Letters to the Editor
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Inconvenient history
Thanks, Paul, for the snippet of Bonus March history, and of MacArthur's role in our own little Кровавое воскресенье.
One of the UT commenters a while back -- I don't remember who, but it wasn't one of Glenn's trolls -- said something to the effect that he'd always thought that it had been the right, and poor people, who had stood against government tyranny. Frankly, I was stunned. What happened, I wondered, to the last hundred years of our history. It was a purely rhetorical wonderment, of course -- I'm very well aware of what was and wasn't taught in public school social studies classes. Still, how can we be expected to understand what's happening now if we have no clue what's happened in the past, or if our version of the past has been fabricated from the engineered consensus of our movers and shakers.
More to your point, though, MacArthur was always a right-wing sonuvabitch. He was probably one from the moment he was weaned. Someone should have taken the sabre out of his hand and marched him off to the loony-bin long before Bataan. It would have saved us a lot of trouble later.
Thanks again.
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Pastafarians Unite!
I think everyone went out to get a bag of Nacchio chips to munch on with Pedinska.
Paul Rosenberg can boggle the false teeth. He deserves a bow and a big toothless smile. Cheers.
Wow- Kitt. I'm quiet too. hope.
I hope no one clips their toes with a sharp scapula or metal scapula. Please bleep me. ok.
It's my mentality gonna wacky.
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Empathy and thinking leads to...
It's my mentality gonna wacky.
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I made my phone call to Sen Reid
I told the staffer it was a bad idea to compromise with Bush on anything. The staffer was cool, but not unfriendly.
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Pro-Law.
It's time we steal a march from the abortion battle, with its "pro-life" and "pro-choice" labels.
Perhaps we can call people who want the rule of law to prevail "pro-law" and the people who want to untie the hands of the President "pro-jackboots".
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For the record
Wolfgang Pauli also told a grad student, "it is indeed very clever but of course has nothing to do with reality." about his theory of spin. Pauli's name later became synonymous with spin (and Dirac got ignored for a long time on it). No Nobel Prize was ever given out for spin, mostly because Wolfgang Pauli's comments led the student not to publish his ideas, and therefore muddied the time line on who originally discovered it.
There is an old joke that when Pauli died, he went to heaven and was told by God that he would be allowed to ask one question. "That's easy," said Pauli, "What is the fundamental law governing all the universe." God went to the blackboard and wrote it for him. Pauli jumped up and pointed to the board and exclaimed "That's wrong!"
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OlivarA! I hate to use [!]. My mind remembered This: You will agree. In relation to Paul Rosenberg.
First, I tease and don't sit here all day all slopped faced with alcoholic brown ale suds.
Let's toast:
The beer is named Paulaner Salvator. It is a double bock from Munich Germany.
The artist has a happy Friar monk with a huge grey beer Stine pitcher. The monk allows a rare glimpse into his miserliness, joyful, playful, and empathetic OliverA's kind of jolly nature.
It's said,..."The sin, yelled the Happy Friar, is to sniff the non-jolly air of a Abbye foul neocon's mentality."
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The ones being offered the excellent brew that's from a monastery batch of nuns and monks, is a goofball looking guy in a robe. The recipient is of the bier is the blue coat fancy established class of society member. His nose is lifted into the air like a sniffling drug dog smelling a chocolate chip cookie in the car (SUV) glove compartment. The blue coat aristocratic is here today.
Time rolls on like a oval egg.
A universe gets cracked open.
A humped Dumb Dump on The Hill?
Time for fools to know it is time to go.
Yup. A Paulaner Double Bock will throw ya's, with Paul's help- back 360 years or degrees. About Face. Thanks. Gads. honesty I no got a brew-problem too. About Good. Neo-cons are Bad Nuts.
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Goldfarb writes:
"This is the first time I've ever gotten to the end of a Gleen Greenwald post,..."
That's supposed to be some snarky insult but it's actually one more indication that he suffers from a serious case of ADD and brainlock.
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ondelette @ 7:38.
First- W.T. My father would rail about MacArthur. Because of Paulaner Rosenberg's insight, and your 'letter' today, I feel flabbergasted. Grateful.
I know my dead dad better.
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ondelette, are you insinuating someone here, me/us, W.T., OliverA, Kitt, Glenn, omelet (green lettuce) in eggs, or that "what's wrong with"....the sweet bell peppers? You do free toe manicures?
I need cured. yep.
More so- lately.
In particular. yup.
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Why not full immunity for *all* felons?
Or at least, ANY Felony committed after a Presidential Order.
Why should the telecoms get to commit all the Presidentially Ordered crimes in this country?
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meh...
the "war on drugs" is not a war on an abstract noun. Thus, it is the sort of thing that could be totally eradicated
I'm sensible of the distinction, but it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. Since "drugs" are nothing more than "chemicals," would a "war on chemicals" make any more sense? A campaign to rid the physical universe of alkaloids?
True, it is concrete, rather than abstract, but this idea of declaring "war on" non-humans seems flawed at its centre, regardless what the indirect object is...
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lupercus
True, it is concrete, rather than abstract, but this idea of declaring "war on" non-humans seems flawed at its centre, regardless what the indirect object is...
-- lupercus
So I take it you're not a devout warrior, wielding your mighty sword or keyboard, in The War on Christmas?
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Differences Are Important
lupercus:
[me]: the "war on drugs" is not a war on an abstract noun. Thus, it is the sort of thing that could be totally eradicated
I'm sensible of the distinction, but it seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. Since "drugs" are nothing more than "chemicals," would a "war on chemicals" make any more sense? A campaign to rid the physical universe of alkaloids?
But that's clearly not what the "war on drugs" means. We are talking about the use of language here, and you can't just substitute one bit of language for another that way and then turn around and criticize the use of the language that you yourself have inserted. That's as dishonest as the rightwingers are.
If they were to actually say, "a war on matter," then that would be meaninigless, except, of course, in the sense of being a later-day gnostic crusade of some sort.
True, it is concrete, rather than abstract, but this idea of declaring "war on" non-humans seems flawed at its centre, regardless what the indirect object is...
Not at all. Metaphoric extensions like this are quite commonplace. Humans have an incredibly large part of their cognitive processing devoted to the inter-specific, particularly the social realm--see, for example, our facial recognition capacities. In folk-theoretic manner, we understand much of the world in terms of personification, and while this is certainly innacurate in any sort of scientific sense, it is clealy a handy heuristic tool that works well enough in many circumstances. The trick is to become sensitive to the different sorts of problems that it can cause.
In particular, the difference between mapping onto concrete vs. abstract nouns is crucial, because not enough of the source domain can carry over in the later case to make meaningful inferences possible.
Ah, heck, I'll have to write a diary about it...