Whiskey Fire

Important Considerations

by va

Finally, at long last, we know where conservatives stand on football: they are simply not interested in the World Cup, and vuvuzelas should be banned.

What's Worse

Trying to get fired up about the World Cup; bought the 10 Year Old a US Team jersey & everything. But this sort of blows:

Watch those mouths, boys. Same for fingers, elbows, fists and anything else that could be construed as, uh, universal gestures.

The Brazilian referee and his assistants for Saturday's England-United States game at the World Cup are brushing up on the lexicon of English-language obscenities.

The crash course in cursing is thanks in part to hot-tempered English star Wayne Rooney, who ran his potty mouth during a warm-up match this week.

But swearing a blue streak isn't the only thing that could lead a referee to toss a player from the World Cup. Obscene gestures and overly aggressive behavior are big no-nos, too, and the refs will be on the lookout.

This is one reason I'm not on the US international side, among others. It's also why I don't write for ESPN, because please, how could you be human and resist the temptation to use "boning" over "brushing' in that second paragraph?

Anyway, in Louisville, grading AP exams, as is the tradition. If you gots the keys, feel frees.

MORE. According to wingnut tit aficionado (and wingnut tit) TittyHawk, the Democratic Party (namely, Wonkette) will totally lose the 2010 midterms because they're sneering in a latte liberal coastal effete way at surgically embiggened tits. This is because of a story a Fox News affiliate thought was The Tits. 

we note that privacy in medical matters is the legal foundation of the Constitutional right to abortion, per Roe v. Wade. This right to privacy is apparently so sacred that (so says the left) it is reasonable to sacrifice fetuses to defend it. One would think that the left, therefore, would be reluctant to intrude on even Sarah Palin's medical privacy. Of course, that would require some measure of intellectual honesty, which is apparently beyond the capacity of many liberals when Sarah Palin is involved.

That's some wingnuttery! Untangling that crazy ideological hairball should keep you guys entertained. Like Penelope, I'm just trying to keep everyone busy for a while until we can sort things out.

The Finest Joke

by va

An article in The Atlantic suggests that it is finally safe to call "the jihadist community" a bunch of incompetent, animal-molesting "nitwits." This would be shocking under different circumstances, because we all know that the jihadist community has vowed in no uncertain terms that it seeks to DESTROY AMERICA. But in these exceptional times, the file labeled "Armageddon" has grown thick, and the memo

To: America
From: The Jihadist Community
Re: Ur destruction

is buried under a pile of others with higher priority. In a recent-ish Gallup poll, four percent of Americans rank terrorism as the biggest problem facing the nation, right under "lack of money." Anyway: sure, call them nitwits, I guess, who cares? Evidence for the nitwit hypothesis includes stuff we all know about, like failed crotch explosions, but also intelligence gathered by Predator drones and "captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle" which shows compromising jihadist behavior such as partaking in "intimate relations with a donkey" and other barnyard antics. Yee-haw. This is all very hilarious, until you calculate the production costs of these films, which, might I remind you, will never recoup their initial losses with international releases or DVD sales.

This generic re-situation of The War on Terror from epic clash to Orientalist slapstick is fine as far as it goes, but let's don't overlook this fine bit of WoT absurdism:

Many laptops seized from the Taliban and al-Qaeda are loaded with smut. U.S. intelligence analysts have devoted considerable time to poring over the terrorists’ favored Web sites, searching for hidden militant messages. “We have terabytes of this stuff,” said one Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Hidden militant messages. I'm curious: did they ever think they'd found one? Did they write reports? "Flaccid penises suggest Florida could be a target." "Cumtrail may be Arabic script; will send to translator." Quick, someone file an FOIA request.

Also, the people at the MMS and the SEC must be kicking themselves that they didn't come up with this "keeping America safe through porn" defense themselves.

OH YEAH. I just remembered that the NSA recorded, transcribed and swapped wiretapped phone sex conversations. It's like the War on Terror thing is just a very expensive excuse to jerk off.

Musical chairs

by flory

Two wars, an economy looking upwards to see the gutter and the worst environmental disaster in the nation's history are but mere distractions from the pressing concerns of our journalistic elite.

Helen Thomas' front-row seat isn't even cold yet, but that's not stopping speculation within the White House press corps about who'll get the prestigious spot right in front of the podium

Pedagogy of the Possessed

by va

Stanley Fish, famed academic and human parody, has produced the most horrendously funny book report since he took up Going Rogue. Usually I lay off the Stanley Fish Book Reports because they're so inane, but today's is like a luxury cruise down the rabbit hole. The topic is Education and Its Aims, and the book of note is by Leigh A. Bortins, who "writes as an engineer, a home schooling advocate and the C.E.O. of Classical Conversations, Inc." In other words, the lady is a nutter. There isn't the remotest chance that the book is anything but drivel, starting with its title. Which, by the way, is The Core: Teaching Your Children the Foundations of Classical Education. Deep stuff.

If "home schooling advocate" wasn't damning enough, Fish reports that Bortins "sees learning 'as a continuing conversation that humankind has been engaged in for centuries.'" Maybe sixty or more centuries, who knows? Was our ancestors learning? Was they teaching their progeny, such as Bortins? Fish does us the service of quoting her, so let's judge:

She proposes a two-pronged program of instruction: “classical education emphasizes using the classical skills to study classical content.” By classical skills she means imitation, memorization, drill, recitation and above all grammar, not grammar as the study of the formal structure of sentences (although that is part of it), but grammar as the study of the formal structure of anything: “Every occupation, field of study or concept has a vocabulary that the student must acquire like a foreign language . . . . A basketball player practicing the fundamentals could be considered a grammarian . . . as he repeatedly drills the basic skills, of passing dribbling, and shooting.” “Every student,” Bortins counsels, “must learn to speak the language of the subject.”

Fascinating.

For whatever reason, the esteemed Fish doesn't care to get into how silly this all is, to say nothing of how insidious and abusive this brand of home schooling can be. He actually seems pretty enthusiastic, except to say that "Notably absent from Bortins’ vision of education is any mention of assessment outcomes, testing, job training ... and the wonders of technology." That's no small omission, but what's absent from this review is direct evidence that Bortins is just bonkers. Which, I'm sorry, but she inevitably is.

Fortunately, for our purposes, she has a blog, where, oh, for example, she announces that her book is for sale under the heading, Leigh Bortins is Going Rogue. Yes, yes: The profile is coming nicely into view. And she is fiendishly clever! "The Lord teaches us to be 'wise as serpents,'" she notes. So she devised a strategy--a secret Christian strategy!

A few people have expressed concern that in writing this book for a secular press and from a secular perspective, I would dilute the truth that drives me to promote Home-Centered Education.

[...]

It was hard to write this book at first because I can't help but express my faith as I write. It's just in me. Every time I'd get "too" theological for the publisher, they would argue with me until I took it out. But the arguing was so fun because I got to share my faith with a handful of secular New Yorkers in the process.

The book was published by MacMillan. Stanley Fish, in the New York Times, puts it in the same league as a book by Martha Nussbaum. The world's supply of trex, and the world's capacity to nurture and love trex, is magically endless.

BONUS. Quote from the Bortins blog: "If the stats are correct, by the end of the Obama administration, he will have been the president who oversees the lowest rates of abortions and teen pregnancy and STDs ever. How will we social conservative activist [sic] complain about him?" I boldly predict you'll make shit up.

And I'll Have Fun Then

Been busy this weekend; the 10 Year Old's Little League team is trying to make the playoffs, which is intense drama of the sort that makes Wagner look bush. Also the 5-Year-Old is prepping for her Dance Recital, and omigod, that is Little League on steroids acid from hell throw it under the bus etc. So, lots of Child Activity Distribution Activities have been occurring.

Also, at about this time of year Molly I puts on an opera (seriously -- she's Master Carpenter for this show); she's also finishing a book (details around here somewhere). And she & I are both gearing up to grade AP Lit exams in Louisville in, er, a week. My own next book is stalking me like a Troma villain. Also we needed to rent a brush cutter for aggravating reasons, and we needed to buy a dryer... argh. Garden is coming in well, though, hopefully last year's blight isn't this year's.

The Louisville AP thing will probably mean a 10-day hiatus, by the way. Molly I & I are driving, because flying is such a tremendous pain in the ass and another 15 hour layover is something up with which we will not put. Stay tuned for some site interim announcements.

Annnnyway, while all this was/is going on, also Jules Crittenden was being a dick. I'm going to have to play ketchup here because apparently while I was just emailing, he was blogging. This is not a big deal in and of itself, but let's be clear: Jules Crittenden is a dick.

Firsters:

BTW, what’s ”Whiskeyfire” supposed to mean?

Something sinister. You'll never know! There is no way of unraveling this mystery bwah ha ha because I have left No Clues. 

I’ll take the subtle irony plus the track record to mean that he actually considers the idea of civility in national discourse to be a joke.

Uh. I kinda do.

So that's all for that. But the fun continues. The E-MAIL JULES CRITTENDEN DID NOT WANT YOU TO SEE. It's my reply to his stuff he posted. And it's smokin'. (This is so stupid.)

Oh, that. I was foxed by the linkage of "Hoft" and "scholarship."

I was there for that! That whole thing was started by Roy Edroso using a bad word, which then made "Instapunk" mad at all the cursing, and then Hoft started counting f-bombs. And then Instapunk called me a stupid Irishman (really! more amusing than anything else), and tossed around the word "dyke," and later, pretty infamously, dropped the n-bomb. Good times... pretty sure you linked me during the whole highly enjoyable mess, also, but I'm not bothering to look it up.

Anyway, I stand by what I said in the context of the time:

http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2007/03/spoken_like_a_t.html

But that nonsensical history aside. More to the immediate point, you are confusing "a lot" with "indiscriminately." Yes, you can prove that I curse a lot. But you have no foundation for saying I curse indiscriminately. Indeed, you acknowledge that I do not! Sir -- I curse as a matter of conscious choice and with due attention to relevant rhetorical, political, cultural, and indeed syntactical contexts. Asshole.

I've said this before at my place, but I was inspired to curse a lot on the internet by Pierre Bourdieu's "Censorship and the Imposition of Form" from Language and Symbolic Power. You'd only need to read the first few pages, but since he's French you won't bother. For the more easily digested version I'd recommend Chris Rock on "nigger" and "faggot." And "fuck!" Oh wait Chris Rock curses a lot so he's in the gutter and not successful and also stupid.

Even your beer analogy is bad. I have cousins who are NYC firemen, for instance. If you would like to witness indiscriminate beer drinking, I can take videos. They do not, however, drink before or on the job. Why? Because drinking, even less so than cursing, is socially & politically situational. In ways that you haven't bothered to consider, because you seem to think in cliches. "Lefties don't believe personal liberties have consequences, or at least don't believe that they should have, which is, leftwise, the same thing." Christ, that's dogma, not an idea. Grow up. Or, grow the fuck up. I don't give a shit.

You have no clue about "lefties." You have idees fixees, which is French for "bite me."

Best. (Honestly.)

He has nothing to declare but being a dumbass. Earlier context:

Why not? Free exchange of ideas floats all boats.
 
Jim Hoft of Gatewaypundit fame via Newsbuckit, on the use of the seven words you can't say on TV, left vs right blogosphere here.
 
Frequency of profanity on major left blogs here. Right blogs, here. 
 
The material is dated but anecdotally I haven't noticed any significant shift from those trends. How fair/comparable are the two lists of sites? Looks good though arguments could always be made for including or excluding sites on either side, the subject matter being pretty highly subjective. It's also notable that there have been partisan flips over time. LGF bolted from right to left, for example, taking a lot of pretty vile and juvenile use of profanity plus mental instability with him. Good riddance. You're welcome to him.
 
What do the results mean? Subject to interpretation. I have a partisan view that has to do with notions of personal responsibility, and the ways in which that is or is not embraced. Lefties don't believe personal liberties have consequences, or at least don't believe that they should have, which is, leftwise, the same thing. They also tend to think that their moral superiority excuses their moral failings, and even turns moral failings into virtues. So no big surprise so many of them think "fuck you, asshole" is a cogent political argument. Tragic how ideology can taint self-expression, when you think about it.
 
While the weight of numbers is impressive, the list also lacks context. I use profanity on my site, for example, but try to limit its use in general, and the ways in which I use it. When discussing the political speech choices of lefty sites; within quotes (extensively in accounts of combat, for example, where profane speech is part of the scenery); or for occasional emphatic and ironic purposes. I try to avoid usages such as "so-and-so is an asshole." I made a special exception in your case with "Prof. Asshole," and "smearing shit on bathroom walls," though those were specific ironic references to your own vile, juvenile choices re language and content. Your own description of me lamentably failing to be an asshole to no one's great surprise was actually a relatively clever use, BTW. Enjoyed that. But profanity has sharply limited utility in any discussion of politics, policy, public affairs, etc. More of a crutch. Shows a lack of imagination, education and breeding. While it may be meant to illustrate the degree to which some target inspires anger or disgust, it generally has the reverse effect, reflecting more poorly on the speaker than the target.
 
That said, verbally, in familiar, selective company and circumstances, I use a fair amount of profanity, as I have noted previously on my blog. Colorful language, like beer, is one of the joys of the greater English cultural experience. But we don't drink beer indiscriminately. People who do can be found in gutters, indiscriminately using the kind of language you seem to think passes for political discourse, and otherwise soiling themselves. 
 
Best,
 
Jules

Heh. I am working. But I am not working for you.

BTW. He really did invoke "breeding." That is The Tits.

FROM CRITTENDEN'S COMMENTS. "And, yes, Mr. Fire, it IS uncivil."

World of Fun

Am intensively studying Neko Case videos. Stand by.

Bad Language

It really is not today or yesterday I was talking about this. New Superchunk!

Like a Fruitcase

The Editors just can't bring the funny like Althouse.

"Rand Paul can't play 'Tom Sawyer' on the campaign trail? Rush says no!"

There's a headline I completely misinterpreted. I imagined Rush Limbaugh had made some argument that Rand Paul can't behave like the Mark Twain character. Was Paul attempting to pass himself off as a good-hearted, mischievous boy? But no, "Rush" is the rock band Rush, and "Tom Sawyer" is one of their songs.

Over the Goalposts

Nice.