I Was at Wounded Knee

Abouts; damn, seven years ago now.  It's appropriately dry and grim.  The fact that a White Man owns the particular spot is, given actions of history unsurprising.  The fact that he is blatantly trying to extort historical passions to the tune of 3.9 million dollars?  He's a fucking dick.

Happy Easter

"Jesus Christ Superstar" is, no joke, the best prog-rock album not made by Pink Floyd.  This is a self-defining principle that I will stand and fight for. 

Dream Blog

I dreamed that I was in a car ride with friends from Los Angeles to the next town on the other side of the northern mountains, which for some reason was called 'Fairfield' in the dream even though I know that's not the case.  Once we were there myself, Paul,  Amanda,  and some perfect stranger had a very mundane and domestic conversation, furthest thing from dream talk you could ever think of, in a house that looked like the set of a 1990's Cinemax style quasi-porn.  But nothing salacious happened, in case you're wondering or worrying.  We're strictly family you see. 

Yes Indeed!

It is well and truly the time of year for this.  

I'll be heading to Boise Idaho next week with some friends, which will happen to coincide with my birthday.  I'm excited.  But also saddened about certain things in the world; as per ussh....

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Mexico Night

I do honestly support soccer, and I do fervently support team USA, but Christ on a fucking stick I absolutely despise media hype.  Not to  hypocritically claim moral superiority for that, but I do. I fucking hate hype and I am not going to hate Mexico just for the dopamine high of it you insincere talking suit motherfuckers. 

It does make me how they do in places where soccer dominates the sports media; how people who live in Madrid or Barcelona or Glasgow are able to tolerate the latest final battle for tribal supremacy cycling back around again and again and again and again.  Fucking laboratory dope rats the lot of them.  YNWA :)

There Have Several False Springs so Far

I have been sucked into a few of them myself, allowing myself to relax in the thought that the truly cold days were over until Thanksgiving only to find that this wasn't the case.  Still I know in my bones that this day, dully chill but sunny and lacking wind, is the real beginning of the uphill climb.  It was the dream I had this morning that told me.  I was driving from North Platte to Benkleman, Nebraska.  It was late summer and everything was dryly dead but also beautiful blond, and I woke up knowing that my land has begun its journey to this particular state.

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I've only been through Benkleman ever once, when I was taking a slower route to Denver for pleasure and discovery's sake.  It wasn't actually all that pleasurable.  The towns of Eastern Colorado along Hwy 34: Yuma, Akron, Wray, all have a depressing, dust-blasted look to them.  One that might be quaintly described as 'frontier' or more accurately apocalyptic except no not even that.  It isn't the case that this is a dead land that used to be alive.  Not even the Natives are native to this particular ground, they never tried to live where there wasn't any water, that's fantastically stupid.  It was the Yankee railroads who needed the illusion of their lines going somewhere; and the towns along the line were peopled with the hope of gleening the leftovers of Denver-to-Chicago commerce.  The good old days when these villages had any vitality at all lasted less than half a human life span and have been gone now for nearly a full one.  It shows. 

Seriously. Fuck Death

As he has in virtually every single one of his thirty eight years in the unicameral, majority of one Ernie Chambers has introduced a bill to ban the death penalty in Nebraska.  Good on him.  We are notable for using our death penalty much more rarely then Texas or other southern states.  there our some tough guys here who say we should get the death row queue much more quickly but for the most part it hardly ever comes up in conversation, and I'd say that the majority support for execution here is much more abstractly 'believed' as a matter of social conventionalism than passionately felt, more a means of displaying a properly anti-murder posture than instinctive knowledge of true justice. 

That, after all, is the point of mantracally proclaiming execution as the 'ultimate penalty' whenever it is publicly mentioned.  Its appeal lies in the ritual belief that for the worst crimes there must be consensus on what the one true ultimate penalty entails.  But of course the death penalty is no such thing as that.  There are many after all who are completely unbothered by their own deaths, but even beyond the pedantic points the death penalty is not so much the ultimate penalty as the ultimate reflection of a belief that morality is a contest to be won. 

The appeal of believing that is obvious and need not be elaborated on here too much.  every religion has its heaven, every secular ideology its utopia. Both have their own variations of hell where the good guys get to rub the losers face in it.  The truth though is that morality is no such thing. The problem with being murdered is strictly the matter of being dead, not the insult of having been killed by someone else.  

None of us will ever enjoy the moment when we are proven righteous before heaven and made invulnerable to harm by our righteousness.  The pursuit of that moment will turn a good conscientious person into something ugly.  They will become convinced that the mere existence of any bad behavior is in itself proof that the behavior is not being punished harshly enough.  This might feel good for awhile, to see oneself as a brave enforcer of decency in a world full of cowards.  But as one grows older and weaker, and they realize that their moment of perfect safety, potency, and glowing admiration of others isn't going to happen, they will become nothing but shriveled balls of hate and condemnation.  I've seen it happen myself.  These are the ones who go mad at the realization that the cosmic reward for being good is the same oblivion as the punishment for being wicked.

Then there's the fact that to believe in a contest for moral victory is necessarily to at the very least flirt with victory. We all want to be the heroes in the great moral narrative, but nobody wants to face the possibility of accidentally being the bad guy, and so the impulse to believe that one's own goodness is an automatic gift of culture, ethnicity, or religion becomes very strong.  Look at the kind of people on death row.  They are overwhelmingly Those Sort of People.  The ones we still whisper about as obviously dangerous and untrustworthy fifty years after overt White supremicism became taboo. 

When this point is made it is common to dismiss it with the false dichotomy of blaming crime on only either personal morality or, our of some perverse cowardice or self-loathing, upon society.  This is total bullshit.  Not only bullshit, but the fact that White men are the ones more likely to take offense to the assigning of social causes to crime is a clear case of protesting too much.  It is our number who are much more likely to see ourselves as personally owning and embodying society as a whole.  Formal law has always been a tribal display of power by the Good & Proper People, a way for the privileged to assert paternal moral authority over the underclass and an innate judiciousness within themselves. I am nowhere near idealistic enough to think this greater ritual can be more than slowly changed for the better in my own lifetime.  But we can and should at the very least stop murdering the already imprisoned like a pack of fucking ogres. 

The NCAA's

Hate to be a hater, but I'm tired and cranky.  I don't find lower seeds winning to be inspiring or romantic in itself;  and in fact if one wants to truly be pro-underdog I say take it back to the days of only conference champs being allowed in the national tournament. (the regular season true champs I mean, not whoever comes out of the stupidly redundant manufactured drama of the conference tourneys.)  This may perhaps break the power of major state schools to hoard all the money by forming 'super-leagues', or even relieve major state schools that do not care about basketball, like the University of Nebraska, from feeling obliged to spending millions in state money on coaches salary so as to respectfully pretend to care.  Or maybe I'm just naive on all that. 

The bigger problem though is that college ball is suffering from the same problem the NBA suffered at the turn of the century of having gotten way too quasi-football like; plodding, regimented, authoritarian.  I'm not one to mindlessly believe that 'more points = better' but, come on now!  This is basketball.  It's supposed to be about going fast and doing awsome shit.   I went to a small-class high school in western Nebraska.  I have seen enough White boy zombiewalk basketball to have more than served my lifetime sentence for 'appreciating fundamentals' thank you very much.  62-60 scorelines as the norm is just so much joyless dreck.

Still, with the pressure to win being what it is, and the amount of money at stake for all, (except of course the players, who should of course be grateful to be kept morally pure from being compensated for their efforts) I'm afraid that it's only going to keep going on and on like this unless we as a society are willing to embrace some truly radical year 0 solutions.  Legally abolish the position of coach, in every sport.  Launch a Maoist style culture-cleansing against the entire mythology of  'Great Men' teaching 'their boys; to 'succeed in the game of life.'  Put team leadership in the hands of whatever player has naturally established himself as 'captain' by either talent personality or whatever combination of the two.  Once this is done, and Bobby Knight has been either savagely killed or so broken by torture that he becomes a willing shill for the revolution, then we can talk about more practical measures like reducing the shot-clock to NBA standard 24 seconds, abolishing TV time-outs and leaving teams only two per half, or mandating a man-to-man defense. But let's take care of the fun part first. 

Fuck Death

I have the power to dislike it if nothing else.  RIP Chinua Achebe.  Sorry you didn't get one more Spring. 

In Honor of The Guy Who Had 'Use Your Illiusion I' on Cassette Tape Today. (Yeah, really)

I find it unjust that history has condemned GnR to the same aesthetic trailer park as Warrant or Motley Crue.   'Appetite for Destruction' was a perfectly fine hard rock LP.  Not so good, it is true, that the band deserved to be the biggest thing in Anglosphere pop culture at the turn of the nineties, and it is on this point that White male privilege and other unsavory forces played a part; forces that would eventually ruin the band.  It was the pressure to live up the mythic, (and soon to be retired) status of 'Greatest Band in The World' that made the Use Your Illusion albums such bloated absurdities and has sent Axl Rose down that very same rabbit hole of bloat ever since.  Still one must not hate the player. In the summer of 92 when all legal currency on Earth was available to them of course they took it.  What would you have done?

GNR also get a bum rap for Axl's 'Shut your bitch up' tiff with Nirvana, an incident that has since been mythologized as the moment when progressive hipsters seized control of White youth culture from the meatheads and have held it ever since.  this is a morally satisfying narrative. But real history doesn't work in narratives. Shit just happens.  The actual story of how the weirdo gene line of Velvet Underground Stooges and Bowie came to be seen as Rock n Roll's true path is a very long one in which Nirvana come in only at the very end, and actually did very little of the real work.

At any rate the VMA incident was only a handful of years before the rise of Korn, Limp Biskit, etc.
The era of stupid White thugs achieving far more than their natural talents warranted was far from over.  The only thing that had really changed was a new mandate to only ever sing about hate and misery instead of sex and fun. GnR were unquestionably superior to what comprised mainstream rock in my own teens and early twenties.  Whatever value you place in that is entirely up to you.      
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The old stereotype of 'rednecks' being the largest source of reactionary opinions in this country isn't actually so.  That's just another system justifier, placing the blame for common prejudice among those White people who have less money and are thus somewhat 'less White.  the truth, as this increasingly internet famous woman from suburban Cleveland makes clear, is that it's the Upper-Class Twits of the world who are the source for most of our problems.  Spending one's life around mostly social subordinates allows peculiar notions to grow without challenge, and what the hell is her trouble with nuns anyway? 

Yeah, This Actually Happened

The National Review pays homage to a Black shoe-shine Man thank you very much. 

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In other news, the European Union has taken to straight up robbing people in the name of fiscal responsibility. In some ways it's darkly comforting to learn that Northern Europeans are just as prone as White US conservatives to use economic policy as a means to assert ethnic righteousness and claim paternal authority over Those People.  Never mind if Those People are in fact towing the line of bourgeois respectability by buying a house of their own or setting their extra cash in the bank.  they are poor and weak you see, which is proof in itself that they do not have the true responsible values that we do and must be subject to our discipline. 

God Save The American Farmer! Let the Hippies be Put To Silence!

The "stupid vs. evil" question is one that pundits will muse upon sometimes. Are politics they consider wrong inspired by deliberate malice or innocent foolishness.  Occasionally some wag will reject this question and point out that stupid or evil is a false dichotomy.  Put me in the latter camp.

A movement in Nebraska and other states to castrate animal-rights sting operations on suspect farms is inspired by both the evil of greed, a willingness to make feeling creatures suffer beyond what eating them necessarily entails in the name of efficiently saving money, an evil willingness to poison our food supply with disease-riddled animals in order to make more money; and also inspired by a stupid mythology that places farmers and ranchers on a higher moral plane from us city boys and beyond our legitimate scrutiny; a sanctification of property that is both stupid and evil, being more of matter of making every White male 'head of household' an unchallengeable Lord than some pure Adam Smith ideal; and finally a childishly stupid fixation with status; so ravenous and insecure that it cannot abide the slightest hint of a challenge to human dominion over other creatures; so that any committed advocate for animal well-being must be formally labeled as a deranged radical out to destroy the true godly way of doing things.

I believe myself that humans are superior to other animals. I can hardly watch my mothers' dog howl at her voice-mail when she's trapped in the phone again and believe otherwise.  But this isn't as horrifically important to my self-esteem as it appears to be for some others.  Call me the Last Man I suppose.  There are some who tried to raise me to a proper American manhood.  To be obsessed with being a master living outside and above everyone and everything around me but it didn't take.  So no, animal rights activists do not frighten me or offend my moral sensibilities.  Not even if they're 'radical', not even if they do claim traditional meat animals to be equal to humans.  What of it?

As for you, Mr. Farmer, (or agricorporate consolidated conglomerate, as the case may be)  I respectfully ask of you to please not be so proud as this claptrap.   It's beyond obvious that food is necessary, but only as necessary as the teaming hordes who eat it.  We are not divinely mandated to eat any particular thing, only to eat; and our stomachs are human and flexible.  We can have and will find 'something' to eat from anywhere on this earth and need not bend the knee to your specific product.  Please do not think for a minute that you have any moral leverage over society or even Nebraska.  You don't.

St Patricks Day

"Fields of Athenry" is one of the great songs of humanity, no snarking about that.

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Grand Island, Nebraska, is the state's largest settlement outside of the eastern cities and its people are glad to let you know that.  But as much as I honestly do love old 'Crank Island' myself; this is all and exactly what it is, simply the largest out of a string of outstate market towns.  The Census Beuraus standards for what make a 'metro area' are entirely too loose.  Any place where the central city is not a true city of at least one hundred thousand is not a 'metropolis', and you need only stand in the middle of GI's free-parking downtown to feel that the place is nothing of the kind.   Be sure that you don't get too big a head about yourselves provencals.

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It's surely no coincidence that the first South American pope is one generation removed from Italy and quite possibly the bluest-eyed fellow to hail from south of Dallas.  But he still isn't white enough for that WASP worshipping Quisling Pat Buchanan.  As an aside.....



"Consider the idols to which European Man has burnt incense since losing his faith: Darwinism, Marxism, Bolshevism, fascism, Nazism, now globalism -- the idea of a secular paradise where mankind's needs are met by the state"


I've seen several variations of this sentiment before and it never fails to floor me.  In what universe is 'man's needs being met by the state' a remotely new idea.  Surely these people aren't stupid enough to really beleive that government helping people is an idea that Karl Marx invented out of whole cloth, some philosophy of what government should be instead of what every form of government physically is.  Ay.

A Further Note on Soccer

The general consensus seems to be that the away-goals rule is bullshit justified only by the fact that penalty kicks are worse.  I would tend to agree with that but still can't help to think that there has to be some better way.  I know that the threshold for neutral-ground tiebreaker games used to be a lot lower in all competitions.  In the old days, for example, when the Champions League was in its true form as the European Cup and only national champions got in, the tournament was small enough to have a third game if teams were tied on goals after home-and-away. I do realize that the schedule has probably gotten too heavy for that, and I know that the Champions League isn't going back to what it was.  The current format is geared towards an international audience who only recognize major names and UEFA isn't going to risk the loss of treasure that unfamilar cast of characters wold bring.  But I guess that's a completely different issue. 

If the sporting ideal meeting halfway for a third game isn't viable there are still other things that could be done.  In the CL round of 16 it would seem a very simple matter to settle aggregate draws in favor of the team that topped its first round group.  This would have the added blessing of rewarding teams who come out from their own ends and play to win much more then the away-goal rule does now. As for later rounds;  well, surely the underlying principle should be that all available means to produce a  team that truly won by scoring more goals than the other must be used, and that all other sporting concerns are secondary to that.  What this means first of all is that extra time should always be played when teams are even after 180 minutes.  True, this would give the team that hosts the second leg an unfair advantage, but this could be compensated by deciding a match that remains tied after extra time in favor of the team who had to play more ball in front of a hostile crowd.  I know the obvious effect of that would be for the away team to barricade themselves in front of their own goal while the home team tries to tear through them.  Some might think that would be too ugly, but I think it would work.  It would be a concept similar to the 'clinch' tiebreaker used in international wrestling  and could produce some real classic trident vs. net style competition. 

The second thing that should be done is bringing back golden goal.  (Sudden death for folks here at home)  This was scrapped on the idea that having a chance to come back is a sacred ideal but I don't buy that myself.  Game winning/losing goals in the last minute of injury time are already a thing that happens so I can't get behind the idea that sudden-death ET would be some alien distortion of the game.  I suspect that the real reason golden-goal was scrapped is that an unknown end point created the possibility of having subs on the bench that could have been used and making the losing manager look bad.  And of course the national treasuries worth of money at stake in this game is the most obvious reason for a general 'conservatism' all around; 1-0 hammerfests on the field and bureaucratic stuffiness in administration both alike.  But this again is a totally different issue. 

My last suggestion is I admit at least borderline crazy and one I consider optional, but why not keep going if still tied after 120 minutes?  I realize that baseball-style 'play till you win or die of old age' isn't viable  That if you went on for too terribly long past the two hour point players would literally start to drop dead, and that would be bad.  Then again, this is the continental championship, UEFA already has that godawful 'anthem' , not theme song but "ANTHEM' to hammer home the point that you are watching The Epic.  Why not just one more half-hour of play to try to produce a real winner, maybe add an 'automatic red card' to make it 10-on-10 on top of that, if that's not too American for you. 

Pope Francis? Fuck That Shit!

Don't change your name at all! 

In all honesty, Latin America replaced Europe as Catholicisms heartland quite a hell of a long time ago. Congrats to the South.  This is far past overdue for them and I hope they're truly happy about it.  Up Argentina and all America. 

I couldn't tell you who more than a handful of the three hundred or so popes and anti-popes actually were.  I don't think there's many people who could and I would doubt the word of anyone who claimed they could.  They do tend to blur together and that's by design. So I was surprised to learn that's this one's going to go about calling himself Francis The First;  such a common European name and one held by one of the most popular saints to boot.  Go figure. 

f

 

Soccer Top 10

Provisional barring an Arsenal comeback tomorrow, (Which, really, get the fuck out.  Feel free to screen-cap this for your own Dewey beats Truman pleasure.)

1. Barcelona
2. Juventus
3. Bayern Munich
4. Corinthians
5. Real Madrid
6. Manchester United
7. Paris St. Germain
8. Borussia Dortmund
9. Galatasaray
10. AC Milan

Contenders:   You know, everyone else at even the 'major club' level is looking pretty nondescript. 

Always Remember

We of the hinterland are the righteous heroes, the keepers of the true and eternal American way, single-handedly keeping the nation upright against the tide of hedonistic parasites who infest those cattle kralls known as cities.  We are fully entitled to our due share of authority over Them, fully entitled to nullify  the whining  Mob when it dares to step out of place.  Let there be no doubt. 

The Thing About It Man

Shakespeare is great alright?  No one is saying he isn't.  The Dead-White Men hating Bogeys are not and have never been hiding under the bed.  I myself am even personally okay with enshrining Shakespere as the eternal pope of English-language literature; so long as everyone is aware that this is only being done for drama's sake and does not actually take it seriously.  I mean, I don't want to carry on like I've made some genius insight here, but he was a mortal human being that guy;  the only way to ensure that Shakespere is forever enshrined as SHAKESPEARE would be to forbid everyone in the Anglosphere from ever putting our own words to paper.  Otherwise the possibility that some other mortal might someday write better than SHAKESPEARE will always be there. Surely the problem there is obvious to lots of people besides myself. 

Or maybe the problem is that you imagine it to be innately moral and 'serious' to dictate what will always be true to the next generation.  Nothing could be further from the truth than that conceit.  Maybe you think that permanently encasing one Greatest Writer for All Time will lead those 'Hard Science' types to take us liberal artsies more seriously.  This my friend is a waste of time.  Those snobs are always going to laugh at us, just as we both together shall always laugh at the Econ majors for thinking that they're with them instead of us. 

Or maybe I should just get down top brass tacks to Brass Tacks Hoss and point out that you consider Steinbeck and Hemingway 'easier' and 'less serious' then Shakespeare beacuse they're Americans, and everyone knows that American culture is and always will be 'simpler' and 'less serious' than the mother-lands.  If that should indeed be the implication here.................

 

What's up homie? 

: )))

The Surprise Blizzard Has Me Thinking

Wyoming is a place that even we Nebraskans look upon with eastern condensation, considered a Mordor even as far out as my hometown of North Platte.  Colorado is seen as the place with 'big' cities; skiing, parties, life, Wyoming is just so much dirt overtly hostile towards life.  Wind, cold and dryness along with a tiny handful of misanthropes who like that, and the sight of a shepard's trailor on a cold day surrounded by his brood and absolutely nothing else is depressing as hell. 

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I'd hate to go on another anti-baby boomer rant here, but I suppose it is called the baby 'Boom' for a reason.  The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Kiss will always have airplay and a profitable touring schedule. The internal tensions of the United States in the sixties and seventies will, to those who were in their formative teens and twenties during that time, forever be the One True Lens for looking upon all history everywhere.  The great war between Hippies and Patriots is forever.  No political question does now or shall ever exist on its own terms but only as a means for the Patriots to prove that they have always been right and the Cool Kids were a bunch of dummy-dumbs for thinking they were so cool.   No one is exempt from this war.  For a non-Baby Boomer to refuse to pick a side is in itself an act of siding with the hippies.  Any media or pop-culture production that does not loudly endorse the Patriot worldview is part of the hippie conspiracy.  And please do not ever suggest that the hippies preference for music and sex over god country and moral triumph was anything less than perfectly unique.  Such a thing was completely unheard of among middle-class twenty somethings before the hippies came along don't ya know, and obviously something that the rest of us would have never picked up if it wern't for them. 

In all honesty though, my own hair is shoulder length, and I am high right now, like for real.  But I am not a hippie.  The hippies are all old and/or dead now, very specific to a very small window of time.  Very specific to a small space yes, but at the same time not at all a freakish anomoly living radically outside the American path, but rather inspired by an American mythos older than America which paints our open spaces as a holy refuge for the Free Folk of the West, liberating to the spirit and invigorating to both body and moral character.  The hippies were in fact inspired by the same cultural gene line of Leatherstocking, Huck Finn, Jack London and Geronimo that produced John Wayne. 

As for the 'Satan Worshipping' stuff,  that's boilerplate which really doesn't upset me.  It is at least honestly more up-to-date and thoughtful than smearing the Flower Children as Communists, which was of course the go-to snarl for them at the time.  Plus I'm still teenage-metal enough to think that there's great honor in being accused of devil worship.  (So long as the people making the charge don't have an actual stake and the means to use it anyway), We're the people who stay out till six in the morning getting the sort of joys that one can find only there. 

Blood In Blood Out

A gloriously ambitious attempt to make a Mexican 'Godfather' from the early nineties, falling short on that note mainly because of weak dialogue, but still filled with opera-level emotion and enough tears of revenge to bathe in.  Part of having Latino friends in my adolescence entailed watching the whole three hours 40 in hand about twice a month or so.  The film is, for now at least, available in full on Youtube, and is now presented to you here where I intend to keep it indefinitely.  For I am obscure and 'They' will have to search long and hard to find me Carnal.

Hugo Chavez

The United States has, with some exceptions, generally avoided colonizing our 'sphere of influence' directly.  We're too pragmatic and commercial for that.  Still we have been true bullies towards Latin America from time to time, and historical anger towards us from that region is not at all unjustified.  If any Latin country should choose of its own will socialism or apartness from us then of course it has the right.  The attitude among some here that it does not is unambiguously racist and imperial. 

Still there is nothing more reactionary or anti-liberty than glorifying victimhood and struggle.  I know this is easy for my priveleged ass to say, but the fact is that even if you are a true victim of history, truly oppressed, you must in good conscience accept that attaining justice is not a matter of heroism or 'winning'.  Your day of indisputable triumph when your humilated tormentors are forced to surrender moral superiority to you will never come.  No human will ever be 'Great' enough to bring that day to you, and to place such hope and sublimination of self upon a man is no path to liberty but  to eternal infantilism.  Those who truly beleive in freedom and equality would shoot every 'Great Man' in the head before they slap an imperialist. 

Chavez wasn't the Stalinist beast that some on our right label him as.  But he was a domineering, mastabatory, antidemocratic son of a bitch.  His gambit of portraying 'his people' as eternally noble underdogs forever at war with knowingly evil capitalists was pure vanity.  The appeal of this narrative to those who buy into it is nothing more moral than vanity.  Let the man's life be reminder that to be on 'The Left' is no immunity from windmill-tilting at demonized Others or patriarchial hero-cults.  "The graveyards are full" etc. 

 

 

 

*  I suppose that his wardrobe was, by Strongman standards anyway, relatively modest.  But that's only one more strike against him so far as I'm concerned.  Go full Gaddafi or go home motherfucker. 

Found This Interesting

In my early undergrad days I had one of those insufferably 'classicist' history professors, the kind who considers Greece and Rome to be the only source for everything good while insisting that his bigotry towards non-whites is based on rational measuring of objective values instead of reflexive racism, who hates modern society for being so decadent as to prioritize curing disease over military triumph while blaming modern liberals for causing the fall of Rome with our time machines.  I remember how one of the dully grand books on Greek history I read in that class mentioned something about the Spartan 'confidence game', how the Spartans were for a time able to coast on their reputation for ferocity while not actually having the numbers to beat up on anyone, not even who my prof described as the hopelessly weak Athenians with their P.O.E. sapping democracy. 

Seeing this article reminded me of that somewhat.  Right-wing activists certainly do have the advantage of confidence, not just certainty in being right but certainty in being rightness, and always certain of being endowed with superior paternal strength, of always being on the cusp of the Great Triumph That Will Prove Them Right About Everything Forever no matter what the latest elections say.  This things make them loud and straightforward in a way that naturally draws media attention, adding to the mechanical advantage that the US Senate and Electorial College afford to rural, homogeonous regions.   The effect of popular culture on common perceptions cannot be overstated either.  The early era Baby-Boomers now running things were instilled with the idea of John Wayne and Little House on the Prairie being the eternal American norm, ours was a nation of universally pious Christian country folk who suffered hardship gladly and sought no excitement that couldn't be gained through violent resistence to evil.  Then there's the fact that sitcoms to this day portray everyone as White and upper-class suburban.  But I think above all else is a half-conscious deference of attention given to traditionally  privileged groups.  White well-to-do and elederly individuals, but also institutions perceived to be more traditional, which may be read as Christian Churches in particular, especially fundamentalist ones who have played there own confidence game in advertising how traditional they are, Never mind that any sort of fundamentalism exists only in reaction to modernity and, with the exception of the SBC, their numbers are generally small compared to sects that live in rough peace with the liberal world.  Fundamentalist churches have still been very good at evoking a past where all Americans were united in theatrically intense Christian belief, and the fact that those days have never existed doesn't change the fact that 'Everyone knows' that they did.  And so you have a great number of influential people, in both politics and media, who are deeply afraid of offending sensibilities that do not actually exist in any great number.  Some latent guilt among White, Coastal, 'limosine liberals' for failing to live up to an imagined agarian ideal may have something to do with this, all griping about 'elitists' or 'liberal media' aside. 

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Happiest city in America Motherfuckers!   I'm sure that the standards of this survey were subjective to the point of being hopeless bullshit, but then again.... Lincoln is a damned fine place.  Crime is low, culture is light but tasty, neighborhoods are stately, well-shaded and reasonibly well-integrated, people are friendly, and the correlation between drunkenness and violence is surely the lowest on earth.  Well done neighbors.  GBR :)  

Attention Conservative Motorists

Just as the use of public transportation is not in itself proof of being poorer than you (so you need not consider money being spent here as an unsporting trophy for losers)  neither is commuting by bicycle in itself a claim of moral superiority over you.  The person you see bikeriding, walking, or jogging is just trying to get where they're going, as you are, and are probably not intentionally displying themselves as healthier, more concientious or more virile than you personally.   Fear not friends for you are secure.  If, however, you still cannot shake the feeling that anyone moving by means other than driving anywhere is neccessarily a wag of disaproval at yourself, then by all means please continue making hilariously asinine statements in self-defense, for the world is cold and harsh and a laugh is worth its weight in jewels. 

Soccer Top 10

Some light fudging in response to the first half of the Champs Leagues absurdly long, long, long, round of 16.  There's a special place in hell for those who intentionally manufacture hype. 

1. Juventus
2. Bayern Munich
3. Barcelona
4. Manchester United
5. Corinthians
6. AC Milan
7. Paris St. Germain
8. Dortmund
9. Real Madrid
10. Porto