Donald Trump

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Suck it up, you idiots.

You preached one thing and did another for decades. Now, when someone comes along to do exactly what you have preached--in deeds, not just words, you organize against him.

So suck it up, losers.

The conservative producing public is not your puppet.

National Review: Publisher ‘Broken Hearted’ Over Subscription Cancellations
by Breitbart News
22 Jan 2016

From the article:

We have received angry calls, and cancel ­my­ subscription demands. One in particular broke my heart. Well, let’s hope time heals.

Time might heal, but I doubt it when the discredit is this big.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

I'm having some fun elsewhere (on Facebook). The discussion is about Trump's protectionism. Here are some things I wrote.

Why the repeat? What the hell. I love me.

First this:

I don't think protectionism is the end goal for Trump. I think it is a step along the way to dismantling all the busybody regulations and getting to a free market. It's an emergency measure, not an ideology. I might be wrong (I hope I'm not), but that's the way I see it based on how Trump does business all over the world.

For example, I agree that a company should use cheaper labor if it can, but I don't agree that there is free-market virtue in using the closest thing to slave labor that exists from another country just so we can get lower prices in this one. Just because we outsource evil, that doesn't mean the evil is gone. That is a contradiction with the free market--we use the government force of another country on innocents far away to gain market advantages. That, I submit, is not laissez-faire capitalism. We are outsourcing slavery and calling it something else and it is killing the internal job market. What worker can compete with the wages of slaves?

That is one of the things that is part of the emergency right now. And it is one of the reasons the protectionism doesn't bother me so much. But I do have my eye on it. I don't like protectionism as an ideology and will oppose it once the dust settles.

I have yet to see any compelling Objectivist/Objectivish answers to the above.

Currently, the unstated but implied answer seems to be, "I'm aghast at the horrific evil of tariffs and other acts of 'protectionism' that the US government engages in, and which Trump is suggesting possibly threatening to implement more of as a bargaining chip against other nations having initiated and imposed such protectionism against the US, but I'm not at all aghast, and really not even concerned in the slightest, about being a slave owner by proxy. Im just blissfully blanking out of my mind how I'm ending up with such cheap products. My fellow countrymen not being able to compete with slave labor is none of my business."

Let's hear some Objectivist solutions. If retaliatory tariffs are not the answer, what is? Should we ban US citizens from outsourcing slave labor? Should we convict US business people for complicity with slavery when trading with nations who don't respect the rights of their citizens?

J

What is the Objectivist premise? Freedom.

How? Rational action in a complicated world.

--Brant

it's not easy

[Roger Bissell]

What That "Made in China" Label Really Means

Josh Gelernter

National Review - December 13, 2014

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394565/chinas-slaves-josh-gelernter

This isn’t NRO’s dedicated China spot, but I’ve got one last CCP piece to write before moving back to more cheerful subjects.

There was big news last week: that China had overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest economy; the People’s Republic is on track to produce $17.6 trillion of goods and services this year, $200 billion ahead of the U.S. A lot of acrimony has been heaped on Mr. Obama’s economics, which seem to have sludged our growth to a crawl. And a lot of credit has been laid at the feet of Communist China’s march toward capitalism. But there’s an element missing from the discussion. An economy is bound to grow when it’s got one billion, three hundred and fifty-seven million people available for slave labor.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the United States finally stamped out its scourge of slavery. Most of the civilized world either had beaten us to the punch or would follow soon after. China has officially abolished slavery several times — in the 14th century, in the 18th, and again in the 20th. But it never really took: China’s Communist dictators operate more than a thousand 1,000 slave-labor camps.

The camps are called “laogai,” a contraction of “láodòng gǎizào,” which means “reform through labor.” They were conceived under Mao; unlike Stalin’s gulags, they never closed — though the CCP has tried to abolish the name “laogai.” In the Nineties, it redesignated the camps “prisons.” The conditions, though, don’t seem to have changed.

Our picture of life in the laogai is murky, but here’s what has been reported: The prisoners are given uniforms and shoes. They have to purchase their own socks, underwear, and jackets. There are no showers, no baths, and no beds. Prisoners sleep on the floor, in spaces less than a foot wide. They work 15-hour days, followed by two hours of evening indoctrination; at night they’re not allowed to move from their sleeping-spots till 5:30 rolls around, when they’re woken for another day of hard labor. Fleas, bedbugs, and parasites are ubiquitous. The prisoners starve on meager supplies of bread, gruel, and vegetable soup. Once every two weeks they get a meal of pork broth.

The camps currently billet between 3 and 5 million convicts — real criminals along with thought criminals guilty of opposing Communism, promoting freedom, or practicing religion — though the process doesn’t wait on conviction; Chinese law permits the police to hold anyone for four years before judicial proceedings. At any given time — according to the Laogai Research Foundation — 500,000 Chinese citizens are in “arbitrary detention.” If a prisoner does get a hearing, he enters a legal system controlled, capriciously, by the Communist Party.

The laogai camps are estimated to have held between 40 and 50 million prisoners since they opened in 1949. Which is about the population of South Korea. Between 15 and 20 million of those prisoners died or were killed. Which is two or three times the population of Hong Kong. Or to put it another way: Between 50 and 300 thousand people were murdered during Japan’s rape of Nanking. China’s Communist Party has inflicted between 50 and 400 Nanking massacres on the country it dominates.

According to an article published in Human Events by a man named Michael Chapman, a large proportion of Chinese exports originate in the camps — a quarter of China’s tea, tens of thousands of tons of grain; “ . . . prisoners mine asbestos and other toxic chemicals with no protective gear, work with batteries and battery acid with no protection for their hands, tan hides while standing naked in vats filled three feet deep with chemicals used for the softening of animal skins, and work in improperly run mining facilities where explosions and other accidents are a common occurrence.” And that work finds its way into American and European stores.

A quick Internet search will yield photos of notes slipped into Chinese products on sale everywhere from Kmart to Saks. Notes begging for help, signed by Chinese slaves. One that turned up in Northern Ireland says, “We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn’t even be fed to pigs and dogs.” It was written in Chinese; one that turned up in Oregon was written in English. “People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement. . . . Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others.”

The CCPG is the Chinese Communist Party Government; the writer of that note identifies himself as a worker in the Masanjia labor camp. Former Masanjia inmates have been interviewed by the New York Times. They described “frequent beating, days of sleep deprivation, and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end.” One told the Times, “Sometime the guards would drag me around by my hair or apply electric batons to my skin for so long the smell of burning flesh would fill the room.” Another said, “I still can’t forget the pleas and howling.” About half of Masanjia’s inmates are in for refusing to renounce their religion — mostly followers of Falun Gong and Christians. Another note from China turned up in Brazil. It was written in English and just four words long: “I slave. Help me.”

And remember: The camps’ prisoners are just the formal slaves. In a more general sense, all of China’s one and a third billion people are slaves; without freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, of movement, of the press, and without a government that derives its powers from the consent of the governed.

So, China’s got a leg up in the economy-building race. The same one that Germany had at its camps. So this Christmas season, look out for that “Made in Nazi Germany” sticker.

Or maybe this will bring it home: This Christmas, remember that “Made in China” may mean “Made by Chinese Christians.” Happy holidays.

— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394565/chinas-slaves-josh-gelernter

[Roger Bissell]

Stop the presses! Here's a major gaffe by the Trump campaign...

(Headline) Donald Trump pulls anti-Cruz ad after using footage of Crispin Glover and Richard Crenna

OK, seriously, here's the real headline and a link to the article:

Donald Trump pulls veterans ad after using footage of Russian soldiers

http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/23/donald-trump-pulls-veterans-ad-after-using-footage-of-russian-so/21301776/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D1637444066_htmlws-main-bb

Ya gotta admit, this guy knows a LOT of people. Very resourceful staffers, too. ;-)

Reb!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ya gotta admit, this guy knows a LOT of people. Very resourceful staffers, too. ;-)

Roger,

That isn't the only screw-up Trump's staff has made in using stock materials. They've goofed on a couple of occasions. (I would have to look them up to give details, but I remember they were pretty awful. )

I think Trump's staff targets the emotional look and feel when sorting through stock images (Trump is a master at the art of the covert marketing message, so his staff has to be), but are sloppy on vetting other visual values--like the history and culture of the subjects. (Duh... )

Then again, some of this might be on purpose. It's always good for free press. As a backup for this view, notice the errors are always outrageous, never minor. And the press only goes apeshit over outrageous stuff, never minor.

Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal that negative press was quite valuable, just like positive press was, for getting what he wanted.

Michael

[william.scherk]

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

LOL...



Now that is a well-done mashup.

Apropos, there's a reason mashups with Sarah (and just you wait and see, Donald) work so well. She speaks in poetry. (So does he.)

Poetry?!! you ask.

Yes, poetry.

And it ain't just me saying it. It's a friggin' progressive who doesn't even like her. Check this article out.

Sarah Palin: The Walt Whitman of Wasilla
Donald Trump's new sidekick belongs to a noble American poetic tradition.
by Jeet Heer
January 20, 2016
The New Republic

In 2011, Michael Solomon released a Kindle single entitled “I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin.” The book consisted of Palin speeches reprinted word for word but broken into poetic lines. Solomon isn’t the only one who has noticed that Palin’s much-mocked speeches make more sense if formatted as poetry. Writers for both Fusion and the Huffington Post have taken Palin’s speech endorsing Donald Trump and re-cast it as vatic verse.

Here is a fragment of Palin, with line breaks from Jason O. Gilbert of Fusion:

. . .

We all have a part in this, we all have a responsibility.
Looking around at all of you, you hard-working Iowa families.
You farm families! And teachers! And teamsters! And cops, and cooks!
You rockin’ rollers! And holy rollers!
All of you who work so hard,
You full-time moms!
You, with the hands that rock the cradle!
You all make the world go round,
and now,
Our cause is one!

And here is another memorable section of the speech, as versified by Jedediah Purdy in the Huffington Post:

. . .

Turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new
Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over the
border as we keep the borders open.
How ‘bout the rest of us?
Right wingin’, bitter clingin’, proud
clingers of our guns, our god, and our religions,
and our Constitution.
Tell us that we’re not red enough?

There is a strong consensus among Palin scholars as to where she fits into the poetic pantheon: She is heir to the tradition of free-flowing democratic verse that runs from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ginsberg.

. . .

Jason O. Gilbert agrees. “Many critics derided [Palin’s] speech as ‘rambling’ and ‘insane,’” he notes. “These critics are wrong. With a little proper formatting, this speech was poetry, in the tradition of Walt Whitman.”

Whitmanesque poetry is sprawling, headlong, rambling, as wide open as the prairies with its run-on sentences, free and gregarious in using commas to splice together disparate thoughts. This is democratic verse that tries to encompass the world in a bear hug. Palin achieves her Whitmaneque effects through heightened language: alliteration, habitual gerunding, and marathon-long sentences.

I culled the progressive snark, including the snarky poem titles, just so people can get a glimpse of the truth behind this idea.

And I like the truth behind this idea...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

God, I wish I could resist posting this one:

 

Word is that crying @GlennBeck left the GOP and doesn't have the right to vote in the Republican primary. Dumb as a rock.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

January 24, 2016

 

 

Michael

[william.scherk]

From deep in Trump Iowa Wonkery ... an internal training session for Iowa Precinct Captains and other GOTV volunteers. Take-home: Trump is watching. Features Tana and a close look at Ground Game II and UNIVERSE, a super-terrific integrated software application that allows the campaign to micro-target and share information in real time -- using maps, phone-lists, databanks of collected demographics ... and more, all tied into the central operation control.

At the seven-minute mark, you will understand that Trump is Watching You. He will know if you won your precinct or not. Tana says he is very much into the details. Me, I am probably not going to be satisfied with mere Thank You notes from the candidate for my efforts. I want Santa to give me what I really want.

Bored by Wonkery? Fast forward to 1:30 to get a feel for the meticulous operation, the all-seeking eyes, all-knowing minds of Trumpism in Iowa.

Get with the hive mind, people. Get in on the ground ...

[william.scherk]

So, I asked myself, "Self, isn't it interesting that someone is realizing Mrs Palin is an, er, poet of the people?"

Self kept his mouth shut and wouldn't answer; I guessed he was thinking "What the fuck. This is not a new thing. You people are so 2009."

I gave him a veiled look, which said "I have been Trumping in Iowa Caucus Land. I have had no time for fooling around -- beyond contributing several translation tests."

Here is a selection of the vast online literature on Palin Poetry, including my own item at bottom. I think that Palinesque language will resound with different groups of people. some mere consumers of her product, others connoisseurs. I can fully get behind servicing the connoisseur slice of the market.

William Shatner's thespian power infuses Palin's Tweets with the throb of great oratory -- and initiates the Beat meme:

The Poet of Populi in her own natural setting ... without adornments or artifice, with an excerpt from Ballad of The Quitter, when the genre was born:

A beautifully-edited distillation of Sarah returning to her Beat instincts, in an intimate modern setting:

This same modern Sarah, fully gerundative and mature, from the Freedom Summit in Iowa last year, in fuller context. This one aches to be translated into USA Spanish and Canadian French and put to a beatnik bongo -- it would probably even sound good in Latin, with solemn bells. I am pretty busy drumming up caucus-goers, but I could take some time out to explore and contribute to the literature. I might win a Video of the Week mug from Tana.

But no, the mine is apparently inexhaustible, as every couple of days Sarah gets off the Trump plane, and is trucked to a Trump event, where she utters fresh poetry. A mine that will no doubt show great new veins of material, as she stumps at Trump events that are the most live-streamed events in the history of humankind.

Here is my first stab at the Palin Poetry genre. There is a steep learning curve. She gave a long speech on stage in Iowa a couple of days ago which I think I should sample. In this tough new genre, robot voices won't do. You have to clip Sarah's words without clipping their wings. I want a mug so bad.

-- one of the fun things a pink-ops person can do while GOTVing for a campaign is to sun in questions not on Ground Game II's list. I sub in the four child-rearing questions to detect authoritarian support. So far it is the honey-trap, and so I keep telling Tana and Rick. Find every last authoritarian in the precinct. They tend to get behind Trumpismo.

Back to the weeds of Lyon County. I feel like I killed off this thread for the day. Which is a poetic kind of feeling.

[Roger Bissell]

I just realized that if Todd and Sarah had a son Juan, he'd be listed in the phone book as Palin, Juan.

Or a daughter, Comparison - she would be listed as Palin, Comparison.

Also, I think it's a darn shame that Donald Trump never (yet!) had a wife named Daisy.

Guess it's bed time - I see that it's 10 degrees F. outside, but about 60 degrees warmer than that in here. Night all...zzzzzzzzz.

Reb!

[william.scherk]

Roger, you might as well get on the Trump train and quit your griping about his policies, his manic co-campaigner and her garbled thinking and values.  There is a time and a tide, sir.  Since Sarah Palin inflated the Trump balloon, it might be time for all of us to grab on and soar. Put a melody of hope and change in your heart, and sing along with us. 
 
On the other hand, if you will not put aside your un-American tendency to squabble about principle and policy, then you will be left behind. Palin has unleashed massive emissions of medial hoopla. Soar with us, Roger.  
 
From what I gather in the far northwest counties where the battle for the soul of America is under way, the troop trains leave for the front every ten minutes. The Trump campaign has moved into its zany zenith in Iowa, with a massive citizen-intelligence op, NSA-style love-bombing target maps, incredible name by lot by name by neighbourhood, pins-on-a-map hard hustle and grift. Now I know where all the money goes. Massive emissions cost money.  
 
Meanwhile the Zombie Cruz hardcore minions are getting mean. That is no way to win, not in Iowa. You can say one thing about Mr  Trump. He is not mean.   
 
I am mean, a little. Here is one more Palin Poetry trifle before I return to pink ops.

 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="ro" dir="ltr">Palin Poetry In Latin -- Causa Est! <a href="https://t.co/30k3Ue4hhz">https://t.co/30k3Ue4hhz</a> via <a href="https://twitter.com/YouTube">@YouTube</a></p>— William Scott Scherk (@wsscherk) <a href="

24, 2016</a></blockquote>

<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

[Brant Gaede]

Iowa is not a pivotal or necessarily a key state. New Hampshire might be.

[Roger Bissell]

William, , I suppose you're right about the policy/principle obsession thing. (Damn that Thomas Paine/Ayn Rand Syndrome, anyway!)

But you, a little mean? Naw. You're so bubbling over with love, it's infectious. No matter what I do to wipe down my computer and internet connection. I seem to have caught the bug. (It's even damping down the aforementioned Syndrome a bit.)

Here, without all of the bells and whistles you are so adept at providing, is Sarah Palin's response to William Shatner's hasty pudding (pudding us all on, for sure). As always, she displays her Whitmanesque mastery at Native American (she was born here, right?) poetry. (Couldn't Shatner have worn shades and a beret, for Pete's sake?)

There, I've done it. It feels so good to have turned this corner. Enjoy, all,

Reb!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

William,

You are missing a critical element with the Sarah poet mock-fest. And it is something I think is going to backfire bigtime on the progressive culture.

It's a communication thing along the popular and serious divide. Let's start by analogy with serious literature.

Do you know what the difference between serious literature and popular literature is? I'm not talking about the substance like a new way of looking at one's belly-button or embedding gross worldviews into themes and calling them profound.

By contrast (on substance), normal popular literature is where the good guy kicks the ass of the bad guy and gets the girl in the end, all the while learning something important about himself (although this part is optional). Or the love stories where "true love" is elevated over fooling around and manipulating. Things like that. I think you get my gist.

The main difference between serious and popular is in the nature of the beast. Popular literature tells an emotional story and that's the end of it. Serious literature is essentially a crossword puzzle.

In other words, in serious literature, there are hidden references all over the place to this person or that thing or this tradition or that culture and so on. The more esoteric and hidden the better, albeit sometimes there are easy references just to get people started (like all good crossword puzzles have).

Here's an example of what I mean. I saw a university lecture online about Cormac McCarthy's book Blood Meridian, which is an extremely violent Western. (I'll try to find the lecture again later if you like, but I don't want to stray from my point right now.) McCarthy is considered a master storyteller and highbrow as opposed to, say, John Grisham or Nicholas Sparks, who are just popular storytellers.

The professor hammered home a hidden understructure of McCarthy's work. I don't remember the scene off the top of my head, but I do remember the process. McCarthy took a not-too-famous scene out of Moby Dick, but one that was impactful, and recast it in his book as one of the events. The professor went on mentioning other things like this and she backed up her approach by a quote from McCarthy in a NYT interview: "The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written."

So the pleasure of understanding Cormac McCarthy is not just blood and guts. You also get to play a highbrow crossword puzzle and try to figure out where each scene came from.

By extension, this highbrow crossword puzzle element doesn't have to be limited to plot events. You can take this same approach to character, hidden themes (especially religious or esoteric ones), metaphors, descriptions, and so on. The more you can pepper in hidden references and peg this stuff to highbrow culture, the more tantalizing it becomes for the highbrow audience.

It often gets to a point where the story doesn't really matter anymore. That kind of book will have an initial run, but then stop selling. After all, once you've done a crossword puzzle and/or seen others do it, you don't want to buy the same one. You want a different one. But if the book has a story with some strong emotions along with the puzzles, you can keep the purchasing power running.

In poetry, you see this serious to popular difference all the time. T.S. Elliot, for example, made a career out of highbrow crossword puzzle poems. He references everyone, even when he writes "the" and "an." But nobody reads these kinds of poems on the popular market. The general public prefers its poems in songs with simple emotions like longing, happiness, feelings of loss, love, and so on.

Now, what happens when something popular gets "discovered" by the intelligentsia and they find some highbrow crossword puzzles in what was once considered hack work? You get things like post-modernism, but that's not the only school. Cormac McCarthy is a good example of another school where he crossed the intelligentsia's crossword puzzles with pulp fiction. And he added a weird writing style just to make it appear more exclusive.

Now back to Sarah.

The intelligentsia has had a hoot mocking her by pegging her stuff to beat poetry and so on. And they had total control over the mainstream media as they did it for a few years. So long as the comparison was restricted to a field populated by kooks (beatniks), this gave a special zing to the crossword puzzle for the insider of superior intellect. We all love to laugh, but so does the Superior One. He or she is human, after all.

However, and this is where Jeet Heer at The New Republic played with fire, if you find hidden highbrow stuff to peg Sarah to, you recast her. And it's not just a trivial recasting. It cuts deep. When you make statements like the following that Heer made: "She is heir to the tradition of free-flowing democratic verse that runs from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ginsberg," you are shooting yourself in the eye if mocking is your aim.

(Ginsberg is beat, but he's also considered a master. So the "kooky" trope doesn't settle emotionally in the reader's mind when thinking about him. "Respect for greatness" does.)

Granted, this recasting of Sarah is not an on-off switch. There are still plenty of people out there who like to turn off their brains and mock just by looking at her. These folks will be around for awhile. But they are essentially surfing on the all-out attack on her from before when the media still had the power to do an unconditional smear.

Now there is a new toy and it is deadly. It is a seed of destruction called a new highbrow crossword puzzle and it will grow in the intelligentsia mainstream. The seed can be expressed by something like this: Sarah is not just a silly twit from the sticks. She used to look like that, but she actually belongs to a long line of American thinkers and poets like Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and Allen Ginsberg.

Woah!

Talk about a contrast!

And if we can count on anything, we can count on the vanity of the intelligentsia in playing one-upmanship with each other. So once a few of them digest the delicious contrast (which is how they will see it), I have no doubt they will start coming up with other such comparisons. More highbrow culture will get pegged to Sarah Palin. Then more. Then more...

And once that starts happening, a new mainstream narrative will arise.

I don't know if you can see this now, but I see it as clear as day. Also, Sarah now has a master media manipulator on her side, Donald Trump. So I expect this change in narrative to go much faster than it normally would have.

Which means that Sarah Palin is stepping into the classic culture of America's legends, not just the popular culture as a niche bimbo. And if she is appointed to a position of power in the Trump administration, this culture of mockery will self-destruct of its own accord as a new core story about Sarah, in whatever form it may take, replaces it. I can't say at this point what that story will look like. I see the seed, but not the tree.

This is not to say that all mockers will stop. It's just that a good portion of the highbrow heavyweights will start finding the highbrow crossword puzzle of Sarah Palin a lot more pleasurable than the fart jokes.

Michael

[william.scherk]

Michael, it is always good to be alerted when I am misunderstanding something.

I may indeed be "missing a critical element"-- in assessing the humour value of mocking Sarah Palin's English. My position is that the industry devoted to Sarah Palin Poetry indicates a mine of gold. Comedy gold. In a distant future, I do not believe that the mockery of Palin communication will dissolve into respect. I mean, I can only look into my own heart. Unlike you, I claim no entry to the heart of the people, ordinary people.

The point I made earlier is that both streams of thought will be coeval. Those that love her and those who hate her. Those who mock her and those who praise her, those who glorify her and those who denigrate her. I get the feeling that you have Split the people into two blocs and only two blocs. Lovers, haters -- those who 'get it' and those who don't.

I have hung around the Objectivish porches for long enough to know how mistaken I can be in sorting a population into Good and Bad piles, whateve the topic. So when I see you bifurcating opinion into two extreme poles, I demur from doing the same. It doesn't do much cognitive work.

What makes this problematic for me is measurement error -- which I will expand upon should I give your comment another deeper consideration. I will proffer the hope we neither dodge off into the woods in search of a perfect simile. There is an election on hand. Brant is quite right that Iowa is not indicative of a winner. And yet the ferocity of the campaigning in Iowa is still entertaining ...

In my second reading of you comment, I looked for a refutation of my main point. I did not see that -- in fact, I did not see an acknowledgement that I had said something which you took issue with. In a conversation, imagine how much more easily our exchanges would flow. We are so often fascinated by the same things.

Which reminds me, is there any chance of 'turning on' the Chat function here at OL? If it is a money or technical problem, I will be happy to help implement. It would add another dimension to discussion.

To return to the Quitter, and her struggles to communicate effectively to her non-Lovers ...

If I am missing an essential element to Palin, and well I might be, Michael -- is it possible that you too are missing an element? That she is funny, a scream, a rich vein of high-quality material?

A topic starter, perhaps, for a chat.

Edited January 24, 2016 by william.scherk

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

In my second reading of you comment, I looked for a refutation of my main point. I did not see that -- in fact, I did not see an acknowledgement that I had said something which you took issue with. In a conversation, imagine how much more easily our exchanges would flow. We are so often fascinated by the same things.

Which reminds me, is there any chance of 'turning on' the Chat function here at OL? If it is a money or technical problem, I will be happy to help implement. It would add another dimension to discussion.

William,

To start with--the chat function. I think there is a chat thing that is part of the OL package, but I prefer not to implement it. That would be an incredible time sucker for me and this forum already cuts into my time way too much. Oh, there are ads and so on to help with costs, but I don't make any real money with them. Even with donations, I end up paying for this forum out of pocket. And I have my business projects to attend to so I can't afford more time than what I already give.

I do not discard the notion of a chat thing, though. Just not for now. Later in a new incarnation when I open up all stops on the forum (which will happen when my project pans out).

Now about refutation. You are correct there is no specific point you said that I was addressing. I was analyzing the core story in which your response lives. It's like the David Foster Wallace story of the two small fish being told by a bigger fish to enjoy the water, then one asking the other, "What is water?" By core story, I'm talking about the water everybody swims in but nobody sees.

Right now, there is a core story we float around in that the values presented in the mainstream press are the values that the majority of Americans adhere to--that is, the ones who are reasonable. The rest are bigots, stupid people, and so on, and they're not important people anyway. They have no impact on the world. Within that core story, those who believe in this, those who swim in it without seeing it, position Sarah Palin as the poster-girl for the stupid people. Not all stupid people. Just the white racists.

There are several problems with this water. The working class is not made up of stupid people. Most of the bigotry has been rejected in American society. Maybe not in the mainstream press (which exists on fear and outrage), but it has been rejected within the actual neighborhoods people live in. The USA is nothing like it was right after WWII with Jim Crow laws and so on. Even for gays the situation is different. Set aside the noisy radicals and most people don't care one way or the other.

So when you responded to an erudite comment I made to your Hee Haw Sarah Palin thing, you didn't address the erudition part. Instead, you emitted a string of more videos at the intellectual level of the Hee Haw as if to say, "How did you miss the Sarah Palin poetry buffoonery? It's been around for ages." In this water, Sarah Palin has been defined and trounced. There is no place in this water for erudite.

The problem is, there is erudite water from a new source that is starting to feed the spring. Erudite is what it is going to be in the future. When I said I didn't think you could see it, this was exactly what I was talking about. And, to be frank, I'm still not sure I am getting the idea across.

If I am missing an essential element to Palin, and well I might be, Michael -- is it possible that you too are missing an element? That she is funny, a scream, a rich vein of high-quality material?

A topic starter, perhaps, for a chat.

From within the water of laughing at the bumpkins from the sticks because I am superior to all that, I admit the standard mocking of Sarah Palin is a scream. If I were that way, I would be busting a gut at SNL. This kind of humor is used to reinforce and contain the water I swim in. Without it, the water itself might change.

But if I do not swim in that water, if my preferred water is another, I find the first jokes about Sarah Palin funny, but then they start not being funny. It's not because I feel offended. It's because the jokes never change and they get stale.

It reminds me of old minstrel shows where white people used to dress up in blackface and mock the mannerisms of black people. If you are not a racist or even anti-racist (meaning if you don't swim in the waters where racism is an important issue), the first few jokes might be funny. Yeah, some of that is true enough to give a chuckle or two. But after awhile, the mockery gets old. Not because it is offensive (although it is). It's because racism is not on your radar. You don't swim in racism. That kind of humor is not relevant to what you think.

To be honest, when people tell the same joke over and over, even when they do it with different words, I start getting embarrassed for them if they get self-congratulatory. And if the intent is to mock and humiliate the butt of the joke, I don't resonate with it as humor after I detect it.

It's too aggressive for my spirit.

I'm moved more by love and woo-woo shit. Not hatred.

I love me some ribbing, I do it and receive it all the time.

But I don't care much for the bully's laughter.

What about Sarah's mockery of liberals? In my perception, she is standing up to a bully. If people didn't attack her, I doubt she would joke about them. See her reality TV shows as an example of what she is without the provocation. Kind of bland, actually. Nice, but bland.

Michael

[william.scherk]

I think there is a chat thing that is part of the OL package, but I prefer not to implement it. That would be an incredible time sucker for me and this forum already cuts into my time way too much. [...]

I do not discard the notion of a chat thing, though. Just not for now. Later in a new incarnation when I open up all stops on the forum (which will happen when my project pans out).

I had mentioned the chat plug-in once before, and you answered with less detail. I see now your discouragement. I had fun with the chat function at OO.net, at least for a brief time. It was, as far as I could tell, ephemera. There were no chat logs that survived longer than a session. Bad and nasty words were bleeped or blocked. People were hair-down, jokey, sometimes newsy and trenchant, rarely angered or disputatious. There was no moderator, but a red button to press in times of trouble. There were banned and bannable criteria if a member went past the line of scrimmage.

I guess that you think you yourself might spend too much time in a real-time jocular conversation happening in ephemeral OL-land. I get that. But from my experience, the habit of chatting is pretty much for the young. It is semi-private, it wipes itself at midnight, URLS and picture links and Hi There! are exchanged, people get bored, zany, impulsive, chatty, and go bye-bye.

So, I will be happy the day the chat button appears at OL. I like the idea of knitting our disparate cohorts together in that social way. I think of it as like the running news scroll at the bottom of a news channel screen. It comes, it goes. Another benefit is to the silent observers. My experience at OO and elsewhere is that registered members reading OO will chat for a moment about a current topic without leaving a comment for posterity.

Ephemera. It is all ephemera on a slightly broader time scale. If OL is willed into the future when the Fearless Leader and consort fall, OL will endure. The chat will have long gone to electronic landfill.

Michael, your commentary above, automatically rendered into poetic meter. I read this in my mind with the timbre and cadences of James Earl Jones and the musicality of Paul Robeson. I hope I have captured some of the essence of your message.

I See The Seed, But Not The Tree

Sarah poet mock-fest.

Backfire bigtime.

Progressive culture.

Communication thing.

Popular and serious divide.

Let's start by analogy.

A new way of looking at one's belly-button,

embedding gross worldviews into themes.

Normal popular literature,

good guy kicks the ass of the bad guy,

gets the girl,

"true love,"

fooling around and manipulating,

things like that.

I think you get my gist.

Hidden references all over the place,

this person or that thing,

this tradition or that culture,

esoteric and hidden,

McCarthy is considered a master storyteller and highbrow,

John Grisham.

Nicholas Sparks.

Popular storytellers.

Hidden understructure of McCarthy's work.

A university lecture online about Cormac McCarthy's book Blood Meridian,

a not-too-famous scene out of Moby Dick,

"the ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written."

The pleasure of understanding.

Not just blood and guts.

A highbrow crossword puzzle.

Highbrow crossword puzzle element.

Metaphors, descriptions, and so on.

Pepper in hidden references,

peg this stuff to highbrow culture,

more tantalizing,

highbrow audience.

Story doesn't really matter anymore.

Once you've done a crossword puzzle,

you want a different one.

If the book has a story with some strong emotions,

along with the puzzles,

keep the purchasing power running.

In poetry,

all the time.

T.S. Elliot,

highbrow crossword puzzle poems.

References everyone,

when he writes "the" and "an."

Nobody reads these kinds of poems on the popular market.

The general public,

poems in songs,

simple emotions,

longing, happiness, feelings of loss, love, and so on.

Something popular,

"discovered" by the intelligentsia,

some highbrow crossword puzzles,

hack work?

Things like post-modernism,

intelligentsia's crossword puzzles,

pulp fiction.

Weird writing style,

appear more exclusive.

Now back to Sarah.

The intelligentsia,

had a hoot mocking,

pegging her stuff to beat poetry.

They had total control,

mainstream media,

the comparison was restricted,

a field populated by kooks,

beatniks,

.

A special zing,

crossword puzzle.

Insider of superior intellect.

We all love to laugh.

So does the superior one.

He or she is human,

after all.

Jeet Heer at the new republic played with fire,

find hidden highbrow stuff.

Not just a trivial recasting.

It cuts deep. Jeet Heer. Jeet heer. Did you eat here?

"She is heir to the tradition

of free-flowing democratic verse

that runs from Walt Whitman

to Carl Sandburg to Allen Ghinsberg,

shooting yourself in the eye.

Mocking.

Ghinsberg is beat,

considered a master.

The "kooky" trope doesn't settle emotionally.

This recasting of Sarah is not an on-off switch.

Turn off their brains and mock.

These folks will be around for awhile.

Surfing on the all-out attack.

The media still had the power.

Unconditional smear.

Now there is a new toy,

deadly.

A seed of destruction,

a new highbrow crossword puzzle,

it will grow in the intelligentsia mainstream.

The seed can be expressed.

Sarah is not just a silly twit

from the sticks.

She used to look like that,

but she actually belongs to a long line

of American thinkers

and poets.

Walt Whitman,

Carl Sandburg.

Allen Ghinsberg.

If we can count on anything,

the vanity of the intelligentsia,

playing one-upmanship.

Digest the delicious contrast.

More highbrow culture.

Pegged to Sarah Palin.

Then more. Then more...

A new mainstream narrative will arise.

I don't know if you can see this now,

i see it as clear as day.

Sarah now has a master media manipulator,

Donald Trump.

Sarah Palin is stepping into the classic culture of America's legends.

Appointed to a position of power,

this culture of mockery will self-destruct.

A new core story about Sarah.

I see the seed, but not the tree.

Not to say that all mockers will stop.

Highbrow heavyweights,

start finding,

highbrow crossword puzzle of Sarah Palin,

more pleasurable than the fart jokes.

I see the seed, but not the tree.

Edited January 24, 2016 by william.scherk

[Brant Gaede]

I love me some ribbing, I do it and receive it all the time.

But I don't care much for the bully's laughter.

Michael

Ha! Ha! Ha! HAHAHAHA!

--Brant

~snort!~

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'm not a fan of Chris Matthew, but he's on to something here.

 

This one stings.

 

 

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

William,

LOL,

That poetry with my words is sheer genius. And flattering.

Thank you.

To make it a real poem, it would need a strong edit, lots of trimming and the addition of a few poetic values like alliteration, more metaphors, some rhymes, rhythm, etc., but by God, that's a friggin' first draft you made.

Michael

[Roger Bissell]

I think there is a chat thing that is part of the OL package, but I prefer not to implement it. That would be an incredible time sucker for me and this forum already cuts into my time way too much. [...]

I do not discard the notion of a chat thing, though. Just not for now. Later in a new incarnation when I open up all stops on the forum (which will happen when my project pans out).

I had mentioned the chat plug-in once before, and you answered with less detail. I see now your discouragement. I had fun with the chat function at OO.net, at least for a brief time. It was, as far as I could tell, ephemera. There were no chat logs that survived longer than a session. Bad and nasty words were bleeped or blocked. People were hair-down, jokey, sometimes newsy and trenchant, rarely angered or disputatious. There was no moderator, but a red button to press in times of trouble. There were banned and bannable criteria if a member went past the line of scrimmage.

I guess that you think you yourself might spend too much time in a real-time jocular conversation happening in ephemeral OL-land. I get that. But from my experience, the habit of chatting is pretty much for the young. It is semi-private, it wipes itself at midnight, URLS and picture links and Hi There! are exchanged, people get bored, zany, impulsive, chatty, and go bye-bye.

So, I will be happy the day the chat button appears at OL. I like the idea of knitting our disparate cohorts together in that social way. I think of it as like the running news scroll at the bottom of a news channel screen. It comes, it goes. Another benefit is to the silent observers. My experience at OO and elsewhere is that registered members reading OO will chat for a moment about a current topic without leaving a comment for posterity.

Ephemera. It is all ephemera on a slightly broader time scale. If OL is willed into the future when the Fearless Leader and consort fall, OL will endure. The chat will have long gone to electronic landfill.

Michael, your commentary above, automatically rendered into poetic meter. I read this in my mind with the timbre and cadences of James Earl Jones and the musicality of Paul Robeson. I hope I have captured some of the essence of your message.

I See The Seed, But Not The Tree

Sarah poet mock-fest.

Backfire bigtime.

Progressive culture.

Communication thing.

Popular and serious divide.

[..]

Man, I am *so* inspired by this, William. I couldn't resist. So I tried my hand (so to speak) at doing a "Southern" (hillbilly, redneck, somewhere in there) version of the first clump of Michael's message. I call it "Nair Them Trains."

REB

[Peter]

Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Boney fingers. Hoyt Axton.

REB is a gene you us.

From Trump headquarters:
Sarah Palin endorses me. Wow. She has great bosoms. Tina Fey’s and William Shatners satires of her only made her greater. Then a bunch of neocons at The National review spit on me. Bastards. But you, know, add the endorsements and the denouncements up and what do you get? President Trump. I’m just saying . . . . Sorry, gotta go. Downtown Abbey is coming on.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Man, I am *so* inspired by this, William. I couldn't resist. So I tried my hand (so to speak) at doing a "Southern" (hillbilly, redneck, somewhere in there) version of the first clump of Michael's message. I call it "Nair Them Trains."

Roger,

Dayaamm!

Michael

[Selene]

Wow. She has great bosoms.

And The Donald is the "sexist?"

I am so confused...