NRO's The Corner: Rolling Bile, Spit, and Gnash Thread

"shitty things that happen are a force for conservatism, because conservatism is about more shitty things happening to people"

wtf

i srsly don't understand this level of stupidity

it just seems like conservatism in the form it has survived in in America is about an aesthetic preference for suffering, which, really?

Conservatism requires silent suffering, which heaven will reward.

i hate reading stuff like that because there is just SO MUCH WRONG with it i dont even know where to start, like which category of wrongness do i begin to attack there, the actual facts that shes getting wrong or the bizarre philosophical suppositions or?

somewhere along the line conservatism became in essence a kind of willful assholism that is basically absent of any real beliefs except that you're smarter than everyone else. it's like a political framework derived from bad stand up comedy.

modern conservatism is a performance art. but that example isn't even a very good performance.

i hate reading stuff like that because there is just SO MUCH WRONG with it i dont even know where to start, like which category of wrongness do i begin to attack there, the actual facts that shes getting wrong or the bizarre philosophical suppositions or?

― max, Wednesday, December 29, 2010 12:46 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, that, too, like i was about to get all mad at how dumb blizzards=no global warming is, except that turned out not even to be her main rong point!

The comments are, as usual, edifying.

i think modern conservatism is basically post-politics, if that makes sense. it's not about understanding the world or reacting to suffering, it's about reacting to all these other people who have already tried to do that. it's really rare and weird when you read a right-winger assessing the world or a problem in itself, rather than just making an argument about liberals.

so it goes, liberalism tries to do something about suffering >>> liberalism is evil >>> let's root for suffering

i just feel like when i'm reading modern conservatives (which i don't do that often, tbf), their prose tends to dilate at the moments where they're describing suffering? like, they enjoy the idea of how it feels to suffer? like, that's really where they live? which is so fucking crazy i can't even.

That paragraph is the single most stupid thing I've read this year.

it just seems like conservatism in the form it has survived in in America...

we get it like that over here as well.

well one could see it as an immune response to suffering too. it's sorta psychically distressing to be white and privileged and be shown suffering or to fear the ethical or compassionate response it might elicit.

but even with, say, buckley standing athwart history there's a sense of irony, a performance. it's like once the foundations are gone and we're "modern" then one can only be conservative ironically...but that ironic/performance aspect seems to be lost and replaced with a weird reverse utopianism implicit in that blizzard comment.

i mean, i think it's an immune response to suffering, too, and it's often accompanied by "those people over there should suffer because it will strengthen character", but there seems to be kind of an imaginative yearning for suffering in the absence of real suffering or something? i should probably find an example of this, huh?

Off topic guys, but relevant.

So glad I knew, while reading, how it turned out! Had I not known of the outcome, this would have been a frightening story. The pieces fell into place for us freedom lovers, but the authors give us an immense appreciation of the fact that the odds of defeating Great Britain were overwhelmingly not in our favor.

all i really mean is, this is crazy stuff for the arena of politics. it seems more theological or philosophical or something; it just seems like these people should get out of the politics game.

xp

i mean, i think it's an immune response to suffering, too, and it's often accompanied by "those people over there should suffer because it will strengthen character", but there seems to be kind of an imaginative yearning for suffering in the absence of real suffering or something?

Related: conservative obsession with media. Hitchens correctly said years ago that it's a weird self-pity: superpower self-pity.

i def agree horsehoe...sorta the "regeneration through violence" kinda thing.

it helps that the natural constituency of these ideas are the people who materially have the least to really worry about

i think that's a fundamental part of it!

A lot of it seems just the result of spite + authoritarianism + ressentiment = a non-thinking. Everything is the result of those Bad People doing something Immoral. All problems are cuz of Libruls, and so we must fashion ourselves to be what we think Libruls would most hate, because doing ANYTHING positive(building something, progressing something, fixing something) is a distant secondary to the infantile tantrumic glee we receive by Pissing Off Those Libruls.

Take these bits and mash them together like Play-doh, and you wind up with an amorphous blob of turgid brown that doesn't please anybody and yet still tastes kinda salty when you nibble at it.

Its like some people have completely and unconsciously absorbed the fact that they're the losers or the Remainders of History, so any action comes from a point of butthurtness so deep they can't even detect its butthurt existence. Run Sarah Palin for high office? Why not! There's no way she'll win over any independent voter but MAN will it piss off those pussy faggit east-coast laJtEtWe-eIliStiHst Libruls!

No longing acting anything close to principle, it down to merely reacting in the pissiest, most infantile and puerile manner available. Who gives a fuck if Congress doesn't do anything, we'll block and cry and scream and stamp our feet rather than pass a bill. Because we've scrapped or distilled everything down to Us vs Them, those hated evilest peoples on Earth, we must expend all energies to the end of time destroying them.

Block the 9/11 Responders bill? Block the START ratification that even the trad-Repub Richard Lugar has to say, "what the fuck is wrong with you people?" Why the fuck not.

One of things it reminds me of in from my existentialism class, reading stuff like Dosteovsky and Nietzsche, where N. went on about the slave class so hating that the master class was good at shit that they poisoned the well, and deliberately inverted morals to result in Fundie Christianity, so that being great at something was prideful and wrong.

Nice overlap with the health care thread. The holidays have been awesome for everyone.

I got in my own spat on Saturday with a bisexual history professor (he wrote the only full-length bio of Liberace), a libertarian who's reconstituted himself into a witty contrarian gadfly. I like the guy, but so much of what he does is performance. For all his intelligence, he could not answer my direct question: "If Obama is such a quasi-socialist, then why did he hire Geithner and Summers?" For him it was more fun to be coddled by my dad and cousin, who peppered him with obsequious questions about 2012.

And I think it's going to get worse. Every single time you get the death-throes of a generation realizing that they're becoming irrelevant, that the World is Moving On, you get this violent thrashing about.

The kicker is that we know have a 24/7 "nihilistic commercial media" as Taibbi describes it, which amplifies everything and anything and can filter thru to how our brains have evolved to where such noise can block everything else out. It works a lot like how we tend to hold an anecdote as far more compelling that any actual statistic. Hyperfocus on this one vivid thing, and everything else falls away.

So now we have this overcharged media complex not only controlled by, but packed with, entitled and privileged aging white folks who are beginning to twig to the fact that Shit Is Changing, and they fuckin' scared of what's coming next.

One of the reasons that I don't pay attention to politics news anymore(or read blogs or even post on the politickin' threads as much) is that there's nothing out there right now BUT responses to this angry hateful dread.

As I've noted elsewhere, my own personal anxiety level has been fucked for over a year-and-a-half thanks to repeated lay-offs and job instability that I can't possibly tolerate bringing in any more emotional bullshit to my current load.

a witty contrarian gadfly.

part of this is what i hate, because that way(similarly to Vice Mag-style hipster coke-repping contrarianism) leads to a nihilism.

also

who peppered him with obsequious questions about 2012.

plz plz plz tell me they were asking about the end of the world.

synonymous with nominating Palin

they all hated Palin actually -- she wasn't "serious."

The blizzard reveals something basic: Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives

How does an example of the nanny state "failing" reveal any of this? If you are going to frame your bias as deductive reasoning at least follow it through properly.

i think it's clear that whatever is going on with modern conservatism, charlotte hays is one of the stupidest people in history

luv ya kingfish but the phonetic spelling of 'liberals' is kinda grating imo?

anyway, my real contribution to this thread is that we're talking about a specific stream of middlebrow faux intellectual conservative & when it comes down to it, isnt it mostly about 'social issues'/racism/social conservatism being connected to elites who are willing to cave on anything as long as they get tax cuts. the actual political philosophy behind it is nonsensical because its basically about using social issues to cut taxes for upper income brackets

hey kingfish- where's the "if global warming is real why does it snow?" political cartoon thread? cant find it for some reason

I did laugh out loud at this:

Food for Thought
December 29, 2010 1:02 P.M.
By Jack Fowler

Commenting on yesterday’s NRO editorial about first lunch lady Michelle Obama, Corner fan John, a local teacher, e-mails “A sample menu item for NYC public schools in January: ‘Mediterranean Roasted Chicken, Whole Grain Rotini with Fresh Herbs, Ellie Krieger’s Tri-Color Salad.’ If you saw these meals close up, you’d agree that the menu writer should be our poet laureate.”

luv ya kingfish but the phonetic spelling of 'liberals' is kinda grating imo?

I use that b/c half the time the spite behind anytime they utter the word prevents the proper pronunciation.

gr8080, here you go, it's a blog:

http://ifglobalwarmingisrealthenwhyisitcold.blogspot.com/

I don't think we had a separate thread for it.

There must have been some kind of memo - let's call it the Daily Dogwhistle. It's now totally OK for conservatives to consider Palin as somewhat less than serious, if my own mom is anything to go by. Mom is now saying 'all she is doing is trying to provide for her family' when conservative conventional wisdom should dictate 'these deadbeats ought to stand on their own two feet and not sponge off their parents'. <----American exceptionalism, y'all.

Mom is now watching Megyn Kelly give attitude to a (black) woman representing a group of journalists who are trying not to use the term 'illegal immigrant'. I hate that stupid Valkyrie.

also can't get enough of stanley kurtz talking about how brilliant and persuasive his own book is

^^ me too. even by the high standards of authorial egotism this guy is special. love when he ANTICIPATES disagreements. dude secretly realizes nobody gives a shit.

A sample for the uninitiated:

Knowing that Obama was a conventional Marxist when he was young is important because it shows us that Weigel’s explanation for Obama’s work with socialist community organizers is unconvincing. Obama’s early socialism was sincere, and he was not merely fooling his community organizing mentors into thinking that he bought into their worldview. Later on I do think Obama adopted the more sophisticated socialist stance of his Midwest Academy mentors. But that doesn’t make Obama’s more traditionally Marxist past irrelevant. On the contrary, it shows us that Obama was not just a “liberal political hack” who tricked Chicago’s socialists into thinking he was one of them, as Weigel would have it. On the contrary, Obama was a true believer who became more sophisticated in his socialism, but never abandoned it.

Also, the Marxist undercurrent that has always infused “democratic socialism” in America has never entirely disappeared. That is a revealing fact as well. A significant threat to liberty that inheres in even the most reconstructed socialism. This comes out in various ways in Radical-in-Chief. The Marxism question is complicated. Marxism gets transformed and downplayed in modern democratic socialism, but it never goes away. That is the reality of Obama’s socialist community organizing world.

It would be a mistake to make too much of that fact, but also a mistake to deny it. The book does not score cheap points but lays out the reality of modern socialism in all its complexity. The result is scary, but it’s a legitimate concern, based on a fair and nuanced portrait of modern democratic socialism and its place in community organizing, not a bogus invocation of the Gulag.

a fair and nuanced portrait of modern democratic socialism and its place in community organizing, not a bogus invocation of the Gulag.

he's really not selling it to his audience here.

Book Recommendation for Anyone Curious about Catholicism
December 30, 2010 6:51 A.M.
By Mike Potemra

Kudos to Ignatius Press for reissuing, in a revised and expanded version, a likable and well-written work of Catholic apologetics by Father Dwight Longenecker. The organizing premise of his work, More Christianity: Finding the Fullness of the Faith, is that in Catholicism is found the complete fruition of the truth present in what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” In my experience, apologetics generally — whether of the Protestant, Catholic, or other variety — is long on hectoring, bullying, and the devising of false choices, and significantly short on persuasiveness. In other words, they don’t make C. S. Lewises by the dozen: So it’s refreshing to read a book that has something of Lewis’s spirit. Longenecker’s work is distinctive in two ways: 1) Having been both a fundamentalist at Bob Jones University and an Anglican priest before becoming Catholic, he has had an exceptionally broad experience of the diversity of the Christian faith; and yet 2) he has none of the distaste for his former religious homes that mars the work of too many converts.

"diversity": that's the same Bob Jones who says pope is the anti-christ!?!? the US catholic church is merely an adjunct of the republican party

The comments on this article are astonishing:

"Many of my conservative friends — who oppose both civil unions and gay marriage and object to rampant promiscuity — often act as if there’s some grand alternative lifestyle for gays. But there isn’t."

Not sure I agree that celibacy is impossible (some of us manage it at times, whether we want to or not). But even conceding that point, so what? You don't have a normal mating instinct? Tough. You're SOL. Just like the woman who wants to be in a marine infantry unit, or the man who wants to work at Hooters. To ask that society re-define itself to accommodate your condition, consequences to society be damned, is outrageously self-centered. And to claim it as a matter of right is beyond the pale.

astonishing and appalling. their befuddled logic makes my head hurt.

You very much underestimate the harm that gay "marriage" will do to marriage it will make the term meaningless and useless. Exactly what we don't need right now.

Would you like this situation to play out in a bar one day...good looking man, "Would you like to get a room."

person being hit on, "Ahh I am married you know..."

good looking man, "I am not sure what you mean by married is it just a friendship thing or what?"

That would be a sad world to live in.

Jonah is such a weasel/that column is pure disingenuous hater-bait.

man you ain't kidding, those comments are wild

some dude quotes an anti-gay marriage book:

"[The origins of] close-relationship theory...can be traced back behind the likes of Alfred Kinsey or Margaret Mead to Friedrich Engels...it interests itself in gratification, not renunciation. In short it offers a radically different account of the nature and function of marriage, and so also the politics of marriage."

the book itself has a great title tho

http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Bastards-Essays-End-Marriage/dp/0978440242/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1293629066&sr=8-6

Would you like this situation to play out in a bar one day...good looking man, "Would you like to get a room."

person being hit on, "yes I would like to share a room. Hotels are very expensive in this town. Do you like playing card games? I love Crazy 8s!"

good looking man, "wait I was trying to hit on you."

person being hit on, "oh I thought you were just being friendly."

That would be a sad world to live in.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/chestnuts-and-silver-bells/

oh god just read the whole thing

merry christmas, from steve sailer

Be Good, Members
January 4, 2011 10:33 A.M.
By Kathryn Jean Lopez

It is a good move by John Boehner to have nothing to do with tomorrow night’s swanky, PAC-sponsored LeAnn Rimes concert to raise money for the reelection of some freshman Republicans. Among other things, someone clearly didn’t learn from the recent Shape magazine controversy over Rimes. I’m a huge fan of redemption — it’s my only hope — but freshmen coming to Washington and celebrating with a star most recently best known for adultery isn’t quite coming to town on the right foot.

Saying no to a drop-by, on the other hand, is. Declining a reception invitation is something congressmen ought to feel completely comfortable doing. Hitting the cocktail circuit may not be the best use of their evenings — for their constituents, for their family, for their moral health.

Bobby Jindal has some advice for Washington — and all of us — in his new book on leadership: “All people — regardless of their job or role in society — have the responsibility to notice when they are viewed as a role model and live up to that responsibility. No excuses. That admiring kid of today could be a political leader, athlete, parent or teacher of tomorrow.”

god help me i just looked up what the leann rimes shape magazine controversy is

I didn't know there was a controversy!