"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jul 29, 2010

Quotes and Summations of the Summer

BDR:

"I've been saying what Yglesias said - that as shitty as the economy is, our overlords believe (or pretend) it would truly crater without permanent war - I just haven't been saying it approvingly."

Commenting upon:

"...But there's something wrong -- something sick, really -- with Ygelsias' war-as-stimulus argument that strikes me as far more offensive than the fact that some fiscal conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the National Security State. If you believe the war in Afghanistan is vital to protecting America, well, go ahead and make your case. Explain why pushing the couple dozen or so members of al-Qaeda allegedly still in the country over to Pakistan, while creating new enemies with each errant air strike, actually makes us safer.

What you
shouldn't do in a debate over war, at least if you want to maintain your status as a Non-Despicable Person, is argue that bombing and occupying a foreign nation makes good economic sense. Even if it were true as an academic point, it's grotesquely out of place in a discussion of matters of life and death. War, if it can ever be justified -- and I have my doubts -- can only be so on the grounds that it is absolutely necessary to protecting human life: there is no other choice, it's a last resort. Yet Yglesias discusses the continuation of a major, bloody armed conflict as if it were just another jobs program; perhaps not the most effective one to his mind, but hey, it's better that the federal government spend money on a pointless war than do nothing at all (like actually save money by ending said pointless war). Read the line again: "I believe that with the economy depressed it’s better to spend the money in Afghanistan than not to spend it." Sorry, but someone truly familiar with all the horrors of war, someone who could actually empathize with an Afghan mother or father losing their child to an American smart bomb -- or a child watching their parents die in a botched night raid by U.S. marines -- could never write that...."

From Charles Davis.

Again, Yggie provides the really low hanging fruit. But that doesn't change the observable data. A monster, that twit. An actual monster. Not on par with his beloved Imperial Barack, or with the man he loved to hate, George Junior. But, the sort of court sycophant who spends the entirety of his existence trying to pretty up the ignoble and heinous choices of his betters, his face covered in lickspittle, his mind long colonized by devotion to power.

Had I Calvinist bone in my body, I'd rest assured that Yggie had an eternity of torment awaiting him. Alas, no religion in me. So, perhaps the non-existent fates and Furies can settle that score.

4 comments:

Ethan said...

Did you see his appearance in an IOZ comment thread? He doesn't understand why IOZ finds him so "outrageous." Here.

Jack Crow said...

Just noticed. That was a rather stimulating deconstruction, IOZ's respondents provided.

augustus818 said...

For someone like Yggie, Hell is too good a place. And Fates? Yggie will be judge and jury on himself, much like the most of us.

Jack Crow said...

gus,

Some people seem incapable of self-judgment, no?

Obama and Bush, as more famous examples, come to mind.

Respect,

Jack