First they came for my beloved puppet mascots, and I did not speak out
I gotta be honest with you guys: those terrorists are no good. I mean, sure, we were all kind of miffed back when they crashed airplanes into notable American landmarks, but fifteen years is a long time, and terrorism has become almost passé. It’s definitely gotten to the point that, whenever a terrorist does pop up to do evil deeds, we libertarians can be so blinded by the fact that the plot was actually dreamed up, funded, and executed by the FBI that we forget to be viscerally offended by the very idea of terrorism and pledge our lives and treasure to the FBI. Last week, that all changed.
A Swedish chef was reportedly assaulted by three Muslim men who punched and kicked him in the face and head, sending him to the emergency room. Writing about the assault on Facebook, he said he was attacked because he looked like Donald Trump.
What? No! Not the Swedish Chef! Terrorists, listen to me: there are some lines that are not to be crossed. When you beheaded Miss Piggy, we could look the other way. When you crashed airplanes into Rowlf, well, the American spirit is one of forgiveness. When you burned Scooter alive, I think we were all secretly pleased, to tell the truth. But the Swedish Chef? Americans will not tolerate this! All I can say is that, if you mess with Sam the Eagle, things are gonna get real.
The prominent Malmo chef said he believes the attack, which left him with a "broken nose, bumps, clogged eye, mouth, lips, and jaw… even a broken right thumb," took place because he "looks like Donald Trump."
Hey guys, did you know that RT thinks the Swedish Chef looks like Donald Trump? I found that out from absolutely every single line in this article. Not that you’re laying it on a bit thick, guys, but you could at least pretend to care about the actual crime.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone
Back when I was in college, mind you, the bizarre concept of "free speech walls" hadn’t been concocted yet. Apparently it’s a thing these days, though, which should be pretty much all the evidence any thinking man needs to conclude that the university system is hopeless. In case you’re one of those few holdouts who still believe that there’s some valid reason to subject your children to these horrible incubators of insanity, I’d like to call to your attention the fact that the University of Denver just put out a press release explaining all the limitations the school will be placing on the free speech written on the free speech wall.
In recent weeks the free speech wall has been a source of great conflict, fueling the increasingly tense racial climate here on our campus. As a result of these tensions, The Wall was temporarily closed…
Students may not use The Wall to intimidate, oppress or exploit members of the community…
Hate speech, which is prohibited on The Wall, may take the form of direct or indirect offensive slurs, jokes, messages, or attacks on members of the DU community based on their race, gender, ethnic origin, religion, abilities, socioeconomic background, or sexual orientation.
Freedom! You’re allowed to say whatever you want on the free speech wall! Well, I mean, as long as it’s not an "indirect offensive message" of some sort. Your humble narrator struggles to determine what, if anything, could not be censored under this standard. Of course, this is all purely academic; it’s not like they have any real means of determining who wrote what on the wall, so students can, in practice, continue to enjoy the freedom their feckless overlords wish to deny them.
A camera has been put in place to monitor The Wall, and students in violation of the above guidelines will be subject to a student conduct evaluation facilitated by the University administration.
Well for pity’s sake. I was about to write that this would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad, but, honestly, it’s hilarious anyway. At least it only costs sixty thousand dollars a year to subject one of your children to this insanity!
Also, dear Tom Woods: Pink Floyd stinks.
Hate trumps love
Ever wondered if there exists some type of absolute bottom below which progressive thought controllers will not sink? Is there, perhaps, some point at which the pettiness may become too much to bear, and even the most horrible of people are compelled by a tiny vestigial shred of common human decency to behave like grown-ups for a moment or two? There is not.
I absolutely hate wishing people congratulations on their engagement, and I won’t do it anymore.
By definition, “congratulations” means an expression of praise for an achievement. Congrats on your new job! Congrats on buying that house! Congrats on watching the entire backlog of Gilmore Girls in one weekend so that you can be culturally relevant [sic] this fall! Congratulations, to me, implies that you’ve achieved something others haven’t, something you’ve worked hard for and earned.
Engagements aren’t an achievement. Engagements are a grown-up decision made between two people who have discussed their relationship and decided that, hey, they’re clearly better together than not, so why not make it official? That’s a wonderful moment that deserves celebrating, but calling it an achievement implies that you’ve succeeded at something (i.e. landing a husband) you otherwise may not have had the drive to go forth and accomplish. Then not being engaged must mean you haven’t achieved something, and, for the sake of this argument, that you’re the marital equivalent of someone sleeping in their [sic] parents’ basement at 30. It implies failure on the part of the un-engaged, and that’s uncool.
Congratulate, v.t.: to express vicarious pleasure to (a person) on the occasion of success or good fortune
You’ll forgive me if I fail to locate the phrase "for an achievement, e.g.: watching TV" anywhere in that definition. You’ll also forgive me if I fail to find any possible sense in which "buying that house" is an achievement in a way that "got engaged" is not. Also worth noting is that, judging from the style and quality of Ashley Mateo’s prose, I’m reasonably confident that I’ve been married longer than she’s been alive, and I can assure you, gentle readers, that a marriage absolutely is something I "worked hard for and earned." I’m hard pressed to think of one single thing I’ve worked harder for.
Of course, it wouldn’t be très moderne simply to write an uninformed, snot-nosed whinge without appealing to the very dumbest of lowest-common-denominator third-wave feminist sloganeering. I’ll omit quoting the curse words young Ashley apparently hasn’t yet been taught should not be put into print.
Who cares if it’s not polite to say a woman landed herself a unicorn of a man with a good job, good hair, and the unfailing ability to sit through every episode of The Bachelor with her while listening to her friends deliver recaps in real time over FaceTime? If "Congratulations" has old-school roots in lady ownership, neither person gets to hear it…
I get that for most people "Congratulations" is just the easiest way of voicing their happiness at someone else’s good news, because there’s no better word to say "AAAHHH!" (although, maybe that’s the right word?). And you might say that getting all cerebral about what it ~really means~ calls more intention to my own insecurities than it schools anyone on proper etiquette. But sometimes a casual word or phrase isn’t just a casual word or phrase, and it’s OK for someone to react to your news in a way that differs from everyone else.
[sic]
I don’t believe any further comment is warranted. It saves me time when stupid articles are amply refuted by the quality of their writing.
Strike that. Reverse it.
"Former" communist and current executive blower-up of German culture Angela Merkel gave an utterly chilling rant last week during president Obama’s rather bizzare "farewell tour." Apparently displeased with the fact that the German people have learned the truth about her destructive actions in spite of the time and money she spent buying up all the established German media, the Wicked Witch of the EU has made explicit her desire for governments to destroy the internet.
Digitisation is a disruptive technological force that brings about deep-seated change and transformation in society. Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what kind of consequences it had. Or industrialisation, what consequences that had.
Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies and it took a while until societies learned to find the right kinds of policies to contain this, to manage and steer this. We live in a period of profound transformation.
You heard it here, friends: comrade Merkel has officially declared that the printing press was a bad thing. This is made even more hilarious by the fact that Merkel is allegedly a Lutheran; you’d think she’d have one or two kind words for herr Gutenberg’s embattled invention, but apparently not. What a shame that "societies" hadn’t yet developed the correct policies to "contain" Martin Luther. And if only all that industrialization had been properly contained! Why, we could be enjoying a standard of living as robust as that of seventeenth-century peasants, who had all manner of leisure time in which to sit around drinking tea and posting long snotty articles on their blogs.
The most important and noble task of politicians these days is to see that each and every person can find his place. But those who purportedly belong to certain groups say ‘we are the people, and not others’…
[W]hen the [East German] people stood in the streets and said ‘we are the people’ it filled me with great joy, but the fact these people have hijacked it does not fill me with joy.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to identify the irony in the passages above. For my part, I’ll simply point out that, as far as "the most important and noble task of politicians these days" is concerned, there’s a lot to be said for abdication.
You say that like it’s a good thing
Real quick here, I’d like to talk about this one thing:
The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.
That was Steve Bannon, former Breitbart muckety-muck and current Trump administration muckety-muck, outlining his plan to return America to the exciting days of the 1930s. That’s what the 1930s were known for, right? Excitement? Yeah, that’s what I thought too.