Thursday, September 04, 2008

Whither, withered testes?

About a year ago, the US held firm at 48th place in the World Press Freedom Index, well behind Mauritius, Namibia, and Bosnia & Herzagovina. The Index is compiled by Reporters Without Borders. Iceland ranked first, Eritrea last.

Due to the special effort made by USian journalists to be fair, balanced and inane (thanks to Jay Rosen for the link), I can't wait to see where we end up this year.

And if McCain becomes President Palin's bitch?

She's quite the enthusiast.


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3 Comments:

Blogger jonhusband said...

I watched her speech.

I've worked with people like her in the past. Not a fun experience.

She's perfect for signaling a possible further descent into a Dark Age. Uninformed, relentlessly enthusiastic and opportunistic .. I think they call it "situational leadership" or some other such barbarous euphemism.

9/04/2008 9:53 PM  
Blogger Tom Matrullo said...

These are people who long ago relinquished thought, education, or reason, Jon, and therefore must signal by wearing coded amulets, talking in code, using a series of fetishes, totems and scripts to essentially say back and forth to each other, ceaselessly, "I'm just like you." They do not think, they barter encoded speechgrams hoping to rise in favor inside the cargo cult. It's about mutual excitation - ask Sam Brownback.

9/04/2008 11:40 PM  
Blogger Juke said...

When you listen to someone like Palin you're hearing something else, behind her, above her, outside her socio-physical locus.
What that is is what we have to combat if we want things to improve for the good guys, and since it's invisible, lacks any specificity of boundary, has a multitude of mouths and hands - all replaceable - it gets enervating just to contemplate going up against it.

She's a Zionist of the Xtian persuasion. That's the key facet of what she brings, why she was chosen. Not so much for the theological dogma but for the inbuilt servility and acceptance of anti-rationality that's a prerequisite for membership.
She's a calm surface, a mask.
The mindlessness is a feature not a bug.
Impervious to pedantic reason. Immune to the prions of her own illogic. Obedient to a higher authority that never shows up as accountable for what its minions and myrmidons are doing.
She's a modern consumerist-demogogue.
Sacred gasoline, like the Grail.

Off to the Holy Land, crusaders!

She has telegenic-affect bulk from the millions in the audience who worship cuteness and mall-worthy cosmetics and sit-com level speech.
But she isn't representing that constituency, anymore than television programming is a response to viewer demand; she's mediating with it for the thing she answers to; she's representing the animating spirit of that group nexus back to the congregation, just as Bush is. Was.

It's near impossible for smart people to accept that things like Zionism, especially the US Xtian variety, are driven - and guided - by something that might as well be called an entity, because that means accepting the trademarked proprietary version of what that is.
More comfortable to see it as trivial, delusional, aberrant. And wait for the proctors to grade its efforts as failed attempt. Where are those proctors anyway?

Redefining the participants would help.
Redefining the conflict would help.
Seeing it as a Darwinian response, a strategy of survival. Not just a mistaken, mentally unhealthy condition that produces high-function idiots.
Something more akin to spirit possession - that p.o.v. makes the actual foe more visible, at least in outline.

Otherwise we can only carp along, down here in the brilliant murk, looking up at those vague shapes moving around, in a part of reality we can't access with explicit sense.

9/05/2008 5:06 PM  

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