Rumsfeld should stay [too many links to count on that subject] and so should Negroponte. The people don't care, [archive.org] so let them learn why they should. American values—read: Capitalism—will always win, but not America itself. The faster the people of this country learn the costs of their own ignorance, the better.

I've said this before as well: I have no respect for the members of our armed forces. I have pity for the desperate and the foolish, and contempt for the rest. The willingness to be led, the need to be in servitude, disgusts me. I suppose it's just result of the education foisted on me by my otherwise Stalinist father. I am the product after all, of a sort of Skinnerian hell that instilled in me a sense of moral responsibility, though whether that was even the intent is still uncertain. Considering the means I'm still surprised it didn't have the opposite effect, but there's still time. Until that day I'm as disgusted as much by those who follow as those who lead.

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This country is being led by drunken frat boys and their servants.

Is this George Will? David Brooks? Or is it one of the young disciples of Socrates and Allan Bloom who now populate the Federalist society, one of those condescending creeps who masturbates to posters of Antonin Scalia. "Fuck me Master!" These are the bastards who send illiterate white trash, born again bumpkins and niggers to die in Iraq and Afghanistan, all in service to an ideal: that the many should serve the few. 

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Brian Leiter on poetry Short and sharp: I'm no fan of Helen Vendler. Those who know how best to define great art are most often those least able to define why one would ever try to make the stuff. Art is artifice, is skill, is the ability to communicate ideas with subtlety and grace. What those ideas are is something else. Leiter has no respect for poetry as he has no respect for law, seeing both as merely means to ends. To Vendler ends as such are vulgar. Again to the stupidity of a culture that divides itself, its knowledge and awareness, into categories of "Form" and "Content." No sophistication. None. You can all go to Hell. It's Friday. Time to drink.