Super Rhetoric

generic question answer

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:59:10 GMT

who would i invite to the proverbial imaginary dinner

1. Sigmund Freud (for laffs, plus he'd bring mad drugs)
2. Laura Ingalls Wilder (badass bitch)
3. Oscar Wilde (he's probably good at awkward parties)

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:44:56 GMT

I just wrote a lovely screed against the useless stupid neandertal sacks of shit that "represent" the state that my personal economic crisis brought about by the national economic crisis has forced me to call "home": Senators Graham and DeMint. The thing that makes their idiocy totally reasonable is the fact that people in this state do not go to colleges or universities - they go to football team theme parks with dormatories, frat houses, and ostensibly unused libraries. They probably don't even know who Keynes is, probably have never read a word of Marx. And yet there they are, making decisions that only intelligent people should be trusted with.
I'm not posting it though because "small, weak central government" Republicans love to spy on people. I'll just let Obama say it for me, in sum: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/blogs/phlog/OBAMA_IGNORANT.mp3

May both Senators have career-ending gay sex scandals.

transformation/transferrence

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:07:31 GMT

transformation is a fair-use principle that may save my ass in the future
think duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q

It's Backhanded Compliments in a NYT Op-Ed Time!

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:03:39 GMT

No Ordinary Woman
Judith Warner

In 1977, Bella Abzug, the former congresswoman and outspoken feminist, said, “Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.”

In other words: women will truly have arrived when the most mediocre among us will be able to do just as well as the most mediocre of men.

By this standard, the watershed event for women this year was not Hillary Clinton’s near ascendancy to the top of the Democratic ticket, but Sarah Palin’s nomination as the Republicans’ No. 2.

For Clinton was a lifelong overachiever, a star in a generational vanguard who clearly took to heart the maxim that women “must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” and in so doing divorced herself from the world of the merely average. In that, she was not unlike Barack Obama — taxed by his race to be twice as reassuring, twice as un-angry, twice as presidential as any white candidate.

Mediocrity, after all, is the privilege of those who have arrived.

Palin is a woman who has risen to national prominence without, apparently, even remotely being twice as good as her male competitors. On the contrary, her claim to fame lies in her repudiation of Clinton-type exceptionalism.

She speaks no better — and no worse — than many of her crowd-pleasing male peers, dropping her g’s, banishing “who” in favor of “that,” issuing verbal blunders that linger just long enough to make their mark in the public mind before they’re winked away in staged apologies.

She is a woman who is able to not only get by but also be quickly promoted on the kinds of attributes that were once the exclusive province of unremarkable white men: rapport, the right looks or connections, an easy sort of familiarity.

In the days leading up to Palin’s pick as vice-presidential nominee, according to an article in The New York Times Magazine today, Rick Davis, who is John McCain’s campaign manager, said a friend had told him how best to choose a running mate: “You get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V.P.”

Donny Deutsch, the ad executive turned talk show host, put it less elegantly on CNBC right after the Republican convention. “Women want to be her, men want to mate with her,” he said, describing Palin as a “new creation that the feminist movement has not figured out in 40 years.”

And this was the crux of the Palin Phenomenon: she was a breakthrough woman who threatened no one.

The McCain crowd would have you believe that Palin is the perfect representation of the post-feminist woman, a candidate whose very existence marks the end of feminism — of the old “liberal feminist agenda,” as McCain himself has put it — and the start of a more global kind of triumph for the great mass of women.

Just as some young women in recent years have argued that appearing topless on “Girls Gone Wild” is an act of sexual liberation, putting an untested Alaskan governor on the road to the White House was spun as a sign of the arrival of real, hot-blooded women into the mainstream of power.

But the finer points of what it takes for real women to make progress in seizing power don’t seem much to trouble Palin.

“Someone called me a ‘redneck woman’ once, and you know what I said back? ‘Why, thank you,’” she told the country singer Gretchen Wilson at a recent Republican rally.

I guess Palin has never seen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” music video, which, in addition to images of an attractive Wilson driving a variety of fuel-inefficient vehicles, features a couple of stripper-styled babes dancing in cages, one of which is made of chains.

With her five children, successful political career, $1.2 million net worth and beauty pageant looks, Sarah Palin is really not an average woman, much less the worthy schlemiel envisioned by Abzug. She’s actually, as Colin Powell carefully said, quite “distinguished” — for her looks, her grace and charm, her ability to connect with an audience, her ambition and her drive. Those are admirable, even enviable qualities. But the American public, defecting from the McCain ticket in a slow bleed, is clearly not convinced that they amount to vice-presidential qualifications.

Seems like “real America” wants something more than a wife, mother or girlfriend in a female political leader.

Maybe we’ve come a long way after all. .

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:51:04 GMT

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:52:25 GMT

please kill me if i ever become the kind of person who not only is married but refers to my spouse as my "hubby"
seriously what the fuck is up with that

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 06:17:22 GMT

never go with a hippie to a second location

Being rude on the internet

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:11:19 GMT

is lame

Hidden Anti-Semitical Comment of the Day

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:23:27 GMT

The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death

By THOMAS FRANK
September 10, 2008; Page A13

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler.

"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler, who must have penned that mellifluous line when not writing his more controversial stuff. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt.

There's no evidence that Mrs. Palin shares the trademark Pegler bloodlust -- except maybe when it comes to moose and wolves. Nevertheless, the red-state myth that Mrs. Palin reiterated for her adoring audience owes far more to the venomous spirit of Pegler than it does to Norman Rockwell.

Small town people, Mrs. Palin went on, are "the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars." They are authentic; they are noble, and they are her own: "I grew up with those people."

But what really defines them in Mrs. Palin's telling is their enemies, the people who supposedly "look down" on them. The opposite of the heartland is the loathsome array of snobs and fakers, "reporters and commentators," lobbyists and others who make up "the Washington elite."

Presumably the various elite Washington lobbyists who have guided John McCain's presidential campaign were exempt from Mrs. Palin's criticism. As would be former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a "senior adviser" to the Dickstein Shapiro lobby firm, who hymned the "Sarah Palin part of the party" thus: "Their kids aren't going to go to Ivy League schools. Their sons leave high school and join the military to serve our country. Their husbands and wives work two jobs to make sure the family is sustained."

Generally speaking, though, when husbands and wives work two jobs each it is not merely because they are virtuous but because working one job doesn't earn them enough to get by. The two-job workers in Middle America aren't spurning the Ivy League and joining the military straight out of high school just because they're people of principle, although many of them are. It is because they can't afford to do otherwise.

Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric, and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those "reporters and commentators" with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?

No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town's mortal enemies.

Without raising an antitrust finger they have permitted fantastic concentration in the various industries that buy the farmer's crops. They have undone the New Deal system of agricultural price supports in favor of schemes called "Freedom to Farm" and loan deficiency payments -- each reform apparently designed to secure just one thing out of small town America: cheap commodities for the big food processors. Richard Nixon's Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz put the conservative attitude toward small farmers most bluntly back in the 1970s when he warned, "Get big or get out."

A few days ago I talked politics with Donn Teske, the president of the Kansas Farmers Union and a former Republican. Barack Obama may come from a big city, he admits, but the Farmers Union gives him a 100% rating for his votes in Congress. John McCain gets a 0%. "If any farmer in the Plains States looked at McCain's voting record on ag issues," Mr. Teske says, "no one would vote for him."

Now, Mr. McCain is known for his straight talk with industrial workers, telling them their jobs are never coming back, that the almighty market took them away for good, and that retraining is their only hope.

But he seems to think that small-town people can be easily played. Just choose a running mate who knows how to skin a moose and all will be forgiven. Drive them off the land, shutter their towns, toss their life chances into the grinders of big agriculture . . . and praise their values. The TV eminences will coo in appreciation of your in-touch authenticity, and the carnival will move on.

Source

things that always make me cry EVERY TIME

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:33:57 GMT

-bald chemo kids (they are way too young to understand what the fuck is happening to them)
-parents who try not to cry when talking about their dead children (particularly fathers who are talking about a political or social cause related to their child's death)
-baby animals with their mommies (even if it's not sad)
-thinking about my mom being sad/scared/in danger/alone
-photographs of angry, helpless civilians in war-torn countries (mostly because the injustice is so blatant and yet i can do nothing to change it)
-abused animals
-children who are sad because someone older than them is not treating them well
-old people who cry (for any reason)
-helpless people being taken advantage of by those who should be helping them
-republicans (but i only cry on the inside)

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:25:33 GMT

I really. Really. Really.
Hate the word "fashionista."

And the fact that the bitches behind Marchesa actually have jobs.