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LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSIONPosted by Ron Coleman on November 26, 2007
Mike Huckabee is trying to separate himself from the pack as the hour gets late by going after the Saudis.
Probably too little, too late. But I like when good candidates add legitimate issues to the campaign this way. I have my view, but this is a legitimate issue.
Posted in Orient, Politics and Poker | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 25, 2007
NewsBusters prints this excerpt from the transcript of NPR’s review of “Redacted” (via Instapundit):
The rape scene has led to a familiar charge, that De Palma is a misogynist who relishes violence against women. . . .
Another charge is that he’s anti-American or anti-troops. But it’s an act of sympathy to suggest that soldiers on their third tours of duty in a place where they have no knowledge of the culture, where they can’t tell who’s on their side and who wants to blow them up, stand a good chance of losing both their moral compass and their minds. Here, and in “Casualties of War,” De Palm[a] is dramatizing the idea that even decent people in such circumstances can convince themselves they’re entitled to do anything.
Here lies the road to the complete inversion of morality. As an “act of sympathy” for the troops, DePalma is supposedly taking the position that even the worst actors in the world — U.S. troops committing atrocities while on an imperialistic mission — are no worse than morally exempt from blame for such atrocities because of the moral incoherence all around them. The logic is unassailable:
- Bad guys might be good guys.
- Good guys might be bad guys.
- Hey, this is hard!
- Let’s rape someone.
This aligns well with the leftist conception that people the world ’round do not make their own choices at all, but rather are zombies. In America, choiceless voters are under the sway of Rush Limbaugh, religious fundamentalism, and Karl Rove. In the Middle East, suicide bombers are compelled to murder housewives and schoolchildren by their plight or by their rage. But it is relatively novel to see the left apply this to the faceless, heartless automatons of the U.S. military, even in the commission of their fictional outrages. Naturally we can expect NPR to lobby for the release of all soldiers incarcerated for improper conduct in the Iraqi theater immediately.
Soon we will recognize that everything — everything! — is George W. Bush’s fault, and that individual conscience is merely a bourgeois construct of kapital. It is so much simpler.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Medialites, O Mores! | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 25, 2007
Taking the Lincoln Tunnel into the City is a lot more direct, but coming up town on Hudson Street via the Holland is almost always far more interesting. And then some.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 25, 2007
William Teach makes a compelling case.
Posted in Americana, Medialites, Sisyphus | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 23, 2007
The Weekly Standard (via Glenn) on left-wing denial of the improvemement in Iraq:
Of course, the left-wing nutroots live in their own self-contained universe.
The real question: are congressional Democrats really going to stay in the bunker with them through November 2008?
I think there’s another question: Whither the mainstream media? Answer that one, and then see where the one posed by the Standard goes.
Posted in Medialites, Orient, Politics and Poker | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 22, 2007
James Lileks can’t stand them!
Eat them, not me! Can’t you tell by my posture and expression that I identify with you? I’m better than those
stupid birds. They deserve to be eaten. Here – let me go get you some gravy. Later, I can whistle Mozart, if you like. I love Mozart, don’t you? All of us smart bipeds love Mozart! Those stupid birds couldn’t sing two bars of “Turkey in the Straw.” Me, I’m not fond of the tune – it’s a little simple, don’t you think? Of course, if you appreciate folk music as an expression of the people – there was an article in Life magazine about that last week, did you read it? – then I suppose it has its place, but frankly I just think turkey culture is just too low, too base – yes yes, I’ll shut up, of course! Anything you say. Shut up it is.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Originally published at Dean’s World, Thanksgiving 2006:
A million essays and blog posts will explore the topic of “being thankful” in the next 24 hours.
I’d say, based on a perusal of a Google search I just ran seeking a link to add to this post on my blog, that at least 80% of them talk about “being thankful” with no reference whatsoever to Whom (or even whom) one should be thankful.
It is an utter logical dead end. You cannot, by definition, have “thanks” without an object of thanks. It is meaningless.
thank
TRANSITIVE VERB:
thanked , thank·ing , thanks1. To express gratitude to; give thanks to: He thanked her for the gift.
2. To hold responsible; credit: We can thank the parade for this traffic jam.
You can’t have free-floating thanks. You can thank her for the gift, you can thank the parade for the traffic. You can’t just thank, however.
You can eat turkey. You can watch football. You get together with family and you can call it Thanksgiving. But not thanksgiving.
Whom are you thanking this Thanksgiving?
Posted in Americana, Faith and Works | 5 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
If there is one thing about Ron Paul you should never doubt, it is his ability to pull in the conflicting and monstrous fringes within our political system.
He doesn’t mean that in a good way.
Posted in Americana, Politics and Poker | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Michelle Obama, the highly accomplished wife of Senator Barack Obama, and I are Princeton classmates. Did you know that?
Me neither, until fairly recently.
I’m quite sure she doesn’t know it even now! She’s got plenty on her mind and, I’m guessing, like most of you doesn’t know where I went to school. And why should she? Unlike yours truly, Mrs. Obama distinguished herself academically,
graduating cum laude, and therefore must have spent a lot of time in the library, where I was not. (I graduated sine laude, as I have mentioned before, and spent a lot of time on the radio.)
I am sure we never met at Old Nassau, because in four years there I had personal contact with, I believe, six black people, maybe five, and I remember them pretty distinctly; a few of them were (and are) my friends.
Not that there were so few blacks at Princeton, but in those days blacks mainly segregated themselves at what was then a voluntary-membership residential college called the Princeton Inn College or “PIC.” It was named after a defunct hotel adjacent to the campus which the university had acquired and turned into residences, dining and social space. Over the years became the place for black undergraduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the space was somewhat isolated from the main part of the campus, though legend had it that the accomodations were superb. In four years, I recall stepping in there only once. I had no business there. I don’t really know if Michelle lived there, and have no way of finding out.
Not long after we graduated — well, shucks, not really “we,” right?; I graduated and also Michelle did — alumnus Steve Forbes gave Princeton a gazillion dollars in honor of his father Malcolm Forbes and they renamed PIC after the old man. A short time later Princeton reshuffled its residential and dining options, made the colleges non-voluntary for underclassmen, and desegregated them.
Not then, however. Michelle Robinson found the Princeton experience to be one that only enhanced her racial identity:
At Princeton, where she followed her brother by two years, she wrote her senior sociology thesis on race, titling it “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”
“One of the points I was making, which is a reality for black folks in majority-white environments, is it is a very isolating experience. Period. The question is how do people deal with that isolation,” she says now. “Does it make you cling more to your own community or does it make you try to assimilate more?”
As an adult, working in public, private, and political worlds, Obama emphasizes the nuts and bolts of her undergraduate thinking, while also talking of grander goals that infuse Team Obama’s quest. She issues a challenge, equally to Chicago, to elite universities, and the nation: “It is incumbent on us, whether we are in city government or sitting around the corporate boardroom or in policy or education, to have critical masses of diverse voices at the table.
“At many of the top universities, we still struggle with that. … The question for Princeton is what does the ratio of underrepresented minority students look like today? What about faculty? What about top administrators? Those are the questions we have to continue to ask as a country.”
I actually didn’t quite get the answer to the question posed in the first paragraph — “Does [racial isolation in a mainly white environment] make you cling more to your own community or does it make you try to assimilate more?” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Americana | 6 Comments »
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
That’s the punchline of an old Jewish joke about a blessing that is part of the traditional thrice-daily prayers, which begins, “On the saintly (i.e., the tzadikim), and on the pious (the hasidim)
…,’ asking for a special blessing in their merit. Why, the jape goes, doesn’t the blessing go in the opposite order — “on the hasidim, and on the tzadikim“? Answer: “Never start with a hasid!”
The New York Court of Appeals agrees, refusing to get involved in a succession fight among rival groups of one of the largest hasidic groups, the Satmar hasidim. What does that have to do with LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®? Well, of course, it recalls our discussion of the still-active trademark dispute among rivals in the Bobov hasidic group. And it reinforces our argument: Secular courts, and other agencies such as the Patent and Trademark Office, will be well advised not let their good offices be part of this “fun.”
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
