Whenever anything bad happens, liberals are behind it. In fact, I personally am responsible for making it impossible to read the Confederate Yankee site.
BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Although this site had some problems yesterday, also, which were solved by removing Sitemeter. I am so diabolical I blocked my own site.
Michael Grunwald writes for Time that, by any previous predictive measure, the McCain candidacy ought to be toast. However,
It’s also unwise to underestimate the hunger of the media for an exciting race. … The media will try to preserve the illusion of a toss-up; you’ll keep seeing “Obama Leads, But Voters Have Concerns” headlines.
Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei write for the Politico that “McCain gaffes pile up; critics pile on,” but the fact is that McCain’s “gaffes” — which are about big honking geopolitical matters like where Pakistan is — aren’t drawing nearly as much attention as inconsequential stuff Al Gore didn’t even say back in 2000.
The wingnuts are still hyperventilating about John McCain’s “rejected” op ed about Iraq, in which McCain tried to get by with bashing Obama instead of explaining his own position.
Today I learned that a “humor” piece someone wrote about Netroots Nation was “spiked,” and Michelle Malkin says, “So, not only are we not allowed to make fun of Barack Obama, but it appears that liberals in the media have also made ridiculing the left-wing blogosphere off-limits.”
I didn’t go to Netroots Nation this year, I regret, but had I been there I’m sure I could have written something humorous and fun-poking about it. The problem with the “humorous” piece that was ripped down from the website of the Austin American Statesman is that it wasn’t a bit funny. It was just mean. Right-wing humor, in other words. (IMO actual, unvarnished ridicule is rarely funny.)
Malkin has a big chunk of it on her website. But if you want to get the Cliff’s Notes version, see Greg Mitchell at Daily Kos. My impression is that the “writer” of the piece built it entirely from ancient stereotypes of “leftists” without bothering to pull his head out of his ass long enough to notice if the stereotypes still apply.
Genuine wit reveals something real. As Mark Twain said, “Humor is the good natured side of a truth.”
The part of the spiked piece that most offended me is “Pelosi is so far left her title should include (D-Beijing).” Pelosi has shown more cojones, as it were, in speaking out against Beijing and its Tibet policies than any Republican I can think of.
That’s why it wasn’t funny.
Somebody actually spent hours and hours on this.
The controversy over the New Yorker‘s Barack Obama cover once again reveals the humor rift in American politics. Yes, it’s a joke. Yes, I get it. But I don’t think it’s funny. It was a damnfool thing to put on the cover of the New Yorker.
Gary Kamiya complains that we lefties have lost our sense of humor:
After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that “irony was dead.” Seven years later, they’ve been proven right — but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity — it’s been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.
Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits.
I see his point, but I still don’t think the cartoon was funny. Yes, we’re frightened, and we should be. Cartoons have power. The Creature “won” the past two presidential elections in part by caricaturing Al Gore and John Kerry and turning them into cartoons. People often joke about dangerous things, but the jokes aren’t funny when the danger is real and imminent.
In the same way, the New Yorker cover, now being displayed endlessly on cable TV, speaks louder than any efforts by Obama supporters to stop the smears (though it doesn’t help that barackobama.com makes it hard to navigate to the truth-squading). As the author Drew Weston has shown, negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts. With one visual move, the magazine undid months of pro-Obama coverage in its pages.
We live in a nation in which large chunks of the population are irony-challenged. Jonah Goldberg, for example. As BooMan says,
The fact that people like Jonah Goldberg support the literal interpretation of The New Yorker cover explains perfectly why it failed as satire.
I didn’t realize this, but “arrogance” is a synonym for “having a conscience.” No, really. I learned this today from Jammie Wearing Fool.
You may have read about L.F. Eason III, who retired from his job of 29 years at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture rather than obey a government directive. The directive was to fly U.S. and state flags at half mast in honor of the late pox upon humanity known as Jesse Helms. Well, Jammie Wearing Fool had this to say about that.
Such sanctimonious arrogance. Just because he’s a liberal twit with his own opinions, in his mind he gets to decide which state directives to follow.
Oh, my dear ones, read that sentence over and over again, and reflect upon it, because it is the true voice of American conservatism. How dare any of us listen to our own wisdom and act according to our own consciences? We are called upon to muffle our inner voices and do what we’re told. This is the American Way.
However, what Eason did is called “civil disobedience,” and it’s a time-honored American tradition going back to, oh, the Boston Tea Party at least.
Civil disobedience is the willful violation of a law or government directive because that law or directive is unjust. (It is not, as some assume, an act of malicious vandalism to demonstrate one’s unhappiness with government.) Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey a segregation law and sit at the back of a bus was classic civil disobedience. According to Jammie Wearing Fool, Rosa Parks was just being arrogant.
Another time-honored convention of civil disobedience is that if your violation of the law requires punishment, that you accept the punishment and not resist arrest. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. He spent a night in prison. He was prepared to remain in prison, but an aunt paid his poll taxes over his protests, and he was released. He later said “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Mr. Eason wasn’t imprisoned, but he gave up a job, which is a terrible penalty these days when good jobs are hard to come by. I wish him well.
And just because these leftists say such things about Mr. Helms does not make them true.
A valid point, but just because Jammie Wearing Fool doesn’t want to believe them, doesn’t make them false, either.
Sure enough, this haughty Eason is a John Edwards supporter.
Clearly, he needs to be sent to the Rush Limbaugh Re-education Camp, so that he can be relieved of his own opinions and think only state-sanctioned thoughts.
Who knows, before long Silky will sue on his behalf for wrongful termination. You can be sure this Eason will be put on the leftist pedestal of worship for his courage. Heck, they’ll probably have him speak at the convention in Denver.
It did take courage, since it cost him his job, and I salute the man. It shows us there are still people with integrity in the world who don’t take the easy road with the rest of the crowd. If only there were more like him.
A couple of days ago I interviewed Zen teacher Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. And one of the items that came up in our conversation is the extent to which we are socialized into forgetting our own life experiences in favor of an “official” narrative sanctioned by society. We shuffle through life with this sanctioned narrative in our heads about who we are supposed to be and what our lives are supposed to be like, but that narrative may have nothing to do with who we are and what are lives really are or could be. Some people eventually wake up to this, and get real, but others never do.
So Jammie Wearing Fool sees someone who’s awake to who he is and who acts on his conscience, and this looks like “arrogance” to the Fool because it’s overriding the Official Sanctioned Narrative that we’re all supposed to follow and not ask questions about.
Of course, at the other end of the political scale we have the “pro-life” pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions. It seems to me this is also civil disobedience, since pharmacists are licensed by their states to fill prescriptions. If filling birth control prescriptions violates a pharmacist’s conscience I respect that, but the penalty should be loss of his license and a new career path. Instead, such pharmacists want to keep their jobs and play God with other peoples’ lives. I wonder if the Fool finds that arrogant, too?
I urge you to read this op ed by Dick Cavett on depression. This is a man who’s been there.
John McCain jokes about beating his wife.
This one is actually amusing. A researcher with two Ph.D.s working for a super-elite think tank tried to track down the origins of the “Obama is a Muslim” email. After months of painstaking work, the trail eventually led to … Free Republic. She could have just asked us.
The oldest Soto Zen monastery in the U.S. is threatened by wildfires.
Here’s the latest on the Associated Press v. Bloggers smackdown you may have read about elsewhere. The AP has announced an “Excerpt for Web Use” policy that requires payment of fees based on the number of words used. For example, one would owe the AP $12.50 for excerpting as few as five words. Yes, m’loves, that’s 5, as in the number of fingers most people have on one hand. See this article in BetaNews for more details.
Cernig at Newshoggers reports that the AP used 154 words from the rightie blog
Kos says he’s going to excerpt wantonly from the Associated Press all he pleases, nyah nyah nyah.
Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.
The AP doesn’t get to negotiate copyright law. But now, perhaps, they’ll threaten someone who can afford to fight back, instead of cowardly going after small bloggers.
Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use” often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print. But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.
I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. The AP is nuts.
Update: Scholars & Rogues is taking the side of the AP. I just left the following comment there:
Having worked in print media for years, I can tell you that “fair use†often is one big gray area. I have encountered publishers who wanted a permissions fee for use of one sentence from a magazine or newspaper article to be republished in print.
But on the web, if the brief excerpt is fully attributed and linked back to the original article, this is both driving traffic directly to the original article and also making the article more visible to search engines, which is a benefit to the publisher if its ad revenues depend on traffic.
I sometimes find entire blog posts of mine pasted on other blogs, and this annoys the hell out of me even if it’s linked. If the entire article is there, why would anyone feel a need to click on the link back to me? But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about brief excerpts. Now the AP wants to charge bloggers for use of as few as five words. That’s insane.
I write for the New York Times Company’s About.com site, which is a big commercial site, and I can tell you we live and die by traffic. Search engine optimization and traffic driving is the be-all and end-all of that business. If someone excerpts some of my writing with a link, this drives traffic back to my work on About.com and also helps move my writing up to the top of google searches, driving more traffic. Ultimately this makes About.com more money and it makes me more money, which makes me happy.
The New York Times encourages us to sniff out people re-publishing entire articles, and the NYT lawyers will issue takedown orders if such an article is found. But excerpts with links? We like people to publish excerpts with links.
There is indeed a crisis in news reporting now, because newspapers are losing revenue and cutting back on reporters and news bureaus. News gathering costs money, and bloggers do make free use of the work done by news-gatherers.
However, the issue ultimately is one of business models. The old print media business models don’t apply to the Web. How will news gatherers and media make profits in the future? The way things are falling out now suggests traffic and SEO are huge assets that web sites must cultivate to survive.
A couple of days ago, while the wingnuts were trying to make an issue out of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, I wrote,
One might argue the Obama campaign ought to just release the mystery birth certificate to put the rumors to rest. But you know that would just set off a new round of rumors. Some rightie blogger would question the authenticity of the birth certificate, and that very evening Sean Hannity would look into a Faux Nooz camera and intone, why did Barack Obama release a forged birth certificate? Questions are being asked, after all.
Today Kos, who should have known better, posted a birth certificate for Obama without documenting how he got it. Big mistake. I assume it’s authentic, but it’s a big mistake to have played their game and posted it, anyway, especially without provenance.
Already people like this idiot, who apparently has little experience with resized .JPEGs (the distortion he finds suspicious is something I’ve seen a lot in graphics I’ve worked with. I don’t know what causes it but it’s not an indication of photoshopping, in my experience), insinuating the birth certificate is fabricated.
There’s also a certificate/certification flap at Suitably Flip (“Kos Tries To Pass Off Obama’s Birth Certification As Birth Certificate“). Children, if you have a copy of your birth certificate around — a notarized one as needed to get a passport or for other stuff — what does it say? Does it say “certificate” or “certification”?
I dug mine out of a file and lo, it says “certification.” Yet it’s still what is commonly known as a “birth certificate” and, as it is notarized, it’s a legal document that will fill the bill whenever anyone asks me for my “birth certificate.”
The “birth certificate” document that was issued to my parents when I was born has a lot more stuff on it. I have seen it, but I don’t know what happened to it or even if it still exists. But typically (I’ve retrieved birth certificates for my children, born in Ohio and New Jersey, over the years also), what you get if you ask a state for a “birth certificate” is the simplified, notarized “birth certification.”
However, the wingnuts will dance around with the certificate/certification thing for a while and try to make an issue out of it. Just watch ’em.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that I predicted would happen if the birth certificate became public, which is why I said there was no point making it public.
The fact is what we are looking at is trap…the same stupid one the Republican operatives been using for two decades. They create a dilemma:
If you don’t answer their inane questions, it’s an argument from ignorance based inference that something is being hidden. Gotcha.
If you do respond to debunk it, then (just like with Intelligent Design) they simply repeat, repeat, repeat the accusation while ignoring the evidence refuting it. The fact that there is now a “serious disagreement” involving a Presidential candidate shows that it is a serious topic to be reported on widely and the fair and balanced way to present the story is “some say this is true, but slimy politician worried about getting votes denies it.” Gotcha.
Further, once you’ve shown you’ll play their silly little game, they’ll deluge you with made up accusations to tie you up and make sure you can’t stay on message. They will work hard to use up all the oxygen in the room — gotcha.
And so on. The only way to respond is to turn the tables on them and slam them back. If they trap us into perpetually playing defense to their offense, we lose.
Update: See Jack and Jill Politics.
The Booman and Chris Bowers took the crude Meirs-Briggs personality test, and they are both “Architects.” So I took it, and I’m a “Mastermind.” That’s way cooler than “Architect,” I say. They should both defer to me from now on.
