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July 12, 2006

"march together for life" steps on rake

Sometimes political comedy is nuanced and subtle, and other times a group called "March Together for Life" puts up a post called "Murder Without Conscience" in which they take serious issue with a seven-year-old Onion opinion piece entitled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" Then six hundred people line up to kick them.

On another note, the subhead at the March Together for Life blog is

We will end abortion through our unity and the monthly call for life.
Having had it spring to mind through no fault of my own, I am now desperately trying to un-think the notion that "monthly call for life" is their euphemism for periods.

UPDATE: A thousand and forty three people. I'm amazed that folks are still coming up with points that hadn't already been made in the first thousand comments, but there it is.

July 10, 2006

the legitimacy of partisanship

Op-ed from the New Republic's Jonathan Chait on this year's fractious Connecticut senatorial race, here. Given that the left-netroots have for the most part thrown TNR under the bus during this whole business - Markos Zuniga even referred to them as part of the "vast RIGHT wing conspiracy", which made me slowly blink twice - he's unsurprisingly harsh:

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn't a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.
Now, while I don't disagree with his conclusion, it is worth remembering that Chait is the same man who wrote a vicious and extremely entertaining blog called "Diary of a Dean-o-phobe" during the 2004 primary season.

(Ah, good times:

Dean tries to spin his outburst as evidence of his being "willing to say things that are not popular." But the problem wasn't that Dean said something unpopular. The content of what he said was fine--"EEEEEEYYYYAAAHHHH!!!!" is not, per se, an unpopular sentiment--but the form was problematic.
I'm willing to stipulate that that's perfectly acceptable intra-party wrangling, because it's funny, and the anti-Lieberman campaign is just spittle-flecked and depressing. But I have a feeling that as criteria go that's a touch on the shallow side.)

north by norquist

The always-engaging Grover Norquist does some community outreach at the American Prospect. While finessing his positions on immigration (essentially "I would like to punch Tom Tancredo in the face.") and gay marriage, he comes up with this inspiring anecdote:

I think it's a mistake to write off any group. I was in Romania, they're having elections in four weeks, and I was organizing the non-communists. And I had them write on a blackboard Who's Voting for Us, Who's Voting for Them. And they had to list ... understand why everybody was. They had the gypsies voting for the communists, and I said, "OK, I get why the Communists are voting for the Communists, and the Army and the police and the guys with government jobs, but why the gypsies?" If I were a gypsy I'd want to live outside touchy-feely U.S. law, much less harsher communist law. And they said, "Well, the communists buy them liquor and then they vote for them." And I said, "We can do this; George Washington did this, it's OK." And they said, "No, the gypsies are scum and we won't talk to them." And I said, "OK, I guess you're not getting the gypsy vote then."
My proposal: make this a reality show. Send Grover Norquist around the world to advise political groups, license something by the Ramones for the theme song, and suddenly C-SPAN has higher ratings than that Frankenstein network that used to be the WB.

July 9, 2006

apparently teaching psychology can make a person quite tense

There are a number of anonymous academics in this harsh, damp, endless world of blogs, virtually all of whom update more often than I do. I can certainly understand why the practice is so widespread: even when there's no particularly good reason to blog anonymously, there's still an undeniable sense that you don't want a collection of personal nonsense showing up on page one when your students Google you. It'd be even worse than that awkward feeling you get when you run into them in bars.

Anyway, that's off the point. The reason I'm typing this is to say that, no matter how you feel about anonymity, avoiding your students in bars, and so forth, one thing's for sure: doing this is a really, really terrible idea.

UPDATE: In response, a constructive outlook on the world is proposed:

Deb, these right-wing terrorists will never, ever stop attacking you; you don't talk nicely to rabid animals or ask them to please stop biting you, you execute the damned things.

They're hate junkies, and the best way to deal with them -- other than taking a baseball bat to their heads -- is to overdose them with hate.

Now, this I have to take issue with. Surely the best approach would be to synthesize some kind of "hate methadone," perhaps from the journalism of Dale Peck.

(Incidentally, the folks who are determined to interpret Frisch's original comments as a serious threat against the life of Goldstein's kid are milking this one way too hard. "Gotcha" doesn't take long to become a fairly tedious game, especially when you're playing it with someone who clearly has very serious problems interacting with other people. The woman is deranged: how much outrage is it really possible to feel about this fact?)

July 7, 2006

what rhymes with "precious bodily fluids"?

Still in administrative limbo, which I'm going to use as my excuse for never updating this damn thing. Picture me floating in a fuzzy grey space, a waiting room of the soul, typing this at the rate of one keypress every two hours. There's something like four separate levels of bureaucracy to pass through before I can get to the "buy plane ticket" stage, which means I'm probably going to be buying that plane ticket the day before my contract starts. Before that, assuming my bona fides check out back on the other side of the Pacific, I'm going to have to present myself at the US consulate and do God knows what to convince them that I should be let into the country in time for the start of fall semester. Novelty Yankee Doodle costume? Recitation of anti-Communist limericks? There's a twenty-three-day waiting list (and a $130 fee) to get past the front desk, so I'll have time to come up with something.

Meanwhile, though, I'm stuck in Sydney, which might be one of the best places in the world in which to be stuck.

To pass the time, I've become obsessed with sites like this. I've learned that, when it comes to moving to the US, there's a very fine line between being a unskilled immigrant who's going to laze around and be a burden on the state, and being a skilled immigrant who's going to steal jobs from red-blooded Americans. The trick is to have just the right amount of skills.

UPDATE: However, the folks behind H1-B Visa Sucks! should certainly be apprehensive about competition from foreign website designers. I mean, damn.