Open Thread Monday

var4512

40 comments to Open Thread Monday

  • David Marcoe

    ObamaCare chances are dimming and apparently we won’t see anything until January. However, this situation is still fluid. We need to keep stabbing, makes as many holes as we can and make them bleed out as quickly as possible.

  • Veruckt

    So I suffered through about 20+ minutes of “The People Speak” last night and aside from reaffirming my belief that Matt Damon is a giant douche bag it also reaffirmed by belief that the best way to deal with leftist is to simply let them talk. There is nothing that will more quickly show how ignorant they are than listening to their emotional masturbation. What I saw of the “special” made absolutely no sense and was only missing a smoky room full of beatniks snapping in appreciation to really complete the amateur poetry night vibe it had going.

    • Kit

      I did not watch it.

      What was the kookiest part of what you saw?

      Can you give me an example?

      • Veruckt

        Well you had Eddie Vetter (not positive on the name spelling) incoherently singing some Bob Dylan song which was pretty kooky. James Brolin reading an excerpt from some book called “Jonny Got a Gun” about a disfigured veteran asking to be wheeled into elementary schools so he could show the kids how not everyone dies in war and how someday they’ll get a chance to fight for nothing. Viggo reading, in Spanish, a letter from anti-war people who lost a son on 9/11 talking about how our fighting back does nothing and we should just let it go. Matt Damon reading from what I believe was a communist novel of some sort about farmers who had so little raising up to take from the farmers who “have a million acres”. Most of it was just babbling.

        Here is my problem. It had nothing to do with history. You basically had Howard Zinn talking about how much more valuable musicians, actors, and writers were to the American experience than soldiers and businessmen. There was not historical context, it was actors read excerpts from fictional anti-war novels. It was just weird.

  • Scott M.

    “The People”…gawd,how I hate that term…

  • Scott M.

    People’s Republic..as opposed to what? Plant’s Republic? Cat’s Republic?

    • In ancient times, the most powerful guy justified his tyranny and wealth by asserting that he ruled by the will of God, even when he flouted God’s law at every turn. Nowadays, he does the same thing “by the will of the people,” even when he oppresses and murders the people. What all of us do in small ways, they do on a large scale. But you always need a rationalization.

      • Lars… your comment reminds me of this piece of a 2004 City Journal article called “The Frivolity of Evil” by Theodore Dalrymple:

        Still, all these were political evils, which my own country had entirely escaped. I optimistically supposed that, in the absence of the worst political deformations, widespread evil was impossible. I soon discovered my error. Of course, nothing that I was to see in a British slum approached the scale or depth of what I had witnessed elsewhere. Beating a woman from motives of jealousy, locking her in a closet, breaking her arms deliberately, terrible though it may be, is not the same, by a long way, as mass murder. More than enough of the constitutional, traditional, institutional, and social restraints on large-scale political evil still existed in Britain to prevent anything like what I had witnessed elsewhere.

        Yet the scale of a man’s evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities. They do what they can get away with.

        In any case, the extent of the evil that I found, though far more modest than the disasters of modern history, is nonetheless impressive. From the vantage point of one six-bedded hospital ward, I have met at least 5,000 perpetrators of the kind of violence I have just described and 5,000 victims of it: nearly 1 percent of the population of my city—or a higher percentage, if one considers the age-specificity of the behavior. And when you take the life histories of these people, as I have, you soon realize that their existence is as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship. Instead of one dictator, though, there are thousands, each the absolute ruler of his own little sphere, his power circumscribed by the proximity of another such as he.

        • Now that’s a weird coincidence. I’ve just been scratching my head over this article at The American Prospect.

          It’s making the point that it’s a crying shame that 1% of Americans are in jail, and Joe Carter at First Things is pointing to it as evidence of a growing movement to release imprisoned offenders to some sort of supervised freedoms as something conservatives should get behind.

          These are the types of reforms that should be led by conservatives. Yet instead we settle for empty sympolic gestures (e.g., executing criminals) that give the impression we are “tough on crime” while ceding real crime-reduction policy solutions to the liberals.

          Carter also says, “Fortunately, not all politicians are choosing to put the safety and concerns of the public ahead of their own electoral prospects.” Which doesn’t make sense to me. It sounds backwards, but if I reverse it, then he’s undercutting his own argument, so I give up.

          But back to the weird coincidence: 1% of Americans in prison. Dalrymple claims that 1% of the population of his city is “saturated with arbitrary violence.”

          Obviously, not every criminal is caught and imprisoned, and the 1% in prison includes drug addicts who probably shouldn’t be there. But it’s interesting that these numbers are the same.

  • The left is pissed at Joe Lieberman for not marching in lockstep with them on Obamacare. But since their temper tantrums aren’t making him change his mind, they’re going after his wife.

    Stay classy, liberals.

  • Michale Savage is right – about liberalism.

  • Veruckt

    I tend to like Reagan’s “liberalism is a mental disorder” but personally have always thought it was more specifically an emotional disorder. You’d have a hard time disproving it.

    The good news about Liberalism is 8 out of 10 people will grow out of it after they’ve been out of college for about 4 or 5 years and seen how the real world works, the other 2 become teachers or journalist.

  • “People’s Republic” is generally meant to refer to a republican form of government in which all authority stems from the citizenry and not from nobility, clergy, or oligarchy. “Democratic Republic” means pretty much the same thing, but is less strident about it. For instance, Germany – a Democratic Republic – is headed by a Chancellor, which infers a monarchy, despite the fact that there hasn’t been a monarch in, what, 80 years? 90? They also still have nobles, though they have no political power and they tend to ignore them.

    So “People’s Republic” was meant to distinguish themselves from that sort of thing.

    It’s also intersting to me that “Soviet” is the Russian word for “Congress” – IE the “Union of Congressional Socialist Republics.”

  • Dunno if anyone’s interested or not, as this thread seems dead, but “V” and “Flash Forward” just got picked up for the rest of this season http://www.republibot.com/content/breaking-news-v-and-flash-forward-aint-dead-yet

  • At The Corner, Shannen Coffin has a great line about Bush 43.

    President Bush may not have batted 1.000 as far as conservatives go, but he had a pretty damned good slugging percentage.

    If you talk and reason mostly in baseball analogies (as all reasonable men should) this sums the last President up nicely.

  • And speaking of baseball, SI reports that Halladay is going to the Phillies, with Lee to Seattle and prospects going to Toronto.

    Seattle looks like they’re making a run here, which probably means I’ll be saying bye-bye to Jason Bay.

  • Kit

    Matt Damon responds to criticism that People Speak! is just stupid, poorly made propoganda made solely for the purpose of celebutard onanism:

    “Matt Damon. Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon. Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon. Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon. MATT DAMON! Matt Damon! Matt Damon, Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon, Matt Damon. Matt Damon Matt Damon: Matt Damon, Matt Damon, Matt Damon, Matt Damon, Matt Damon Matt Damon. Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon Matt Damon. Matt Damon MATT DAMON!”

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