And what's all this shit about children nowadays? 'Save the children!' 'Help the children!' 'What about the children?!' Well you know what I say? FUCK the children! Fuck 'em! They get entirely too much attention already.
Watch out for that youngest kid -- I hear they were planning to slip you a rock instead.
I once worked at a camp for children where the director kept saying her policy on everything was "Is it best for the children?" which quickly became synonymous with "no."
Could the camp instructors grab a quick cigarette while the kids were playing?
"Is it best for the children?"
Could the camp instructors date one another?
"Is it best for the children?"
Could the camp instructors play rowdy games on the lawn while the kids were asleep?
"Is it best for the children?"
Eventually, we began to realize that she didn't necessarily believe in running a totalitarian regime, but she'd become prisoner to a child-centric ideology that didn't even have anything to do with real children or their possible responses to things.
Let us call this the "straw child" argument.
Female bears of any color are not good for children.
II Kings 2:23-25:
"23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, children came out from the city and mocked him. 24 When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two of them."
But is it more important in a case like that to focus on the "straw" or the "child?" If your point is that she perhaps deceived herself, and that an overvaluing of children in our society faciliatated that, doesn't "child" have a lot of competition? legal requirements? national security? safety?
When I was a child, we'd try to catch the semi-adult female counselors dressing and undressing.
We thought that it was good for us as children, since peeping on your own sister is creepy, incestuous, and probably punished by stoning.
"Is it good for the children?" is simply a way to say "I am really looking for an excuse to butt in on your personal life, your toddler could be eating cyanide for all I care."
6: How wonderful that you know about that! Some of my best narratological research is on the problem of Elisha and his cruel "miracles."
6: Spare the bear, spoil the child.
9: That may as well be true, but I don't think the person butting-in knows it's true. In her mind, she's standing up for what's right.
10--It's one of PG Wodehouse's favorite Biblical passages.
12: We were working there long enough that she eventually had to recant, somewhat. She was so obsessed with her policy that it began to create a completely unlivable scenario for everyone who worked there. There was a kind of mutiny, some administrators were fired mid-term, others rebelled openly in ways that were certainly not best for the children, and she ended up getting really drunk one night and yelling, "Fine! I don't even care anymore what's best for the children!"
6: Specifically, they are mocking his bald head, saying, "Go on up [to Bethel], baldy! Go on up, baldy!" If you go through the history of the way people have tried to make what he does with the bear a reasonable response, it makes sense they started just cutting that bit out of the translations.
wow, and I thought jesus was being a dick about that fig tree!
I love 5 so much I want to have its babies.
And then kill them.
13: I've come across Lot and Lot's wife, and Bertie claims to know about Balaam's ass, and there is Bertie's favorite stage direction from Shakespeare: Exit, pursued by a bear, which he illustrated in the margin of his book, but I don't remember Elisha ever coming up. I can't wait till I get my big box of Wodehouse!
Mark Twain used that story a lot, IIRC. There's also a little jingle that ends:
"The little child was not aware
that it had been eaten by the bear".
To be on the safe side, however, I think that there should always be another adult in the room with AWB if children are present, especially mouthy ones. And FL too.
18--When you get your big box o' Wodehouse, take a look at the forward to Summer Lightning. I think it shows up there, though he reuses almost exactly the same joke in a late Wooster novel.
I like the conception of Issachar. It was Rachel's turn with the patriarch, but Leah was feeling lucky that night so she paid Rachel off with mandrakes, and Issachar was conceived. Oddly enough, he didn't amount to anything special -- he was just a generic son-of-Jacob.
I read that story in Sunday School by mistake, because I'd written down the chapter and verse incorrectly.
16: I think the fig tree's actually kind of worse. The fig tree hasn't done anything to offend Jesus; it just doesn't happen to have any figs on it, and with good reason - Mark clearly explains that it "wasn't the season for figs." So Jesus gets annoyed and withers it out of an almost Ahabian sense of spite (think "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me"), which is pretty unsettling when you consider Jesus is supposed to be an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God given flesh.
In Elisha's case, those kids were being annoying. Now, most children are annoying, but not all of them are; they are not compelled by nature to be annoying in quite the same way that a fig tree is compelled by nature to produce figs at certain times. So there was at least a provocation that justified a response, if not necessarily bear-chomping, whereas Jesus is just picking on a fig tree for being a fig tree.
21: But a chance discovery like that makes you go looking for more. I did a lot of my bible reading before twelve, so things I would have noticed only a few years later made no impression on me.
Revised Standard in your youth, John, or King James?
21: It's true, JE, no one ever assigns the good stuff. When I was young, I used to say I was sick so I could stay home from church and read the really bizarre parts of the Bible like II Kings and the apocrypha. Then I could report back that I'd spent all morning reading my Bible.
Things that pique my interest:
1) Does she still have her job?
2) Has Goldstein actually pressed charges? I mean, given that it was a threat, and not just an over-the-line assholish comment.
Also, following up on 22, there's no shortage of annoying children in the world, while we can never have enough delicious figs.
I support a zero tolerance policy toward children. A friend of mine who works at a museum told me that she recently told a group of kids not to the touch the paintings, and they told her in return to go fuck herself. The answer to that is the calabat.
little child was ... been eaten by the bear
B is, if memory serves, for Basil, assaulted by bears.
Yay! Gashlycrumb Tinies! Neville was always my favorite, as having suffered the death that I fear most.
If the calabat is unavailable, the Zidaneabutt is also handy. Or heady.
RSV.
"There's no shortage of annoying children in the world".
Elisha was faced with at least 43 of them, for example.
I am objectively pro-murdering children.
In answer to 25, Cala, go check out JG's site, where he has posted a picture of Frisch and her family along with her email to him telling him that she has received threats and feels personally threatened by having that picture up in the context of this blog spat.
I hate that man with a passion.
Children, behold the monster wild
Has gobbled up the Infant Child!
The Infant Child is not aware
It has been swallowed by a Bear.
Maybe he'll be eaten by bears.
God, with any luck. It's unhealthy how much I loathe someone I've never met who has no real power over anything.
Belloc was a conservative, BTW. Why isn't JG denouncing him for his blase attitude toward kids being eaten by bears? (Or Elisha, for that matter?)
And may I remind possible trolls that Frisch was banned by the weenie liberals at Crooked Timber something like two years ago -- why didn't Goldstein denounce her then? Huh?
32: I just checked out the site (this pisses me off), and it looks like there was a link to a picture of her; which, whatever. But as far as actual threats go, JG definitely wouldn't be on sound footing with the repeated talk about slapping a guy with his cock.
Um. via Armsmasher in another thread, Goldstein's "we'd rather just shoot you" is a lot more of a death threat than what Frisch said. And he said it first.
There was a link; she wrote JG asking him to take it down, which he did (along with a little lecture about how magnanimous he was being), and then he reposted it on the front page to punish her for not being grateful enough. I mean, if what people are exercised about isn't threats per se but rather threats to a child, then JG has pretty much demonstrated that he's quite comfortable with them, thankyouverymuch.
OK. Have to stick with the cock-slapping, then.
I'm gonna have to get offline for the afternoon because for some reason this really winds me up. In terms of actual potential for someone crazy to go apeshit and hurt someone, we have on the one side one troll who says nasty things about someone's kid under her real name, and on the other a pileon by hundreds of anonymous people--some of whom have allegedly sent actual threats via private email--along with a real name, location, and photo.
There's something to that too. I haven't followed this and don't want to; but basically no one on the left likes Frisch anyway, Goldstein's "let's kill all the liberals" rhetoric isn't exactly unique to him, and he's got a long history of completely over-the-line behavior of all types; yet most of his rightwing friends seem to stand by him.
No disagreement with 42 and 43, but that specific quote came before the true ugliness started on either side. Just putting on the troll prophylactic here.
Goldstein used to irritate me a lot, as well, but now this stuff kind of makes me laugh. JG is joke, Frisch is a joke--why does anyone care in either direction?
Maybe that's not accurate. It's more gross than funny. It's like watching a homeless fight video: even if you had nothing to do with it, and even if the homeless guys willingly chose to fight, you can't quite escape feeling morally complicit in something wrong, and wondering whether either of the homeless guys were really capable of making a choice.
See, while the partisan stuff is irritating, it's not as irritating as acting as an apologist for actual threats that are made as a result of whipping up a frenzy over imagined ones.
I can't decide if its the threat thing or the misogyny or the intellectual dishonesty--probably a combo of all three. Along with a healthy proportion of the memory of what it felt like to actually be the target of threats by one of JG's buddies who clearly was unhinged.
Anyway, thank you all for putting up with my ranting. I'm not going to post on this stuff to my own blog because I do not want to stir those waters up again in a place where I'll be easily seen doing it. (Which is again part of the lingering effects of the PD nonsense--I will actively go out of my way to avoid drawing his attention again.)
I've become-- had you noticed?-- fascinated by the JG/S,N thing. I find Goldstein to be completely toolish and unfunny, yet a lot of people will go on about how awesome he is, he's part of the PJM thing...it all strikes me as quite weird, since Protein Wisdom is the kind of site (and comment section) that ought to prompt people to think, wait, what the hell has happened to me, that I'm engaged in this?
Goldstein's "let's kill all the liberals" rhetoric isn't exactly unique to him, and he's got a long history of completely over-the-line behavior of all types; yet most of his rightwing friends seem to stand by him.
I would argue that's precisely the reason his rightwing friends stand behind him. If this kind of opponent-threatening, cock-slapping, journalist-lynching, genocide-hungry talk was as ubiquitous on the left as it is on the right, it would also be relatively unremarkable. There are so many Jeff Goldsteins and Charles Johnsons on the right that venom has just become part of the rhetorical background noise, while Deb Frisch gets banned at Crooked Timber and loses her job in lefty-infested academia.
this kind of opponent-threatening, cock-slapping, journalist-lynching, genocide-hungry talk
If only I could find something like that on my radio!
while Deb Frisch gets banned at Crooked Timber
just to clarify before this gets confusing; these are two wholly separate affairs. Deb's comments at CT were not particularly awful in and of themselves. She was banned mainly for the volume of unacceptable comments, because it became logistically burdensome to delete all of them.
48.--I think it's more subtle than that. A few of the people who follow and occasionally comment on Goldstein's blog are people I know to be basically decent from Obsidian Wings.
Goldstein is all about pseudo-ironic deniability. Even the really violent insults are so hyperbolic that I think people who already trend that way can read them as comedy.
And Goldstein's stupid lit-crit argument about radical intentionality convinces his followers that he's an unappreciated genius (I do think the only people who read through his opus were the theory boys at the Valve).
Ok, ok we all agree that killing toddlers is teh roxx, there's no need to go on and on about it. Instead, let's talk about how I can disrupt what I should do at tonight's Colbert Report taping. The guest is, disappointingly, Tony Hawk.
Irony's just another word for "I really do want to punch you, but I'm not quite ready to assert that yet," sometimes. I mean, to make jokes about sodomizing dogs, you still have to think about sodomizing dogs.
Go dressed as a bear?
Doesn't Andrew Sullivan identify as a bear now? What's his policy on eating children?
53 gets it exactly right. Jokes about killing and cock-slapping your opponents serve to dehumanize them, I expect.
Yeah, but then there are all of those weird posts in which he just snippets a bit of ventriloquized dialogue for people he hates.
57 was to 53. In other words, I agree with the reductio analysis, but it's interesting--if sad--to see how people might get sucked into JG world.
I read his mainpage posts every couple of days for a little stretch at one point. It's pretty easy for a hostile liberal to get to the point where every single word, including "a" and "the," seems like an insinuated insult.
Never commented there, I don't think.
Jokes about killing and cock-slapping your opponents serve to dehumanize them, I expect.
But so what? We do stuff like that, too. If not specifically dehumanizing them, we draw out less than savory inferences from the various things they do.
It irritates me that Dems/liberals/whatever seem to believe that if only we could all just sit in a share circle and talk, really talk, everything would be all right. (NB: I can't really see anything that Weiner's said that could reasonably be said to provoke my reaction; I don't care, I'm posting it anyway. Viva mcmanus!)
SCMT, have I said lately that I think everyone who voted for Bush in '04 was doing something evil and inexcusable, and that I can't think of a single redeeming feature that could have led a reasonable non-anti-abortion person to vote for him? And that the world would be a better place if everyone who did so were disenfranchised, though of course this is not a plan that can be put into action? And that y'all were way too conciliatory to IamSAHM; a reasonable person cannot look at the rhetoric of each side and fail to be more repulsed by the right?
But a big section of the right seems to have signed on to actual fascism—I mean, the stuff about how reporters for the New York Times should be prosecuted or intimidated for printing stuff they don't like—and I think the violent rhetoric has primed them for that.
60: Ah, now there's the sweet music that makes me tingly. And I agree about the rhetoric. I just think that it has a much longer and deeper history than, JG, or Rush, or anyone who is still alive. And we're just not going to be able to extirpate it.
we can never have enough delicious figs.
Nor naughty figs.
52 - The Colbert Report is a fun taping. Much better than The Daily Show. Be sure to go pretty early or you might get bumped.
It irritates me that Dems/liberals/whatever seem to believe that if only we could all just sit in a share circle and talk, really talk, everything would be all right.
Speaking of Obsidian Wings, I hear they have a very reasonable new poster to add a touch of very reasonable conservatism to their very reasonable discourse.
60: I smelled SAHM's blood. I only seemed conciliatory.
65: I have this funny feeling that Timmy won't agree with you on that one, though he might say something inflammatory about Dixie and the Likud.
No, I actually do agree with #65; via Henley, I've been a fan of Olmsted for a while. I don't really know how to describe what I like about him, except to say that I trust his intellectual integrity more than most.
Do you really think the pro-Likud, ex-Dixie comment was inflammatory? I tried to describe the two groups pretty narrowly and charitably, and I'm not aware of any of the major players mentioned who fall outside of that grouping.
In reference to SCMT's question in that ObWi thread, Danzinger is Armed Liberal, and he voted for Bush. He blogs at Winds of Change, and he seems to be the same kind of Democrat as Dean Esmay. The Democrats didn't leave him, he left the Democrats.
I think it's inflammatory in the following sense: other than Martin Peretz and maybe Marshall Wittman, members of the DLC and TNR staff wouldn't like being described as the leaders of an alliance of pro-Likud/ex-dixie people.
I don't really know how to describe what I like about him, except to say that I trust his intellectual integrity more than most.
Could it be that he tends to sound eloquent and well-mannered while cheerleading for a pointless and bloody occupation instead of just making with the cock-slapping jokes? Dressing up an ugly idea in nice-sounding language doesn't make it any better. Generally speaking, people like Olmstead are why I'm grateful for the existence of people like Goldstein.
70: I would think Kaplan would be OK with being described as pro-Likud, and I think it's been something of an open secret that Peretz's editorial control is likely to be at its strongest when the magazine addresses ME politics. AFAIK, the one thing that connects Peretz to his new investors, for example, is the support for an aggressive Israeli stance towards the Palestinians. As for ex-dixie: I was thinking specifically of Zengerle, who's posted a couple of defenses of Southerners flying the Dixie flag. The DLC was explicitly formed (at least from wiki knowledge) for the purpose of advancing Southern Dem interests, and I don't believe it has the protection of African-American interests as anything like a major policy goal. Indeed, I believe that some of them are still quite excited by Clinton's Sista Soljah moment. The terms "pro-Likud" and "ex-Dixie" might offend that crowd, but I don't think they'd argue about the included descriptions.
71: He's really not a cheerleader. His doubts about the Administration, the Iraq war, Padilla, etc. are much longer-standing than Henke's, for example.
72: Not in the "look at all the schools, freedom blossoms in the desert" sense, but certainly in the "we must stay and fight or Very Bad Things will happen" sense. And while he's had his "doubts" about the administration, they weren't enough to stop him from voting to give it another four years, mostly on the basis that he just really, really didn't like John Kerry. And while he's had "doubts" about the war, they came well after the United States had already invaded the damn place and the occupation had gone to hell, and even then he thinks we need to stay the course in the middle of a civil war.
When I think about whether a given pundit or a blogger or whatever is worth reading, there has to be some consideration for the notion of whether or not they're actually right. Andrew Olmstead is not useful to me if he comes to the right conclusion three years too late (and after any number of lefties, liberals and libertarians have done the same). That he's eloquent and well-spoken and doesn't make bizarre sexual insinuations about people's toddlers doesn't make him worth reading; it makes him that token conservative you can point to so and say "even the conservative Andrew Olmstead thinks..." That he comes across as a nice person might mean that he is, indeed, a nice person, but the problem with conservatism isn't that conservatives are mean, it's that conservatism is wrong.
What's shitty about the "ironic" venom is the intellectual dishonesty. Let's be assholes, and if we get called on it, we're only joking. At least with the sober righties, the folks at ObWings or here or even Volokh, for crying out loud, they will actually come out and state an opinion and if someone points out an error, they'll own up to it or argue about it. It's the subject-changing and constant resorting to ad hominems that's absolutely infuriating with the JGs. That and the glee they take in being infuriating, as if pissing people off were some kind of actual substantive argument rather than just the result of being an asshole.
So that's my answer to 59. It's not that "everything will be okay" if we can just talk (there are tons of things that I'm sure we'll never reach agreement on, and that's fine). It's that everything will be better if we can just have the integrity to actually have an argument and stand behind it, instead of simply delighting in throwing bombs and deflecting attention from actual real issues and actually really discussing them.
"we must stay and fight or Very Bad Things will happen"
As I think I said over at ObiWi, I'm more or less in that camp myself. I just don't think we should fight much.
When I think about whether a given pundit or a blogger or whatever is worth reading
I don't look to conservative bloggers much for analysis or news, except to test the robustness of explanations from my side. I do look to them to find angles of approach for possible conversion. I do look to them to try and sort out what sort of characteristics define Republicans with whom I can do a deal. "Libertarian" (or "schmibertarian") seems to be one of them.
I do look to them to try and sort out what sort of characteristics define Republicans with whom I can do a deal.
What kind of deal are you envisioning here? Is this the sort of deal where we "all just sit in a share circle and talk, really talk," and everything turns out all right?
76: More like, "What do I have to give you to be allowed to have the feds burn South Carolina (and only SC!) to the ground without any objections?" I'm more or less OK with that share circle, if you know where it is. Basically, I want to know who is out there that I can trade with.
Mr. Jones,
The question is whether Olmsted is correct or not. Not Olmstead.
Best,
Andrew
Rational argument was possible until mid-afternoon today. Then, *poof*. Someone forgot to re-register with GoDaddy, or what have you.
I take it that the SomeCallMeTim of 59 is not the same person as the SomeCallMeTim of 77.
Basically, I want to know who is out there that I can trade with.
What's being traded here, exactly? It doesn't appear to be support for Democratic alternatives to failed Republican administrations.
Becks was right in 64, as I've learned to my consternation. Though the actual outcome is that we guaranteed seats for a future show, rather than the first come, first serve seats we had for tonight. And since I didn't want to see tonight's guest, I'm not even sure this is sub-optimal.
I thought we were talking about the guy who designed Central Park.
Zombie hosted shows are also first come, first served.
What's being traded here, exactly? It doesn't appear to be support for Democratic alternatives to failed Republican administrations.
I'm not that concerned with the clothing worn by the people in any Administration, but more by the culture that produces and sustains them. So I worry more about a narrowed discussion that reads out (for example) the realists on foreign policy than that we might follow a Scowcroft rather than a Dem foreign policy expert.
I don't mind if the Republicans win in the future, as long as it isn't the set of nutters that gave us this Republican Administration. I honestly don't understand these people or what they mean by "America." So my very limited desire is to be governed by a group of people I can understand. I'll worry about the rest once we get there.
As far as #59 goes, I can't remember what motivated it--probably a sense that someone, somewhere was reaching too far across the aisle. I don't ultimately mind if someone's interests are being fucked, and if they're angry about it; I just don't want it to be the interests I care about.
81 - Oh dear sweet washerdreyer. I hate to tell you but those "VIP tickets" you got that guarantee you attendance at a future show? You can use them right after you visit the dog your parents sent to live on a farm in the country. Make a day out of it.
(That was our experience with The Daily Show, at least. Two of our party got bumped and were given the VIP come-back-another-time tickets with a "special" phone number. Nobody ever answered the "special" phone and the people at the regular number wouldn't rebook them. They tried for about 6 months and then finally just resubmitted their names through the regular channels.)
[pedantry]John in 33 - I'm pretty sure that the Bear devouring Child poem is by Housman not by Belloc (dunno whether Housman was conservative, liberal or not - but his
Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to Man
is an all time classic) [/pedantry]
As daniel says in 50, Frisch was banned less for content than volume - but also for sockpuppeting. She started to post silly/offensive comments under CT posters' names, and it all got a bit tiresome.
My only prior exposure to Deb Frisch was at Steve Verdon's, where she managed to do the near-impossible and make the regulars there seem like the rational ones. If her teaching bore even the slightest resemblance to her internetting, I can't imagine how she got hired in the first place.
86: My friend whose name the tickets were in got an e-mail today with a list of possible dates and a request the he reply with his three maximally-preferred dates in preference order. It is pretty silly that they call them VIP tickets though, isn't it? How does missing out on a previous performance make one a VIP?
89 - Agreed. And I'm glad for your sake that the Colbert Report seems to have their act together more than TDS. Much better taping all-around, I'd say.