In response to a comment here.

It's amazing the number of things from history that we take seriously today that weren't taken seriously when they were made, not taken seriously even by their makers. The last one hundred years exhibited an excess of moral seriousness.
I'm a little tired of it.

Wolcott is the liberal's P.J. O'Rourke. I'll defend him only to the extent that I prefer writers, as craftspeople, to men and women 'of ideas.' But there are far better writers. He's a punk.
---

And speaking of moral seriousness:
What ithe fuck is "cultural content"? The productivist logic/optimism is grotesque. There are so many ways in which this isn't even worthy of mockery. More from CT.
Eszter Hargittai's question to me is just bizarre.

An in joke (from a friend)

"Aye"

Continuing on the theme below:

Read Frank Rich. Don't ignore him just because he's in the Arts and Leisure Section

Eric Alterman wrote those words in a post in 2003.

In the Times today, and not in Arts and Leisure, Rich explains why I'm not going to pay 10 bucks to watch Al Gore's campaign commercial. I may vote for him if I haven't left the country, but that's not the point.

Atrios makes with the pom poms.
Given than politics in this country is more about messenger than message, and that Gore's motives are as self-serving as any other politicians, I find it grotesque, and politically asinine, for Atrios et al. to go out of their way to trumpet the purity of their new hero. Clinton was Big Dog. Gore is Big Guy.
Introspection is foreign to the American political imagination.
And introspection where it exists is manifest as anti-political romance.
Go buy a god damned newspaper.

Another self-absorbed idiot: Kerry soldiers on.

The one book on this list that will be read years from now, by those other than historians going through the garbage of our era, and it's mentioned as an afterthought.

funny

"psst... pass it on"

Congress is Shocked.
Shocked.

I've been waiting for a detailed argument either way. JB has made one, and more.

No wonder Chappelle bugged out.
link

fucking idiots

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1773002,00.html

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Happy Mother's Day

Dictators begin as sincere and mediocre minds full of high purpose: to protect us from ourselves. Letters:

Thomas Powers writes that the man nominated to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, "created and helped to hide from scrutiny a large-scale N.S.A. eavesdropping program aimed at Americans."

Actually, the program is aimed at protecting Americans from foreign terrorists who want to kill us and our families.

The program does not threaten our civil liberties. It enhances them, by increasing our chances of traveling on a train or plane without being blown up or flown into an office building.

Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, May 10, 2006
The writer was an intelligence officer for the C.I.A. from 1966 to 1971.

Freedom is dangerous, but we choose it. It would be much sImpler if in the service of one or another form of instrumental reason we organized ourselves politically -as corporations do- in semblance of a machine. Certainly that dumb-fuck Posner would prefer it this way. But the point of democracy is that we have chosen not to decide or to define what we value.

Tapped out. I hate Pwogwessives:

"You're responding to something I did not write. I said that punditocracy responded to what they assumed the public wanted to hear.

The "core principle" of any politician is politics, and the democrats suck at it. David Mirzer is right: Kerry hemmed and hawed through various defenses of his vote. It doesn't matter what he "meant to say," His performances were pathetic.

The whole point of this blog is to affirm the moral seriousness the press and of political life. But there is no moral seriousness in political life, there's a moral seriouosness in intellectual life, and in the world outside the dreams of American progressivism there's an acknowledged contradiction between the two.
You should go see The Front Page.

I'd be ashamed to defend Clinton, or Gore, or Kerry, on any principle of my own...
beyond realism."

Added a few comments last week to this bit on Colbert.

She continued to stare at me until finally adding another hint. “We work with the officers.” My powers of reasoning slowly started to kick in. “We serve their needs,” she added. She looked around and sighed, thought for less than half a minute and turned her face back towards mine. “We’re escorts for the high ranking officers.”

Meeting a call girl at the mall in Saudi.

I've been telling her to write about this stuff for years.