The Wit & Wisdom of Dinesh D'Souza

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Oh for FUCKS sake fix that linking code

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― kingfish, Monday, 26 February 2007 21:48 (seventeen years ago) link

― kingfish, Monday, 26 February 2007 21:49 (seventeen years ago) link

HAHAHAHA dude D'Souza has officially surpassed Ann Coulter as the most wonderful, lovable, experimental commentator on the neurotic right: this stuff is heartwarming and priceless! There used to be this recurring bit character on Conan (I think on Conan?) who could make a bong out of any three items you gave him: D'Souza is increasingly that guy, able to weave really stupendous and almost non-insane-sounding arguments where more or less anything bad that happens is a result of the amorality of liberals.

The coolest one here is this:

If they were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they could have been hailed as pioneers

Not just for the retro Soho location, but just cause it's like the Where's Waldo of "what important distinction am I missing?" "By the way, we're totally unfair to rapists -- if those women had been consented, we wouldn't bat an eyelash!"

― nabisco, Monday, 26 February 2007 21:57 (seventeen years ago) link

dude has enuf balls to make it seem like he's got some kind of political autism; he's been hung out to dry over and over again by his own side for this shit and he just. keeps. going. the powerline guys, everybody has taken a shot at him, and he hasn't even flinched.

― gff, Monday, 26 February 2007 22:03 (seventeen years ago) link

The comments are just as entertaining, alternating between "WTF are you talking about?" and "Yer right! It's the hippies' fault!"

Y'know, I'm looking forward to the days when the Boomers are no longer in power, so we don't have a national politics seen entirely thru the lens of what happened when we were teenagers, and none other possible.

― kingfish, Monday, 26 February 2007 22:07 (seventeen years ago) link

you can't spell "gff getting depressed" without "townhall comment box"

― gff, Monday, 26 February 2007 22:15 (seventeen years ago) link

While D'Souza's argument suffers from exaggeration, errors of scale, unexamined assumptions, and simplistic ideas of causation, those conservative pundits who bend over backwards to deny that "they" hate us (at least partly) because of our permissive culture probably are engaging in more outright intellectual dishonesty. I think that the reason the pundits don't like D'Souza's argument has more to do with their embarrassment at finding themselves on the same side of the culture & values debate as the terrorists and their fears of how this uncomfortable alliance would play out in the broader media discourse than it does with any factual inaccuracies they might identify in his evidence.

― o. nate, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 21:47 (seventeen years ago) link

Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from Red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of Blue America.

thinking up this sentence really takes a certain kind of brilliance

― modestmickey, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 21:51 (seventeen years ago) link

similarly for Glenn Beck...

― kingfish, Tuesday, 27 February 2007 21:51 (seventeen years ago) link

On today's edition of Revise Your Own History with Dinesh, he goes on and on about how The Left was rooting for America to lose in Vietnam, and that the sexual revolution was probably not the result of loosening attitudes and the wide availablity of birth control, but because of the war.

So how long before he openly calls for the death of left-leaning folks, anyway? He's been whining about us being "the enemy at home" and more concerned about defeating Bush(how? voting him out?) than protecting the Vaterland. Oh, and we're in active cahoots with Bin Laden, accomplices in both the killing of Americans and God since the '60s.

― kingfish, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:32 (seventeen years ago) link

The eliminationist rhetoric really is starting to make my skin crawl. It's scary.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:52 (seventeen years ago) link

i dunno, it sounds more desperate than anything.

― latebloomer, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:56 (seventeen years ago) link

i mean if they actually got their way it would be scarier, but really at this point it's pathetic

― latebloomer, Monday, 5 March 2007 19:56 (seventeen years ago) link

gimme a break I'm not scared of this idiot

― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:01 (seventeen years ago) link

Dude, I go to a Tier 3 University full of kids from the outlying areas of Texas. I've talked with students who thought the "Ghetto Party" at UT Law was "no big deal", think Ann Coulter is an admirable political leader for our time, and think that Muslims should be put in camps "like in that movie 'The Siege'" until "we're more confident of their allegiances."

It may be desperate, but its got a sizable following.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:02 (seventeen years ago) link

Yeah, that's the thing, and one of the reasons why I pay attention to these assholes. This kinda shit has incrementally gained more traction and more airtime, and gets dismissed way too easily, or held up as equivalent by David Broder types to "radical leftist"/campus maoist loudmouth/bloggers who don't get invited to speak at major party events, are used in the advertising, and have blocks-long lines of worshippers needing signed books.

― kingfish, Monday, 5 March 2007 20:02 (seventeen years ago) link

Having taken all criticism on board, it seems Dinesh is extremely annoyed. And this is the first of four parts.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 12 March 2007 17:01 (seventeen years ago) link

You know, the sad thing is that if D'Souza really really cared about his central idea here -- you know, about creating a kind of traditional-values bridge with the mainstream Muslim world -- there are any number of fairly reasonable ways he could have written this book to get that idea taken seriously. (Most of them would have just involved laying out the argument and letting other crazy people actually denounce the left for him, which they'd have happily done.) It's bizarre to see him defend and pedal back toward his central ideas these days, as if totally unaware that its his own lunacy that torpedoed the points he could easily have invited people to take seriously.

― nabisco, Monday, 12 March 2007 17:10 (seventeen years ago) link

You know, the sad thing is that if D'Souza really really cared about his central idea here -- you know, about creating a kind of traditional-values bridge with the mainstream Muslim world -- there are any number of fairly reasonable ways he could have written this book to get that idea taken seriously.

Yeah. A lot of the conservative criticism voiced something similar.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 12 March 2007 17:25 (seventeen years ago) link

the bit for today decides to rehash the whole WMD bit, except going for the sophistry of how a particular claim was formed, regardless of whether that claim was actually true or not:

If you want to know how the Iraq debate got so acrimonious, the tipping point was when mainstream Democrats went from accusing Bush of bungling the Iraq war to accusing him of lying to get America into that war.

Of course, up until that point, debate was quite civil, with no accusations whatsoever of treason or collaboration, or calls for the removal and elimination of anyone not entirely gung ho with whatever the Admin called for that day.

― kingfish, Monday, 12 March 2007 18:01 (seventeen years ago) link

and HAHAHA for the traditional defense of the troll:

My goal is to stimulate a lively and civil discussion

― kingfish, Monday, 12 March 2007 18:11 (seventeen years ago) link

Part two.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 12:50 (seventeen years ago) link

God, this guy is a douche:

It takes a Midwestern lawyer who blogs in his spare time to cite three semi-popular books of varying quality, but not a single scholarly work, in order to establish the real motives of bin Laden and the 9/11 conspirators.

and stuff like this

But Qutb has become increasingly relevant as American popular culture has grown increasingly permissive and shocking to the sensibilities of traditional people around the world.

just kinda re-iterates over and over again that this guy _really_ agrees with them, and adds to the fun by tossing codewords like "traditional" around w/o regard to their meaning or context. e.g. despite the fact that violent islamic suicide-bombing fundies are a relatively new development. Still, is he talking about traditional saudi society? traditional afghani? libyan? lebanese? turkish?

― kingfish, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 19:32 (seventeen years ago) link

Corner types are trashing him, which amuses me greatly. Cripes, even Goldberg said something pithy:

Isn't there just a teeny-weeny disconnect between arguing that conservatives — including NR's reviewer of Dinesh's book — have a "closed mind" while at the same time getting four days in a row of space to defend your position, not to mention an initial elucidating interview on NRO?

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 19:34 (seventeen years ago) link

D'Souza's next book should be about James Burnham.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, 13 March 2007 20:08 (seventeen years ago) link

he's pretty much the worst person ever

― J.D., Wednesday, 14 March 2007 00:35 (seventeen years ago) link

d'souza, not burnham

― J.D., Wednesday, 14 March 2007 00:35 (seventeen years ago) link

Another great day. Would you believe there are such things as 'traditional Muslims?' Who knew?

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 17:19 (seventeen years ago) link

I'm coming in late here -- D'Souza's entire argument, which he repeatedly circles around, is that there is a mainstream Muslim sensibility that somewhat lines up with a mainstream Judeo-Christian/moral sensibility in western culture that believes we're too permissive and promiscuous, right?

Does that mean we can we just turn off the MTV feed to the Middle East and set up a firewall to block TMZ.com or whatever and they'll stop being pissed off at us? Really, what the hell is he going at?

― mh, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 20:22 (seventeen years ago) link

Jesus, he just keeps going. He hits upon the same points again & again, declaring that the bogeymen of "The Left" and "liberals" are now active allies of the terr'ists. This shit is more insidious than your standard rightwing blogger screeds, b/c this guy is writing all of this with a calm, bespectacled scholarly tone. It's just a matter of fact that people you don't agree with politically are in fact working in cahoots with Bin Laden and the Iraqis to give you the ol' dolchstoss in the back.

Of course, when a conservative critic calls him on this shit, he suddenly has to reverse direction and deny the logical conclusion of all his writings:

At one point Berkowitz accuses me of holding that “the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam.” What? The Left is as dangerous to America as al Qaeda, the radical mullahs in Iran, the jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and the worldwide network of radical Islam? Nowhere do I say this, and I challenge Berkowitz to substantiate his allegation. My point is that the cultural Left, through its well-documented policies and its values projected abroad, is greatly strengthening the position of radical Islam. The two groups, I write, work in a kind of scissors motion, each prong operating separately, but moving toward the common end of defeating Bush’s war in Iraq. Yet Berkowitz accuses me of equating the danger posed by the Left and the Islamic radicals, as if I’m weighing one against the other.

― kingfish, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 21:26 (seventeen years ago) link

Radical Islam and the right also work in a kind of scissors motion, each prong operating separately, but moving toward the common end of reshaping world culture into something that adheres to traditional religious tenets. If dude's grand claim were that "OMG opposing groups may have limited aims in common" you'd think he wouldn't bother wasting paper on it.

― nabisco, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 21:39 (seventeen years ago) link

mind blown by genius scissors analogy

― Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, 14 March 2007 21:42 (seventeen years ago) link

Actually, I thought D'Souza's commentary today about widespread Western misconceptions about Islam was mostly spot on, at least in the parts where he confined himself to talking about how Muslims actually live in the world, and how American commentators with little direct knowledge of these things can sound quite ignorant when discussing them.

― o. nate, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:38 (seventeen years ago) link

And maybe "traditional Muslims" is a poor choice of terms, perhaps a better term would have been "moderate" or "mainstream".

― o. nate, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:39 (seventeen years ago) link

Or even "ordinary".

― o. nate, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:41 (seventeen years ago) link

― horseshoe, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:45 (seventeen years ago) link

That is so unfair to D'Souza's pants.

― nabisco, Thursday, 15 March 2007 00:53 (seventeen years ago) link

this cartoon from the rightwing op-ed thread pretty much sums up all of dsouza, in three brief panels:

http://www.caglecartoons.com/images/preview/%7BBFBB8871-3E3D-4497-94BA-41B4317E1E6B%7D.gif

Which, again, makes me why these guys are agreeing with the terr'ists...

― kingfish, Thursday, 15 March 2007 16:30 (seventeen years ago) link

Victor Davis Hanson and various other conservative opponents have things to say in response to D'Souza apologia. They're not impressed.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 16 March 2007 16:45 (seventeen years ago) link

How badly has D'Souza shot himself in the ass? Predictions?

― J, Friday, 16 March 2007 17:16 (seventeen years ago) link

the Hanson piece is pretty good, i must say. i had no idea D'Souza had included Rushdie on his list of "insurgents," that is just beyond offensive and backward. before, this was all haha dinesh what a moran but now i really want to sock him in the fucking mouth

― gff, Friday, 16 March 2007 17:20 (seventeen years ago) link

nice subheader on the Hanson piece

― Shakey Mo Collier, Friday, 16 March 2007 17:24 (seventeen years ago) link

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/03/19/scotus.bonghits.ap/index.html

― Catsupppppppppppppp dude ‫茄蕃‪, Monday, 19 March 2007 17:27 (seventeen years ago) link

Why they want us to lose

But in a deeper sense, the behavior of the left and its political allies is a mystery. After all, the Islamic radicals are the most illiberal forces in the world. At least the socialists and the communists claimed to speak for liberal values, such as sexual and economic egalitarianism. It’s understandable why misguided college students might go around sporting Che Guevara T-shirts. But even American leftists don’t go around with Bin Laden or Khomeini T-shirts. Leftists know how the Bin Laden and Khomeini types feel about Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank. So why doesn’t the left want to fight the broadest and most aggressive campaign possible against a sworn enemy of liberal values?

[...]

Consequently the left in its political strategy seems to be applying the doctrine of the lesser evil. The left is allying with the bad guys in order to defeat the worse guys. Obviously leftists have no wish to live in the kind of society that Bin Laden seeks to establish. But the left also knows that Bin Laden wants to establish sharia in Baghdad, not Boston. Some elements on the left are willing to risk an Islamic fundamentalist state in Iraq in order to improve its prospects of defeating conservative government here in America.

Yes, THANK GOD AND ALLAH ABOVE, there's no difference between Sunni and Shia since Bin Laden will easily be able to join up with the Iraqi gov't and Sadr-types to establish the sharia that he wants.

also, communists => all about the fucking, obv, which MUST be the case why poor conservative Dinesh had such a lonely Dartmoth experience

― kingfish, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 17:38 (seventeen years ago) link

Dartmouth, rather. etc

― kingfish, Wednesday, 21 March 2007 17:42 (seventeen years ago) link

one month passes...

Guess what, the abortion issue is like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, except that Abe Lincoln is pro-life, or something.

(fun fact: abortion was legal during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and would be up until the laws changed just after the u.s. civil war, about the same time a total reactionary(i.e. more than usual) got named pope)

― kingfish, Monday, 23 April 2007 23:39 (seventeen years ago) link

thats just fucking disgusting, i couldnt read more than a paragraph or tow

― deeznuts, Monday, 23 April 2007 23:42 (seventeen years ago) link

Aw, but you'll miss lines like:

The abortion issue reveals the bloody essence of modern liberalism.

― kingfish, Monday, 23 April 2007 23:46 (seventeen years ago) link

"as a former fetus"

― lfam, Monday, 23 April 2007 23:48 (seventeen years ago) link

wow, you were a fetus, too? i figured you grew out of a pod.

― lfam, Monday, 23 April 2007 23:48 (seventeen years ago) link

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