Letters to the Editor
Doktor Krankheit
Published Letters: 57
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I _wish_ Ms Clinton would talk about that + French/butch/bitchery
[Read the article: "Hillary equals France"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Clintons' plan back in 1993/94 was intensely corporatist, nationalising not the care or the cost but rather a way of creating gurantied customers to the insurance industry, which is essentially the problem.
But, anyway, we'll never consciously imitate France: they're faggots.
I'm sorry to use indecent language, but I'm trying to get inside the American mind, including my own---I'm very American, though I have a few other things in my head, including some French and English bits (a long story). What I see there is an old strain going back to the British that says things like, "But to fight a French fa-lal/It's like hittin' of a gal," which is perhaps overcompensation for the French so scaring the Brits and Germans and aristos for twenty years.
We've inherited it and expanded on it. "The French they are a funny race/They fight with their feet and fuck with their face/Hinky-dinky parlee-voo". Froggies eat fancy food with sauces, and actually care about how things taste. Faggots. French men like women, whom real men have always found suspiciously effeminate---you've got to like fucking them, but to like them?!....faggots.
We're no faggots. We'll bugger ourselves silly with our own stupidity to prove it, as surely as St Janor once cut off his dick to prove that he was a Real Man.
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Transcript of text?
[Read the article: Scott Bateman: Robot overlord]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I unfortunately don't have the time to go back and freeze the background text's frames, and my pitiful hu-man visual processing can't grok the text as it passes.... Thanks, --D.K.
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I've said this for years:
[Read the article: Ron Paul's Internet cha-ching ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Libertarianism isn't an ideology; it is an algorithm."
This was after hearing an LP-head answer a bunch of questions with very little thought evidently involved. (Apologies throughout to European/British readers; by 'libertarian' I mean 'propertarian minarchists', not 'anarchists, likely anarcho-communist'.)
Smart modellers are always on the look-out for places where the model diverges from the modelled; most L.P. types to whom I've pointed out apparent such ask me who am I going to believe, Ayn Rand/von Mises/Hayek or my obviously-Statist eyes.
(Yes, I know that the Objectivists read the L.P. out years ago; their hostility is a token of their similarity.)
And, I hate to mention it because it's a popular disease now (I had it when it was playing tiny clubs and got paid in precisely-measured beer), but I feel compelled to point out that Asperbergers' Syndrome makes it much easier to understand a couple of rules than the broad spectrum of hu-man interactions.
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Damn "Salon" liberals
[Read the article: My boss forwards fluffy kitten e-mails!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Will you never shut up about the Bush administration! This whole letter and response are obviously just excuses to spew more of your Bush-hating bile. All this talk about a credulous boss out of touch with reality, believing any story that comes his way that confirms his world-view and the disastrous consequences thereto...you've obviously made this up just to talk bad on Bush and Mr Cheney.
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Fish, barrel
[Read the article: Feminists don't have a sense of humor?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Uhh...rape and molestation and cheap objectification aren't funny when they happen. Neither are death, humiliation, misfortune, prejudice, or any of the other things that are often the raw material of humour. Words can influence us, but the name is not the thing, the map is a human reaction to the territory, and magic[k]al thinking is a bad idea.
Victim's humour, from "Peanuts" through Richard Pryor through Brett Butler is mostly about ways in which the world is not to our liking...someone said "We feel like we could live forever, but we die...it's funny." The best Jewish jokes are often about anti-Semitism, the best Black American jokes are often about racism...I thought of Butler because she has a series of jokes about a cosmetic procedure (cutting a muscle in the forehead to look younger, and as if you'd never had a thought in your life) that has more power in't than any three screeds against our modern versions of foot-binding.
But serious ("solemn", actually, would be better) revolutionaries and activists on Prison Planet Earth often dislike this sort of humour because they see it as a false escape that distracts from the wonderful, obviously practical, escape plans they've made and in which everyone _must_ take part. People who joke also tend to piss them off even more by pointing out the flaws they'll never acknowledge in these plans, and by noting that most of humankind have never tunnelled more than a few feet without injuring themselves with the spoon, much less made it beyond the wire...or how plans that involve dressing up as guards usually result in these new "guards"' forgetting to escape and acting even more oppressively than the originals.
(Victor's humour is another matter entirely...it's about how good this world is, in which other people get to suffer, people who deserve it. It finds its apotheosis in Stalin's or Bush's or Hussein's mocking of the condemned.)
Yup, some, maybe most jokes that feminists (and vegetarians, and anarcho-communist technophiles like me) find objectionable are poorly made, and many or most of the (let's say) men who laugh at them do so from an unquestioning position of insulation and superiority. This song could have laughed at a world in which it's so easy for could-have-been-decent people to end up distorted in this way, but instead it aimed for cheap mockery of anyone who finds anything funny that the singer does not. It smells more like smug failure-in-correctness than of the possibility that she might make actually someone change his mind.
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On another note...
[Read the article: The Da Vinci dinner]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...the uniquely talented Tim Kreider suggests that we might not take advantage of such:
http://thepaincomics.com/weekly001122.htm