Eponymouse posted:

So to my understanding, radical centrists are the kind of milquetoast libertarians who nod thoughtfully at TED talks.

Eponymouse posted:

I've never heard of Thomas Friedman, so I looked him up and according to his Wikipedia he is a supporter of "radical centrism". Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

quote:

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the gently caress is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

Eponymouse posted:

So to my understanding, radical centrists are the kind of milquetoast libertarians who nod thoughtfully at TED talks.

Joementum posted:

HJE-Cobra posted:

Here's some hard-hitting journalism from well-known news source Kotaku. Seems a Florida Tea Party facebook page posted on their wall an image from the game Bioshock Infinite!

http://kotaku.com/tea-party-facebook-group-posts-bioshock-image-satirizin-1483821325

It says "It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes" on it, and is a liiiitle crazy and racist. I mean, that was the point of the image in Bioshock Infinite, but that some Florida Tea Party group posts it on their Facebook wall unironically?

(One of the "foreign hordes" in the image is a Native American, hah)

Eponymouse posted:

So to my understanding, radical centrists are the kind of milquetoast libertarians who nod thoughtfully at TED talks.

Lycus posted:

Is satire just impossible these days?

quote:

Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.

Radish posted:

I wonder when they'll post this one.

quote:

Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.

...

In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever. In the fading of the light, he is gravely concerned about the way everything is going to hell.

Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is beyond the battle for attention. Death approaches. Cruelly, it smells like reverence.

A Neurotic Jew posted:

the NYT op-ed gallery of rogues are just insufferable.

Joementum posted:

Sounds like David Brooks didn't get invited to the Clinton Global Initiative this year and he's mad.

There's definitely a type of person that article is talking about but loving David Brooks (who recently finished teaching a course at Yale titled Humility) is the last person who should be complaining about it. If you want a good parody of the CGI / Davos / Aspen Ideas / TED set, check out Prof. Jeff Jarvis. He's a thinkfluencer.

Sword of Chomsky posted:

I love this imagery. You could replace TED talk with the Joe Rogan podcast and it works just as well!

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Joementum posted:

CBS decided that while everyone was distracted beating them up over their spectacularly bad NSA piece, they'd announce that Lara Logan's suspension was over.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

Unarmed black teens isn't the only thing Georgie Z is murdering.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/george-zimmerman-paints-230758692.html


Him and Bush can open up a studio together.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

Unarmed black teens isn't the only thing Georgie Z is murdering.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/george-zimmerman-paints-230758692.html


Him and Bush can open up a studio together.

kik2dagroin posted:

Limbaugh is coincidentally going on a rant about how Bush the Lesser is becoming trendy with hipsters because everyone is forgetting how terrible a President he was due to BuzzFeed and his cat paintings. Limbaugh obviously doesn't understand how reviled hipsters are, among a vast many other things.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

Unarmed black teens isn't the only thing Georgie Z is murdering.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/george-zimmerman-paints-230758692.html


Him and Bush can open up a studio together.

Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:

Unarmed black teens isn't the only thing Georgie Z is murdering.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/george-zimmerman-paints-230758692.html

Him and Bush can open up a studio together.

Phone posted:

HAND PAINTED (in an alternate universe or in his mind).

E: hand painted as in... He used his hands to apply photoshop filters? I'm confused.

Phone posted:

HAND PAINTED (in an alternate universe or in his mind).

E: hand painted as in... He used his hands to apply photoshop filters? I'm confused.

quote:

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct — unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks and pit vipers.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

(MORE: Women in Federal Workforce Face More Obstacles Than Men)

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some — like Hanna Rosin in her book, The End of Men, about women’s gains — seems startlingly premature. For instance, Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

kik2dagroin posted:

Limbaugh is coincidentally going on a rant about how Bush the Lesser is becoming trendy with hipsters because everyone is forgetting how terrible a President he was due to BuzzFeed and his cat paintings.

Phone posted:

HAND PAINTED (in an alternate universe or in his mind).

E: hand painted as in... He used his hands to apply photoshop filters? I'm confused.

The Rokstar posted:

It's okay though, once whoever owns that stock photo sues the pants off him he won't make anything from this anyway.