Hayek might point out that we should use this as a lesson: all the stimulus and central planning elements espoused by “experts” are little more than guesses, whose consequences we can’t accurately predict, even in the short term. I don’t think our current leaders are much open to learning this lesson.
I also don’t know who’s listening to [Robertson]; in my entire life, I’ve never met anyone, in church or elsewhere, who didn’t roll their eyes when his name was mentioned.
But why, then, is he still around? Robertson is the crazy uncle of right-wing Christianity: he says the damnedest things, and these are taken as just “who he is.” And like any crazy uncle, I’m not sure if he could say anything bad enough to prevent him from being invited to the family reunion.
Allow me, for a moment, to stand out from the crowd. I will now say something nice about Pat Robertson: he puts on a good tv show. I say this unironically, and not as a backhanded compliment. Around here it airs during daytime hours when crappy judge shows and soap operas are the only alternative on broadcast tv. The 700 Club has good human interest stories, approaches news stories from a conservative Christian angle – which, literally, you can get nowhere else on television – without being overly biased, and provides competent discussions of most of its subject matter.
On the few episodes I’ve watched, Robertson was inoffensive and came across as surprisingly knowledgeable. I watched one episode where he gave a competent lecture (complete with whiteboard drawings) of the chemistry underlying ozone depletion. For the life of me I can’t remember in what context he gave that lecture, but I remember looking up and seeing a marker in his hand and the phrase “free radicals” escaping his lips. He talked about it fairly indepth for about ten minutes, didn’t say anything that contradicted what I knew to be true, and said several things I wasn’t aware of. All on broadcast tv, during daytime hours, on a show geared toward conservative Christians.
I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for people saying stupid crap, but Robertson occasionally exceeds that tolerance. Still, I’d no more kick him out of the family than I would vote for him for president.
Dodge, showing an impressive lack of self-awareness, seems to think this is a rhetorical question:
While wiseasses across America have already answered this question in ways that leave them snickering at Dodge, the real suckers here are American taxpayers. Every crappy car, idiotic commercial, and disgruntled buyer they produce is subsidized by us. A company this bad should go away.
Despite his years with AEI and best-selling books that have provided empirical evidence for conservative policy, it turns out that Charles Murray is not a Real Conservative™:
[Glenn] Beck is spectacularly right (translation: I agree with him) on about 95 percent of the substantive issues he talks about. He is a full-throated libertarian in a world of wishy-washy Republicans. The man is a gifted communicator. His style doesn’t happen to be one I like, but many times I’ve sat there on my sofa wishing I could make the same point as effectively. But Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way, I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust.
So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?
I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework.
Popularization –the ability to take dry-but-important material and present it in a fun and informative way — is an essential sub-field of any discipline. Carl Sagan was an unexceptional technical astronomer, but Cosmos did more good for his colleagues than a dozen new research papers, and infinitely more for the general public. Much the same could be said for Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins* (Evolutionary Biology), Steven Pinker (Cognitive Science), Jacob Brownoski (History of Science), or Joseph J. Ellis and David McCollough (American History), just to name a few people whose work touches fields I’m interested in.
At its best, Talk Radio is to conservative politics what these academics are to their fields: people who are able to advocate for their causes and educate people who are intelligent, but busy. Most people aren’t going to read The Bell Curve or the Federalist Papers, but people like Beck, Limbaugh, or Mark Levin**, have the ability to communicate their essentials in to a broad audience much better than Charles Murray or James Madison.
Unfortunately, as Murray and our own Conor say, most of the current crop of Conservative popularizers*** have been using their (prodigious) talents for their own self promotion at the expense of their stated goals. When Mark Levin screams at a politely dissenting caller and sarcasticly suggests her husband commit suicide, it earns him slaps on the back from fans as much as it alienates moderates. When Rush Limbaugh hopes the president fails — not expects, as David Frum pointed out, but hopes! — he gets applause from dittoheads, but makes it hard for people in the middle to take him seriously. As for Beck, I’ve nothing to add beyond Murray’s comments.
Talk Radio is an important medium and it’s one that Conservatives should exploit to its fullest advantage. Obviously, there’s a balance to be struck: nobody wins converts with stale arguments, dull prose, and an apologetic tone, and controversy can be a tremendous asset if used properly. If conservatives have the best ideas –which we do! — we should be able to keep the troops in line while convincing swing voters that we’re right. Folks like Beck, Limbaugh, and Levin have the talent to do both, but aren’t showing much interest in the latter. That’s a shame.
* Dawkins is an interesting case, as he’s both a popularizer of Atheism and Evolutionary Biology. Until very recently, Dawkins refused to admit that these causes are — in America, at least — at odds with each other. In the past year or so, he appears to have relented, if only a little.
** You may notice the conspicuous absence of Sean Hannity from this list of the talented-but-flawed. This is intentional; Hannity has no talent.
*** There are exceptions, particularly Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, who — though imperfect — strive to be fair and honest while being entertaining and strong.
Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the man convicted of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing, has left the Tripoli hospital where he was receiving treatment for cancer.
Officials in Libya on Monday reported that Megrahi had been discharged from Tripoli Medical Centre, the country’s most advanced public clinic, where he had received treatment since late August.
In August, doctors gave Megrahi just three months to live in a judgement that secured his release from a Glasgow prison. But he entered the Tripoli hospital to undergo an aggressive chemotherapy programme just days after Libyans celebrated his triumphal return.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime publicly declared its hope that “a miracle from God” would preserve his life.
It’s hard to summarzie all the government pathologies wrapped up in this. After a year of using red light cameras in one Canadian city, the number of accidents at intrsections with cameras more than doubled. But the city did issue more than a $1 million in tickets (a few to red-light runners, but mostly to those who didn’t come to a complete stop before making a right on red).
So after a year of increasing the amount of harm done to citizens, and taking money from drivers for the most chickenshit offense that no cop would ever waste his time stopping a driver over, how did the program manager sum it up?
“Enforcement Services has promoted red light cameras as a means to reduce collisions,” Roth wrote. “While the collision numbers have not decreased significantly since the cameras have been installed, it is still the position of Enforcement Services that enforcement through the camera technology helps promote safe driving habits.”
“[H]ave not decreased significantly” is, I guess, how Canadians say “more than doubled.” And “promote safe driving habits” is Canucki for “cause wrecks.” Strange language, eh?
By the way, this isn’t about ragging on Canada. Too many American cities, including here in Berkeley on the Colorado, have decided that using accident-causing cameras as a means of extracting money from their citizens is a good idea. The scurge of governments disrespecting their citizens is an international one.
After a lot of thought on the subject, I’ve brought myself to the point where I can at least understand where a lot of traditional anti-Semitism comes from, though I certainly don’t approve. In medieval Europe, the Jews kept to themselves, made a point of never fully assimilating, and had a lot in common with other Jewish communities in far-flung locations. So it’s fairly easy to see how they might become the bogeymen in unenlightened minds.
What’s somewhat harder to understand is anti-Semitism in the modern world. Specifically, Marxist anti-Semitism. Marx himself didn’t like the Jews. If you see the world split in two, between the workers and the capitalists, a people who insist on cultural continuity no matter where they live and no matter their class, and who would rather live in peace with their second-class status than start a revolution – well, it’s not too difficult to see how the Jews would become something of an ideological enemy to 19th and early 20th Century Marxists.
But, in the 21st Century, when the Marxist ex-president of Honduras – HONDURAS! – starts ranting that Israeli mercenaries are trying to kill him . . . surely it has all become farce. Except that the Leftist government of the United States, the most Jew-friendly country not named Israel, wants that ex-president reinstated. That is not a farce, and it is something I cannot bring myself to understand.
This is an atrocious article for several reasons: its poor argumentation, pathetic attempt use of strawmen, its shameless exploitation of Ted Kennedy’s recently-departed ghost, etc. All of that pales, however, in comparison to this quote:
Kennedy knew – as his friend Congressman Barney Frank says – that Government is nothing more than the name we give to the things we choose to do together.
My astronomy club is not government. My outdoors club is not government. My trade-association employer is not government. This group blog is not government. Nor are whatever other private associations or relationships I choose to make outside of a very limited set of institutions.
From the depths of my libertarian soul, screw you and all you stand for, Robert Creamer.
A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking to myself that we’d gone a little too long without a national Republican coming forward and admitting adultery. I thought about making a post on it, but then I realized that I’d invariably make semi-libelous guesses about who it would be.
In all honesty, the first guy who came to mind as a prime candidate was John Ensign. A guy who did not cross my mind was Mark Sanford. It’s sorta a shame, but always delightful to hear Democrats proclaim from on high that having an affair is, by itself, cause to resign.
