brave progressive: “Yes, but how can you prove it’s Monday? And don’t go citing western calendars, either—because those are “evidence” of nothing more than how widespread the western hegemonic meme of dividing the week into 7 days has become. And besides, calendars don’t prove that, from the very first, some proto-fascist didn’t put ‘Monday’ on, say, Wednesday, just to cement his authority and control over the PEOPLE!”
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
You lying neocon bastard.
“Because, you know, it was always Friday night before the fascists imposed their “calendars” on us.”
BUSH LIED THE DAY OF NONES DIED!!!!
I go by the “Juche” Calendar. Just to show how open minded I am.
It’s monday because we say it is.
bored with calling Bush a liar and spinning tales of Halliburton perfidy and greed
Hey, that’s just a strawman! Progressives never said Bush lied! You’re caricaturing your opponents! You don’t want a real debate!
first, they came for the weekdays and I said nothing because…hell, it’s not like I’m going to start working for the man.
The progressive in this case brings up a pretty good point here: When are we gonna go metric? Don’t tell me a 1000 second day (a kilosecond), a 10 day week (a deciyear) and 1000 day year (a kiloday) doesn’t make good sense.
It’s Tuesday – It has always been Tuesday.
How many lights do you see?
“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”
— Pete Cetera
bored with calling Bush a liar and spinning tales of Halliburton perfidy and greed
Hey, that’s just a strawman! Progressives never said Bush lied! You’re caricaturing your opponents! You don’t want a real debate!
Hey,man. It’s whatever day you want it to be. Here have another hit off this pipe.
Robert Lamm, actually.
Hey, and don’t get all uppity about what century it is, either, white boy! We in academe are no longer allowed to say AD or BC because You-Know-Who is mentioned in those seemingly innocent initials, and won’t that offend the other You-Know-Whos? Actually, so far nobody has complained, but they could.
So now we say BCE, as in Before Common Era, because you know everybody had something really important happen during that time, didn’t they?
NO?
Racist!
And what’s with the verification word “evidence”? We don’t need evidence and you are being insensitive to imply such.
Robert Lamm, actually.
Pedant.
Now GET BACK TO WORK ON THAT PLANET!
Been tried, by the French. They even did metric time.
I’m working for the weekend.
Please tell me when it is.
Don’t tell me a 1000 second day (a kilosecond)
24x60x60=86400 seconds (standard) per day.
So one second (new) would equal 86.4 seconds (standard), or about a minute and a half (standard).
Obviously, we’re gonna need some smaller unit of time measurement, for things that take less than a minute and a half…
A centi-second?
Lotsa luck with that plan, bub.
”…and what’s with all this simplistic, unnuanced, black/white Day and Night stuff, anyway? Judging from where I’ve got my head crammed, it’s always night!
Jeff,
Did “In Vino, Veritas” give you explicit permission to post his email? Or doctoral thesis? Whatever.
Cordially…
This post doesn’t pass the Global Test.
Selfishly, you forget all about the parts of the world where people are living in Tuesday.
“We’re not gonna stop with Monday! We’re going on to Tuesday and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and onto Sunday and take back the calendar! YYYEEEEAAAAHHHHH!”
Yes, but since it’s a 10,000,000 second year as opposed to a 31,536,000 second year, you’re saving a bunch of time at the back end.
I don’t know, maybe I’m too incompetent to recognize my own ineptitude at using metric time, but I think I got it right. If you’ve ever seen a French worker in action, the 1 to 86.4 conversion works just fine. But if you’re some kinda workaholic who craves something comparable to the explotaitive Anglo second, try a millihour.
Hey Jeff, what’s your mailing address, I’m going to send you a copy of thisas soon as it comes out
[no thanks. I’m more likely to glean something useful out of those Nigerian emails that keep showing up in my inbox]
An article on how war deaths are dropping exponentially across the world vs. previous eras in history. Forward this to a ‘progressive’ if you want to piss them off.
Listening to the insane left, you would think the Iraq War is the greatest crime ever committed (and hence the frequent ‘Bush is Hitler’ nonsense that they say.
I’m going to have to lose the Earth rotation rate = 15 degrees per hour identity, then. Ditto the more precise 72.921 microradians per second.
The French metric time arrangement, BTW, had a day that was 100,000 new-seconds long, which means the new second is 8.64 old seconds. You can then do milliseconds to get finer time divisions.
Still, never caught on.
Oooh, sorry about losing that oh so memorable 7-2-9-2-1 number–just rolls off the tongue. But if it means that much to you, mankind is as capable of slowing the Earth’s rotation as he is of permanently changing it’s weather, which is to say he can do it almost unconsciously. If everyone can drive his car west at 100k/h at midnight on the vernal equinox and then slam the breaks, we can have 72.921 microradians and metric time. Also, start using a comma instead of a decimal point (really just a two timing period) when you right decimals. That’s how the French do it, and they’re cooler than us.
It’s memorable if you do what I do, just as pi is memorable if you do what I do.
I mean “memorable” in the sense that I can easily recall an approximation of the quantities in question.
This is the problem with the metric system, and why it’s not caught on in our construction industry. While it’s easier to do basic arithmetic with it, it’s simply easier to remember a door is 3’ wide instead of 735mm. Even though most people don’t actually have a 1’-0” foot, the foot is an extremely useful intermediary between inches and yards that doesn’t have a counterpart in metric. Since you have to measure out a room in metric using either millimeters or meters (decimeters aren’t used in construction) it’s effectively like measuring out a room in fractions of a yard. Also, a system that’s divisible by tens is far less human oriented than one divided by 2’s and 3’s. Geometry is pretty boring without 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4, and classical proportioning is used in both contemporary and traditional architeture.
Speaking of straw men….
Chariman-e
The other problem that you end up with on a Metric Calendar is that the years/days/hours thing isn’t neatly divisible.
Sure, you can divide 365 by 5, but you get 73 – a prime number. There are ways to order or partition the 73, but in so doing the elegant simplity of a properly metric syste (and hence the reason for mucking about with it in the first place) start to fade.
For what it’s worth, I seem to recall the time system we do use, is essentially metric if you’re using (one type of) Babylonian counting.
Bad timing, eh?
When your tongue tastes like a used fuzzy slipper the minute you wake up, it’s always a Monday…
Now wait a minute – my coochie most definitely does not taste like a used fuzzy slipper. It tastes like a twice-recapped spare tire.
And thanks for not making me breakfast.
I’m all in favor of this system. My wife’s always complaining that I don’t last 5 seconds. Now she’ll be right
“You’re telling me Cindy!”
Debate the subtleties and nuances of “time” all that you want. There’s one thing I know for an absolute certainty, and that’s all I need to know: somewhere in the world, it’s beer-thirty.
Actually, that reminds me of a quote from The Master: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
Carry on.
Like sex.
Damn.
“Forgive him Theodotus: he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.â€Â
Just like you wingnuts to give a hard time to someone who’s simply making a brave effort to subvert the dominant chronometric paradigm. We need authentic time-keeping systems – with gods and cycles and stuff, like the….uh….Maya! Yeah, that’s it, the Maya. SPEAK GLYPHS TO POWER!
Off topic, but just thought I’d point out how those I am gracious enough to allow to comment here unmolested treat me when my back is turned.
Today’s subject: tristero, who (let’s face it) has the intellect of a gibbon, though he clearly fancies himself a brilliant debunker of lockstep winguttery. In fact, his post
(as seen on Digbysblog) —Loven stole HIS idea about the strawmans, we’re told / and Atrios was exactly right that I’m an idiot who doesn’t realize my own idiocy (a pronouncement, incidentally, that can only be made by one who assumes he is far more intelligent than the object of his scorn, which position essentially deconstructs the study in the Atrios post tristero fellates, or else proves it to his detriment, I’m not sure which)—is par for the course with these bandwidth sucking cocklords. You allow them to stay and say their piece, and they interpret that as a “right” that you now owe them, and they then take that as an invitation to start helping themselves to things in the fridge, or slipping a finger up your dog’s asshole, etc.
Well, sorry, but that ain’t my thang. These fucktards want to take shots at me on their own sites, they can have at it. But from now on, they can keep it there, or they can bitch about me on sites I don’t give a shit about anyway.
What they can’t do is take pot shots at me on other sites, then slather some peanut butter on their joints and show up here hoping to help themselves to a quick hummer from my dog.
So goodbye to tristero. And there will be others, as well. I won’t let this place turn into the cesspole Cole nurtures.
And seriously, what did tristero offer here? He’s a mouthpiece for lib-Dem talking points, from the few posts of his I read, and I have more interesting conversations with beets and sea monkeys than I ever could with someone who is so bent on getting noticed by Atrios that he’s already committed to sing a Katrina and the Waves cover at the next Eschacon—while wearing nothing but one of those bitchin’ Che berets.
WE HAVE ICE CREAM ON OUR VESSEL. THIS IS NOT A PLOY. ANY COLOR YOU LIKE. REPEAT. THIS IS NOT A PLOY. THANK YOU.
For occasions such as this, I can only quote a good friend of mine, FatRat Huffines as he so elequently puts it: “Fuck them motherfuckers!”
Poetry, I tells ya. Sheer poetry.
If that’s not enough, he adds something about salad-tossing.
What I thought tristero added to the site was that his name reminds me of Triscuits. And Triscuits are yummy!!
oh, i knew i forgot something for my birthday. see, the last time rto was deployed and it was my birthday i lived on cheese cubes and triscuits for like a month. good times, good times.
Did you have a birthday recently, maggie katzen? Happy Birthday! Did you at least remember to drink wine?
Har-dee-har-har. Just remember, the space is made for the body, and most bodies’ proportions are more easily measured in the Imperial system. If you want sit around all day adding up 750mm, 465mm, and whatever instead of 1’, 2’ & 3’, be my guest.
But don’t get me wrong. I like the metric system for other things, mainly driving and cooking. I can’t tell a pint from a cup, and I like the illusion of speed that driving in kilometers gives me. I also like getting on a scale and seeing 100 instead of 220.
I disagree. I think it’s more the inertia of the entrenched measurement system, which at the cheap end means an entrenched mindset, and at the expensive end means an entrenched toolset. Your average Joe Estimator is going to have a rough time imagining what a board-meter is (I have NO suggestions along this line), for example, but 2x4s are going to have to be retooled, which costs. Even if they’re replaced by 5x10s. On second thought, maybe only the name will change, since a 2×4 isn’t really 2″x4″. And the cost of not supporting replacement parts for both Standard and metric is also going to be considerable. And are we really going to convert to metric nail sizes?
A 3’ wide door, BTW, is 914.4 mm wide. Metric doors wouldn’t be 914.4 mm wide; they’d be, say, 920 mm wide. Or, what the heck, a full meter. Wider doors are better if you’re weighing in at 100 kg :p
All of this crap is way OT, but OT is kind of my specialty. I think my work is done here, though, for the time being.
Slightly O.T., but…
Speaking of “progressive” hyperbole, did anyone catch the review of “V for Vendetta” in the latest Economist? The last line is a doozy:
“As for the dystopian fable, only fans of detention centers, torture, unfettered government survelliance, screaming mad television pundits and laws against alternative lifestyles will find anything here that could possibly offend.”
Okay, do I have to fit all five categories to be offended, or just one, or a majority, or what? C’mon, give a fellow a hand here.
TW: When, exactly, did the world go mad, and will it calm the fuck down when Dubya’s term ends?
BTW:
a 100,000-second day would have seconds that are .864 standard seconds long, not a bad fit. It corresponds to the above-mentioned “centi-second”.
Still, it’ll never happen. Too French. Too many watches out there that would be worthless afterwards.
Probably a plot by the Swiss.
Wow. The acoustics of your little echo chamber are quite oimpressive.
[and yet how many comments have you left? Have you switched sides? Do tell! Because I hand out gift baskets! – ed]
I am a patient boy
I eat, I eat, I eat, I eat
My food is water down a drain
Everybody’s eating
Everybody’s eating
Everything is eating
Eating, eating, eating
Please don’t leave me to remain
In the dining room
Echo chamber?
Funny that, given that Jeff has allowed you jerkoffs to hang around here for the last few days.
Of course there’s not as much debate here as at Atrios’s circle-jerk . . . rrrriiggggghhtttt . . .
BECAUSE OF THE OPEN THREAD!!!!!!!!
I must have missed the “Tristero” comments. Is he some kind of bestiality fetishist, or something?
These fucktards want to take shots at me on their own sites, they can have at it.
Yay!
Is he some kind of bestiality fetishist, or something?<b>
No, but I think Jeff Goldstein is. Boy, who could come up with such fantasies about dogs unless he really, um, had such fantasies about dogs?
Do you think we need to call the Humane Society to check on Jeff’s poor hound?
I see you can take the kid out of the playground, but you can’t take the playground out of the kid. Let me guess, you were always picked last in a game of kickball? Oh, wait. I get you were the kick ball!
tristero rocks!
[Yeah, you’ve got me pegged. Meanwhile, we’ll all try to ignore the irony of your projecting in this, your first and last comment on my site]
…I am gracious enough to allow to comment here…
A concept I see frequently on right-wing blogs – well, those that allow comments in the first place, anyway.
No, no, fine charity! I’m afraid Mr. Goldstein cannot spare anymore to give, for he has spent all his good graces to ALLOW COMMENTS ON HIS FUCKING BLOG. Cripes, you self-righteous lunatics. Even a pointless, server-hogging site like Myspace allows comments indiscriminately. Is it fear or some inferior thirst for power that is entertained by that notion that leaving a comment is an honor and a privilege, that it is noble and true for you to decide who can and cannot convey typed messages in your high and mighty presence? One would think, Mr Goldstein, that there is enough to fill your day that mean, hurtful, tear-jerking comments from those on the “insane left” could be easily and handily ignored and left for their own self-criminalization in the face of your steady readers. Banning comments on a site INTENDED for commentary simply has no logical or ethical basis, not that I would expect to see logic or ethics practiced here.
[Actually, I pay a couple hundred bucks a month to run this site; you aren’t owed a thing, and I don’t suffer from the kind of liberal guilt that tells me I must bend over and take it when a bunch of whining trolls want to piss all over my property. My deciding “who can and cannot convey typed messages in [my] high and mighty presence” has to do with the tone and content of those messages. Which is why there are plenty of liberals who comment here, and why your argument is, like much else from your side of the political divide, disingenuous. But it’s hardly surprising that to people whose heads are stuffed with hay, everything that comes out of it ends up in the shape of a straw man.]
I invite commentary, not trolling. Don’t like the “ethics” of that, go run your own site and pay your own $200 bucks a month. Or, if you wish to post here, pay ME $200 a month, and I’ll let you talk about fucking my sister in the ass with a cucumber.
Meantime, fuck off. – ed]
Sometimes the line between clever and stupid really isn’t all that fine.
Hey sparky, he isn’t banning comments, he’s banning commenters.
Dumb, useless ones that just take up space, serve no useful purpose, and clog up the works.
Like yours.
Sheesh. I doubt any of Tristero’s comments were as vile as Goldstein’s above comment re: the ban.
No, per JG, the problem was the “lib-Dem talking points” Tristero interjected here. In other words, opposing viewpoints. Or well-deserved mockery.
The most likely scenario is that Tristero was unusually effective at opposing JG, and so his comments had to be dismissed as mere boilerplate, and he had to be banned.
[ed – actually, I never read his comments; he’s a moron. But when someone alerted me to the fact that he was pushing the Atrios line about my being so stupid as to not understand my own stupidity—even as he continued to try and “engage” me on my site (don’t know how many comments he left before I banned him, but I suspect it was in the 40s or 50s)—I took that as an offense. Besides, why do you guys want to argue with a retard anyway?
Now, naturally, you won’t believe this to be the reason, even though it is, simply because you don’t believe a word any of us idiotic wingnuts say. So consider my decision to remove you from the burden of having to point out our dullness so frequently my gift to you. Because as the regulars here know, I’m all about the healing!]
Add protein wisdom to my blogroll? So I can slap my forehead everyday at the inanity of “some” of my fellow Americans?
This is the most ridiculous thread I have ever read. Really, earth shattering, important stuff!!!
[….said something calling itself “Bushtit,” unaware of the irony train bearing down on her like Ted Kennedy on a Hooter’s waitress…]
tristero expends a lot of air. the problem of the 21st century is “how do we stem the tide of radical jihadists who are determined to take down the enlightenment and the democratic experiment?” tristero does not support our president in this war, and he undercuts the president’s work. if you’re not going to support civilization and our president, you’re no longer part of civilization. you’ve turned your back on jefferson and jesus. like it or not, it really is down to g w bush defending western advancement, and if you’re criticize him, you’ve gone over the the other side.
yeah, last week. i had a beer after rehearsal. and a cuban sandwich, man i love those.
[Sorry, no $200, no sex talk]
Let me get this straight: The guy who makes completely out-of-the-blue, apropos-of-nothing comments about inserting fingers into dogs’ assholes, being fellated by dogs, his sister being sodomized with a cucumber, etc. etc. etc., is calling other people’s comments tasteless and moronic?
You’ve really been flirting with unhinged the last couple weeks, Jeff. Might be time for a cup of hot Ovaltine and a nap. Oh, and could you sort of cool it with the anal violation/bestiality stuff? If I wanted that I’d just go buy a Hustler.
[Yes, looking back, all my posts DO border on the unhinged—not the reaction to them from the leftie trolls, who some major leftleaning sites have set upon me—but rather my posts. I’d ask you to point out the unhinged posts, and what is unhinged about them, but really, why bother: the very fact that I support the war marks me as unhinged, so QED.
As to the colorful stuff I put in the comments, that’s just there to amuse me. Which it does. If you find it offensive or offputting, you’re free to lurk elsewhere.
And I thought we blue-nosed conservatives were the prudes. But let me tell you something, pal. DOG’S NEED LOVIN’ TOO!]
the problem of the 21st century is “how do we stem the tide of radical jihadists who are determined to take down the enlightenment and the democratic experiment?â€Â
The answer is that we turn Iraq into a bloody cesspool in which any nitwit who wants to can shoot an American.
That WAS pretty stupid. We should have taken advantage of our DOW-produced MAGIC FAIRY DUST, of which one cargo plane load dropped over the middle east would have turned it into a date and fig and brushed cotton UTOPIA!
What’s wioth all the dogsex references? Is Santorum ghost writing this blog?
Guess Tristero must have bitch-slapped (oh look, another dog reference!) poor Jeff pretty badly…
[Yeah. He cited Atrios’ silly attack on me. So after 40-50 comments here—none of which phased me in the slightest els– I banned him for being the kind of dick who believes he’s entitled to use my bandwidth to “engage” me while elsewhere suggesting I’m borderline retarded.
Of course, I’ve already noted this, but I can’t expect people like you to read through threads to edify yourself. You’re only interested in the sound of your own snark. Or in this case, trying to win the love of tristero.
Well, he has a forum. Go visit him there. You bring nothing to the discourse here other than your public masturbations.]
A lot of poor thinking here.
Your fans are a tad facistic.
[Well, that’s about the level of criticism—vague, relying on easy buzz words that you don’t understand—one has come to expect from many Canadians who presume to interject themselves into US politics]
uh, you write those red pill things right? (love ya!)
I want to add a non-snarky comment to the discussion.
Actually, I pay a couple hundred bucks a month to run this site; you aren’t owed a thing, and I don’t suffer from the kind of liberal guilt that tells me I must bend over and take it when a bunch of whining trolls want to piss all over my property.
We have a comparable amount of traffic to Protein Wisdom, and in three years—since quite awhile before I joined the roster and got administrative privileges—we’ve kept a policy in which we don’t ban commenters, ever, nor delete or alter comments that we ourselves haven’t written.
There’ve been very few exceptions to that. Last month I added a note in [brax] to a comment as an exceptional case, at the request of a troll (as it happens) who was upset about some strong language leveled at him. About eight months earlier, there was an incident in which a troll was posting personal information about one of our regular commenters. We removed that comment and explained why.
There are many ways to run a railroad, and Jeff is entitled to run his any way he wants, but there’s also merit in the idea that a blog’s owner has the entire main page as his fiefdom, while comments belong to the readership. I don’t see that as magnanimity, but as one fair assessment among others—and a rare case in which the principle of laissez-faire work to generate social capital and community.
Apropos Tristero, Jeff, this is an extremely high grade of troll—nearly a Floyd Alvis Cooper of the left—and a lot of places would consider themselves blessed merely to have a sighting of such a creature. Since we’re chronically short of trolls, and in fact ever on the lookout for MORE TROLLS to replace the thin, transient population for whom we constantly set out sly dishes of cookies and milk all the damn time, before ruefully removing their massed corpses in a sack, etc. (and so forth), one’d hope that you could understand how a decision to ban Tristero might seem like a damn-shame waste of perfectly good blog manna.
Honestly, things were pretty exciting here for awhile, weren’t they? And now it’s over!
[Sadly, no—Once again: Tristero wasn’t banned for anything he wrote here. He was banned for sucking Atrios’ dick after pretending to engage with the wingnuts over the course of 40-50 comments. His opinions on world events don’t bother me, and I have plenty of leftists who post and argue here regularly. But what they don’t generally do is then run off to other blogs and link back to me with the suggestion that I am an idiot poser. I find that to be bad form.
Of course, your mileage may vary—but you’ll note, I hope, that you are still able to post, and that there are threads here with 400+ comments, many of them a back-and-forth between ideological opponents. So while I have begun banning those who offer nothing to the conversation, I don’t ban people for disagreeing with me.
A bit of history: When I started this site in Dec of 2001, I was a purist. Didn’t ban anybody, never altered a comment. But honestly? The trolling—particularly the meanspiritedness of some of the ad hominems—takes its toll, and when you have a young son who may one day read your site and the things being said about you, you become a bit more quick on the draw than you might otherwise be. At least, that’s my position.
I took 19 months off from blogging at one point, so disgusted had I become with what was once a truly interesting vehicle to debate politics. Among the regular commenters here were Matt Yglesias, Andrew Northrup (now “The Editors” of Poorman), Ted (now at Crooked Timber), and a host of other high-profile leftwingers. In fact, if you search my archives, you’ll even find reasonable exchanges between Atrios and myself (I think we had a very good debate over the Pledge ruling by the 9th Circuit court). When I returned, the partisan divide had grown even bigger, and some of my old blog friends (like Northrup) were overtly hostile toward me. So I’ve changed with the times, Sadly, no.
You might be better at brushing off the ad hominems than me, but then, part of that might have to do with the fact that I post under my name, I don’t know. At any rate, that was a genuine explanation of where I am now. I hope you take it in the spirit of seriousness with which I offered it. – Jeff]
“the problem of the 21st century is “how do we stem the tide of radical jihadists who are determined to take down the enlightenment and the democratic experiment?—
Too late. Looks like you’ve had a lot more success using radical jihadists to take down our democracy here. Congrats people! Your gonna love the Brave New World that the House of Saud and the House of Bush are building for us all.
Good idea getting rid of Tristero, though. I think you should demand proof of Party registration before allowing anyone to post here. Afterall, you can’t have a democracy if everyone has a different opinion!
[Yes indeedy—banning one troll is the same as demanding proof of party registration. Just go ask the last few threads with the 400 + comments how I CHILL DISSENT! No, Tristero was banned for being an ungracious dickhead who decided to take a pot shot at me after I suffered his daily posts for weeks. Had he not tried to pander to Atrios, he’d not have been banned, most likely.
Sadly, there are many many leftists who post here on a daily bases who are too afraid to step up and point such out here in this thread. Probably afraid you’ll excommunicate them from the Society of Tolerance]
dopey-o, nice nic. seems appropriate because Jefferson would have bitchslapped the boy Preznit six ways to Sunday and told him to stuff his Jesus up his ass… because that’s just the sort of anti-religionist he was. he also realized you don’t spread democracy by killing people indiscriminately, torturing and supporting autocratic regimes.
as for Jeffy, I don’t think you’re as stupid as Atrios claims but it seems some of your dittoheads are.
That’s absolutely right, Doug. Now put the peanut butter away and pull your pants up.
Yeccchhhh. What a mess.
I agree with the banning of Tristero.
As ButterStick would say, Right-thinking will be rewarded, Wrong-thinking will be punished. Tristero is clearly doubleplus-ungood!
Good luck with your dog. At all costs, protect the sanctity of your canine rectal orifices!
You might be better at brushing off the ad hominems than me, but then, part of that might have to do with the fact that I post under my name, I don’t know. At any rate, that was a genuine explanation of where I am now. I hope you take it in the spirit of seriousness with which I offered it. – Jeff]
Hm. That could be the case, about the ad hominems, but astonishingly, nobody takes personal shots at us in our comments. I say ‘astonishingly’ because I hadn’t realized that before just now. The trolling we get tends to be like, “You stupid liberals wouldn’t listen anyway, you rassin’-frassin’ not-listening liberals!”—i.e., self-dialogic in kind of a drive-by way.
But in any case (re: above), the other rule we keep (we only have the two) is that no matter how nasty and contentious things get in blogworld, we try to be unfailingly friendly, or at least cordial, in private—and the idea behind that is that it grants a license for calumny by drawing distinctions not on the type or degree of nastiness one can indulge in, but on the times and places where that kind of speech obtains at all. It’s a binary thing that allows for extreme flights of rhetoric and name-calling, because it’s understood (or at least it’s meant to be) that no one is enemies after hours or on weekends.
And not that it works all the time (because some people are genuinely full-time assholes), but it certainly helps localize the gnashing teeth and broken crockery, keeping it from impinging on the offline world…
“cocklords?”
“slipping a finger up your dog’s asshole?”
seriously!?
Dude.
W.A.S.T.E., as Tom Pynchon once observed in a different context.
I’d been previously unaware of this rich vein of mirth. I’ll certainly bookmark it; wouldn’t dream of blogrolling.
[“You’ll be very very missed, Rand.” Which, for what it’s worth, I think Pynchon has Prairie Wheeler quip in Vineland]
Sadly, No, and others:
To those who are content with the notion that Jeff is some sort of evil free speech opressing fascist;
For what it’s worth, I would point that he has been a quite indulgent and lavish host in allowing long, drawn-out, knock down debate in his threads (check out my back and forth with Llama School, tb, and CK Dexter Haven), even among those folks are pretty nasty to each other, or just nasty in general.
Basically the only thing that I’ve seen get people booted, and not unreasonably so, is the general tendency of some to meander on over and start taking cheap shots at the host.
BRD
BRD: Define “cheap,” please.
[A person I banned making an impassioned speech about how banning does something bad. I don’t really know, I stopped reading. NOTE: If you don’t wish to be banned (and you can see Bravo Romeo Delta’s comment above), all that’s required is that you not come storming in here pissing all over my furniture. Again, I have threads with over 400 comments where liberals and conservatives are doing battle. Why are the liberals there not banned? They didn’t introduce themselves to me with nasty personal attacks.
It’s simple, really. This space does NOT belong to you. It is mine. And I’ll share, but only with those people who are interested in discussing the posts—not how stupid I am, or how poorly I write, or what a fascist I am, etc., etc. Life is too short. And I don’t care enough about such trash to archive it.]