Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Clowns are not vile. The 'odditorium' was where a collection of odd and good curiosities were exchanged for our enrichment. We lost the good 'ole American slang.
I don't either wish 'us' to go toward 'unroningness.'
lit; Desolation. None of us are a 'skildir.' The term meant a potential 'saint' who sure could do some fun sinning. It's a Norse term and St. Kilda, in the late 1800's, did what's done here. Just Expose corruption. It's not screwy if we try to be true. Even a sad-sack clown is just working at self-improvement. Clowns scary? nonsense.
Well, i 'welkin' (old word for the clouds) I do that before the sunsets. This was a watching the nicest a 'wekin's' kinda' day. Thank you.
One thing that troubles me about this whole brouhaha- why didn't HuffPo block the comments before they were posted?
Before you say "they can't because they don't screen the comments," you're wrong. HuffPo has staffers that read comments before they're posted to the article. It's one of the big problems I (and others) have with HuffPo, because it takes forever (and a few complaints to tech support) to get your comment up, and by then you're out of step with the rest of the commenters.
Now, Arianna has not mentioned anything about why they didn't block the comments in the first place. So...has her commenting policy changed (to enable immediate publishing), did her staffers miss this, or what?
I'd just like to step in here with a brief (I hope) word on behalf of mbf, since my blogging partner Dave Neiwert has been covering this turf for about four years now.
Mbf is not wrong. Dave's documented quite authoritatively* the pattern by which unthinkable extremist ideas start out on the far right with the likes of Rushdoony, are picked up by talk-radio sensationalists like Savage and Rush, turned into books by Malkin and O'Reilly, and eventually become part of the mainstream conservative party line. So, yes, we do have to be concerned about the crazies, because what they're saying today is almost certainly what respectable GOP candidates will be saying tomorrow.
He's also right that we are nowhere near out of the woods with these people. As Altemeyer makes all too clear: they have been with us from the beginning, and will be with us to the end. All we can do is keep a close watch on them, and make sure they stay pushed as far to the margins as we can manage. And, right now, they've got a 40-year investment in political and cultural infrastructure that we're not yet remotely close to matching.
Fortunately, Altemeyer is also giving us the scientific basis that may eventually allow us to recognize their mindset as pathological and anti-social, which will both widen our awareness of the dangers they pose, and perhaps improve our ability to deal with them effectively.
Raj's optimistic assertion that the trend lines don't support pessimism is correct as far as it goes; but people who are in the foresight business are inherently suspicious of trendlines, and are very circumspect in placing any reliance on them. Just because it's getting better now doesn't mean we won't have a terrorist attack -- or, more likely, an economic slowdown -- that makes the whole thing re-erupt like an infected wound in the near future.
Things are getting a little better. Offering the country a positive alternative vision is crucial to our success. But we cannot ever afford to take our eyes off these people -- and they are concentrated in the conservative movement -- who have been standing by since the beginning to take our liberties away.
* Dave won the 2003 Koufax for Best Series with "Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism," which thoroughly describes this phenomenon. There's a link to the PDF version over at Orcinus -- http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/.
Wow, you really nailed this one. The ability to predict phenomena is the hallmark of a reliable viewpoint.... too bad this prediction was so sadly easy to come by.
Now, Arianna has not mentioned anything about why they didn't block the comments in the first place. So...has her commenting policy changed (to enable immediate publishing), did her staffers miss this, or what?
-- cfaller96
My understanding is that they only review comments to the blog posts, not comments under the news stories they link to. When the server is working, comments to the news sections go up pretty much immediately. Comments to the blogs sometimes take an entire day to go up, or don't go up at all.
If I say trust the people to you, m.b.f., I say it with the dangers to democracy made emblematic in the successes -- and civilization-destroying failures -- of the Bolsheviks and the NSDAP still fresh in our collective memory.
Still, you should consider the conditions in Russia, and in Germany at the time of those successes. A lost war which had wiped out an entire generation, and the crushing poverty which followed it in Germany, a huge peasant population in Russia which literally didn't know who was running things, or to what end -- unschooled in modern politics and economics at all. To turn the American people into that kind of cannon fodder would be quite a trick, no matter how distasteful they find kinky sex, or how incomprehensible scientific research is to them.
Also, the creation of alternate realities is an enormously labor and energy-intensive enterprise. Every unpleasant fact, every ideological deviation, must have its counter-foghorn (presently) or its secret policeman/commissar (in your hypothetical future.) Could -- can -- our present right-wing nasties manage this in a country of 300 million consumers? Frankly, I doubt it.
Perhaps, if they were to get their hands on all three branches of government, and the armed forces, they might be willing to try. Yes, they've been working on this project for decades -- the introduction of ideological litmus tests in schools, universities, the civil service and the military, the gutting of regulations and regulatory agencies, the attacks on judges, lawyers and research scientists, the destruction of labor unions -- and, of course the incessant fearmongering and attendant pressures on the media.
In the process, they've also made a lot of enemies. How do you think we know the exact contours of GWB's lies? Somebody on the inside fed the information to the outside. All closed vessels leak, especially those built by not-too-bright folks who rely solely on ideological blueprints.
And then, of course, there's us. We aren't exactly standing around, I hope....
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
