I Know I’m Going to Regret This

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I Know I’m Going to Regret This . . .

. . . but it needs to be done.

Billy “Doesn’t Play Well With Others” Beck has once again more than eloquently expressed his overweening misanthropy, not just here but at his own blog, and since Mr. Beck doesn’t allow comments at his site I figured I’d go ahead and stick the proverbial fork in the wall outlet here at TSM. It seems Mr. Beck was less than enamored of Bill Whittle’s recent video paean to Star Trek, TOS after Maureen Dowd’s attempt to hijack it for her own nefarious purposes:

If that guy is what passes for an intellect in these times, we are more fucked than I have previously imagined, although it doesn’t surprise me.

Mr. Beck expounded further at his own site on the topic, sort of (excerpts, skipping multiple contemptuous references to Glenn Reynolds):

If you’re going to take seriously someone who dresses up in a goddamned Star Trek outfit and tells you that reason and logic are impotent, in order to explain the intellectual rot in America today, then you deserve where you’re going.

—

As for Whittle, he’s a wanker and a creep. Sooner or later, he will expose himself to the dumbest among you, and I am content with all I have to say about him until then.

Odd, that wasn’t the message I took from Whittle’s piece at all, but then I’m not the towering philosophical intellect Mr. Beck is and have never claimed to be. Still, somehow I doubt that that was Billy’s last word on Mr. Whittle.

Thus I generated this:


We’re just not worthy to share the planet with you, Billy. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Please forgive us and allow us to scrape lick the mud off your boots, since that’s apparently all we’re suited for.

UPDATE: Billy posts a response:

You’re wrong.

Again.

Of course. That’s what the poster says!

UPDATE II: Apparently I struck a nerve. Via email:

That’s my photograph, and I’m not going to let you use it for that.

You will take it down, quietly or with an explanation to your audience —
it doesn’t matter to me — but you will take it down as fast as you can
arrange it after you see this.

It’s not worth the hassle of arguing over it. I’ve had enough of Drama Llamas for one month. Use your imaginations. Or just go here.

UPDATE III: Since I asked him, Beck sent me a picture with permission to use it for the poster. Picture updated. Who says Billy doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Quote of the Day – Primary Source

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From a post at Samizdata:

At 47, I lament how today’s America is far less free than the country of my youth. Replacing it is not a 1984ish totalitarian dictatorship, but what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘soft tyranny’ of what Mark Levin sees as a 21st century ‘nanny state’. We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence. What makes Americans’ surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten – required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.

Students have far less choice of classes in high school, and often teachers can not make their own lessons since they must teach the test so schools can make “adequate yearly progress”. Only about 40 percent of my college students say they ever discussed any controversial issues in high school. My high school classes revelled in such debate.

The author is Douglas Young, Professor of Political Science & History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA.

RTWT. And note the title of his piece.

Quote of the Day

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In its entirety, a rant of beauty by LabRat right here in my comments:

I just finished reading this whole thread after looking at it once when the number of comments was 3.

UJ and others are doing quite all right at the quote-fisk game. They have that covered.

So far as I can determine from having read Round XIV of Markadelphia versus everyone else including, apparently, Fox News and an imaginary army of slavering violent right-wing neojihadists who will begin mutilating the genitals of women, blowing up school buses, introducing compulsory Christianity on pain of death, and outlawing nonBiblical education just as soon as, um, they finish their beers or something, the following is the grounds for argument. I provide so we can understand each other better, and as we all know all conflict stems from a lack of understanding.

Furthermore, any and all dishonest or incompetent thing that any liberal does- especially Mark himself- is just fine because unidentified conservatives do it all the time only more betterer and Dick Cheney said something about it just last week and by the time you finish watching the obvious violent enemy of all that is good in the world by watching Fox News we’ll have entirely forgotten whatever thing Mark the liberal did because LOOK A PONY

Conservatives are bad, terrible people that hate freedom and anyone different from them and education and intelligence and success and the beautiful flower of human reasoning and hope and we will all be better off just as soon as we’ve gotten rid of them. Oh, and the worst thing about them is they try to fool you into seeing your normal fellow Americans with different opinions as stupid and evil.

If you have ever agreed with a Republican about anything you obviously LOVED it when Bush spent like a drunken trophy wife with no plan for debt and you’re a HUGE HYPOCRITE for disapproving of Obama spending like a drunken Imelda Marcos with no plan for debt. Also you hate doing ANYTHING about ANY problem and you just want problems to continue because you hate change. Any sputtering about how you actually want to overhaul most of American government, just not the same way Obama does, IS VICIOUS LIES. So stop lying, dammit! It gets us nowhere.

Obama has proved forever he’s nonpartisan because he’s kept basically the entirety of Bush’s evil antihuman terror policies also Republicans never have useful plans except when they do only it’s evil but not after Obama redeems it SO DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD WATERBOARD DEMOCRATS OR WHAT? HUH, YOU LIBERTY-HATING SECURITY FREAK oh hey pony

We will spend our way out of this recession even though I said that was lies and foolishness when it was the Bush administration and we should believe Obama utterly on this because he’s said he’ll make mistakes. The economy will turn around under his policies because the Republican policies I will now make up wouldn’t work.

And now I’ll make a prediction. One week from now, in a distant other thread of the FUTURE:

“Taxes? Economy? Torture? Libel? Stop waving all those links to sourced information. What the hell do you people want from me, I have a life, I don’t have time to feed your goddamn pony.”

LabRat, I am not worthy. Thank you for that inspired response. I hereby tag this post with the coveted “Moment of Zen” tag.

Bill Whittle: Anti-Intellectual Rightwing Extremist

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The entire premise of the new movie is that Spock takes an extraordinary risk to make sure that he himself is not sitting in the command chair because no one knows more than Spock just how dangerous it is to have an intellectual in charge.

You HAVE to watch the thing all the way through the credits!

Mr. Whittle, I bow in your general direction. We are not worthy.

Now, get to work on the new “Common Sense.”

Prophecy

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Given President Obama’s recent Middle-East Apology Tour speeches, I am reminded of a Quote of the Day from last October, and the prediction of another damned fine intellectual, Thomas Sowell:

“There is such a thing as a point of no return,” he says. If Obama wins the White House and Democrats expand their majorities in the House and Senate, they will intervene in the economy and redistribute wealth. Yet their economic policies “will pale by comparison to what they will do in permitting countries to acquire nuclear weapons and turn them over to terrorists. Once that happens, we’re at the point of no return. The next generation will live under that threat as far out as the eye can see.”

“The unconstrained vision is really an elitist vision,” Sowell explains. “This man [Obama] really does believe that he can change the world. And people like that are infinitely more dangerous than mere crooked politicians.”

Ran across that perusing the archives for something else, and thought it bore repeating.

Quote of the Day

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Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.

A sojourn at an elite university, you see, can sometimes become a very dangerous thing indeed.

Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, The Reckoning

A very good piece on why so many people connected to reality are considered “anti-intellectual,” written by a damned fine intellectual. RTWT.

But the Stimulus PASSED

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But the Stimulus PASSED!

The blog Innocent Bystanders has been keeping track of the unemployment numbers compared to the projections of the Obama economic team (PDF) back in January. Granted, the team acknowledged “there is substantial uncertainty around all of our estimates”, but still . . .

Here’s their chart with the unemployment data released today:


Now, it’s been a while since I took a math class, but I don’t see the data even starting to indicate a decrease in slope. Using some admittedly crude tools, here’s the graph with the new data points linked:


To me, it looks like the slope is, if not linear, increasing. It’s definitely not nosing over. Yet.

Of course, the claim now would be that “if the Stimulus plan had not passed, it would be WORSE!” Perhaps. But it does indicate that the best and brightest minds on the Obama team weren’t even close in their January projections.

As Glenn keeps saying, “The country is in the best of hands.” Personally, I think “flyfisher” has his finger on the economic pulse of the country.

UPDATE 6/7: Someone else notices the same thing, and uses better graphics tools.

Don’t MAKE US Come BACK THERE!

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Don’t MAKE US Come BACK THERE!

Tam had a very interesting post this morning:

Remember when you were little and you were whining to go to Disneyland or order a large pizza for supper or to get that shiny new toy, and your dad said “No, we can’t afford it.”

He said that because he was a grownup, and it was his job to be responsible.

We need a new political party in Washington, to get the checkbook away from the 537 people who have been kiting checks like a runaway teenager who boosted mom’s purse. Not the G.O.P., because they’re part of the problem.

We will call ourselves the G.U.P.: the GrownUp Party, and our motto will be “No we can’t!”

Chant it with me now:

“But all the other kids have ice cream and free universal health care!”

“No we can’t!”

RTWT.

Government has been incrementally taking on the responsibilities of our parents for decades, but only recently has it become too obvious to be ignored any longer. In 2005 when I wrote Tough History Coming, I quoted an Albuquerque Tribune piece by Jeffry Gardner entitled Save Us From Us. (The Trib is another paper that has failed, so the links are broken.) Here it is again, since it’s pertinent:

During the 1992 presidential debates, there was a moment of absurdity that so defied the laws of absurdity that even today when I recall it, I just shake my head.

It was during the town hall “debate” in Richmond, Va., between the first President Bush and contenders Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

A grown man – a baby boomer – took the microphone from the moderator, Carol Simpson of ABC News, and said, in a fashion: You’re the president, so you’re like our father, and we’re your children.

See? My head’s shaking already. Where did that come from? Would a grown man have told a president something like that 100 years ago – or 50?

We’ve got our wires crossed, and our ability to accept responsibility for our lives – once so ingrained in our American nature that President Kennedy felt comfortable telling us to “ask not what your country can do for you” – has been short-circuited. We’ve slouched en masse into an almost-childlike outlook: You’re the president, so you’re like our father.

The fact that an adult – on national television, no less – would say this and later be interviewed as though he’d spoken some profound truth struck me then, as now, as more than a little absurd. It was alarming.

That attitude certainly hasn’t abated over the past 12 years. In fact, that helpless, innocent-child routine has crept into nearly all aspects of our culture.

At the top of this blog I have three quotes that are illustrative of the purpose for its existence. The third is from Kim du Toit:

I don’t just want gun rights… I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance….I want the whole bloody thing.

I’m not sure there are enough grown-ups left. What adults there are out there sure as hell aren’t in elected office. I’ll join the G.U.P., but I’m afraid we’ll have a smaller membership than the Greens. After all, we won’t be offering to “bribe the public with the public’s money.” Hard to compete with that when the electorate isn’t made up of grown-ups already.

Entropy wins.