crappyCalling a hand gesture a “terrorist fist jab”?? not racist.
Pictures of Obama dressed like a witch doctor? Not racist.
Calling his mother in law the First Welfare Queen? Not racist.
“Barack the Magic Negro”? Not racist.
Saying a cop “acted stupidly” to arrest a man in his own home? OMG! He hates white people!
-- g, Sadly, No!, comments
Really gay guy: So you know how there's nothing on on tv in the summer? I started watching the gayest tv show ever.
Really gay friend: Yeah? Like what?
Really gay guy, conspiratorially: Star Trek: Voyager.
-- from Overheard in New York
I never have understood why business entities taking the corporate form - unlike other business entities, for example, partnerships - are entitled to be considered persons with the same rights as human beings.
-- Bloix, Hullabaloo, comments
The Journal of the A. M. A. is the vilest sheet that passes the United States mail.... Nothing new and useful in theraputics escapes its unqualified condemnation. Its attacks are generally ad hominem. Its editorial columns are largely devoted to character assasination.... Its editor [Morris Fishbein] is of the type of Jew that crucified Jesus Christ.
-- The Golden Age Magazine (Jehovah's Witless), September 26, 1934, p. 807. quoted at freeminds.org
"Malt does more than Milton can," wrote Housman, "To justify God's ways to man." Along the same lines, I'd suggest that missiology pales before mixology as a path to betterment.
-- Blake Stacey, Pharyngula, comments
Yeah, bring back the shame! If there’s one thing our society needs more of it’s crippling depression resulting from completely harmless aspects of ourselves.
-- Stephen, Sadly, No!, comments
I have long felt that "the Corporation has no rights which a Natural Person is bound to respect".
-- R U Reddy, Hullabaloo, comments
Forcing a woman, by threat of criminal sanction, to carry a fetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman's body and thus an infringement of security of the person.
-- Canadian Chief Justice Brian Dickson, 1988, quoted in the Toronto Star
I see that there are words in that quote but they make no sense in the current arrangement.
-- Hawise, Shakesville, comments
Essentially, it seems to me that the men who will go out of their way to insult or harass a woman are trying to put us back into what they perceive to be our places, and when they don't get the reaction they're looking for the hamster in their head has a stroke and falls over, rendering them unable to come up with a trumping witticism or other means of retaliation.
-- Poem435, Fannie's Room, comments
If corporations want to be people, perhaps we should accommodate them, but, in as full a sense as possible. First, corporations die, just like human beings (say, at the end of the median life expectancy) and all their assets end up in a garage sale. They serve jury duty. They cannot avail themselves of financial alternatives to jail for criminal offenses (e.g., their officers go to jail, and the corporation loses its freedom to operate and its citizenship rights). They get one vote each. They pay taxes on the same schedule as individuals, and only get the same deductions. They must pay their state, local and property taxes in full or suffer garnishment (i.e., no more extortion of communities by threatening to move and take jobs with them). They can contribute to campaigns only to the extent that individuals can. The only other rational alternative is to treat them as the legal construct that they are, and not imbue them with human rights when they are, in fact, not human. To do so contravenes common sense and legitimizes what would be sociopathy in an ordinary citizen.
-- montag, Hullabaloo, comments
Vaccination has never saved a human life. It does not prevent smallpox.
-- The Golden Age, Feb. 4, 1931, p. 294., quoted at freeminds.org
I am straight but the guys I sleep with may not be. I’ll have to check more closely in future.
-- Zebbidie, Sadly, No!, comments
English professor to secretary: According to my college transcript, I took a course in my freshman year called "introduction to drugs". I have no recollection of this course, and I wonder why.
-- from Overheard Everywhere
Goodbye "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor"--now it's all about "Give Me Your Ph.Ds and Forget Bringing Over Your Kids."
-- Mikhaela Reid, "Welcome, 'Guest' Workers," Flickr
Government may not be the solution to all problems, but it isn’t the problem. The thing to remember is that the government is what we make it. If government is dysfunctional, it’s because we did something dumb in setting government to a problem, or more frequently these days, because it reflects some of our dysfunction.
-- Wilson Heath, Balloon Juice, comments
I recently watched a Niall Ferguson “history of finance” series on PBS of all places, that summarily declared the welfare state dead but praised Greenspan and the Chicago Boys for inspiring the totally awesome reforms of Pinochet’s Chile. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, I actually threw shit.
-- kingubu, Sadly, No!, comments
Saltwater economists ask: "That may work in theory, but will it work in real life?"
Freshwater economists ask: "That may work in real life, but will it work in (our) theory?"
-- Timothy Butterworth, J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality With Both Hands, comments
A great many years ago, a couple of Jehovah Witnesses bit off more than they could chew with my grandmother. During the unsolicited conversation one of them remarked, "Only god can make a rainbow". To which my grandmother-who was watering her plants at the time-said, "nonsense", and created her own rainbow with a spray of water from the hose. Family lore has it that was the end of the conversation.
-- JL, Hullabaloo, comments
Safire was member of an arcane and dying profession; he was a writer, in a country that has been plunging -- headlong and giggling -- into an abyss of vicious ignorance and arrogant illiteracy for a generation. On the one hand, one less great writer in that darkening world is a sad thing. On the other hand, Safire used his formidable gifts to craft an arsenal which he put into the hands of many of the people who were leading the charge into that darkness. So there you go.
-- driftglass, "Sunday Morning Comin' Down," d r i f t g l a s s
I'm not nice, and proud of it. I have no interest in being nice, and I think it's rather pathetic to start an argument by baring your throat to my teeth and begging for mercy before you've even started.
-- PZ Myers, "Advice for atheists?", Pharyngula
Kristol et al. objected to those nasty counter-culture people who were trying to drag things into the political arena that did not belong there, and did not deserve the protection of the 1st Amendment… things like gender roles, sexual orientations, and economic paradigms, where no need existed for the free exchange of opposing views because Kristol already knew the correct answer. If only the DFHs had stuck to expressing views about which of two wealthy white men to vote for every four years, then they would have been within their first-amendment rights, and the whole neo-conservative movement would never have been necessary.
-- Smut Clyde, Sadly, No!, comments
No one can convince me that the prior 8 years of right-wing howling about jack-booted government thugs had no influence whatsoever on the murderer.
-- Mnemosyne, Balloon Juice, comments
The Titanic was also too big to fail, but after it sank it at least had the decency to stay down...
-- mjs, Hullabaloo, comments
Christians also don't get to play the humility card, anyway. People who believe they have privileged access to mysterious information direct from the brain of a cosmos-spanning super-intelligence, and who believe everyone else is damned to eternal torment, aren't exactly poster-
children for modesty.
-- PZ Myers, "Advice for atheists?", Pharyngula
I personally think of Iggy and Harper as US politicians... they just happen to be here.
-- maruad, James Nicoll's LJ, comments
If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.
-- George Orwell, "Notes on Dali," (1944), quoted at The Volokh Conspiracy
The basic premise of the managerist philosophy (the one that’s basically dominated American commerce since Reagan) is that the workers are interchangeable drones that can easily be replaced by some idiot on the street, and paying them minimum wage would be an imposition. This came from the frankly moronic generalization of finance management to other workplaces; while clerical workers might be mutually interchangeable, the idea has dominated the field that you make a profit in a factory or a sales firm the same way you make it in a bank -– the business runs itself on its own momentum, and labor is just a fashionable expense. There’s a political reason for this, of course: Reagan’s little interest-rate engineered depression basically crushed American industry, allowing the swift restructuring of corporate America around the finance firm. Which is why we have the Rust Belt, how we got the subprime crisis, and why we have next to no industrial production today – and, along with that, why layoffs happen in response to any economic stimulus or none at all. The foreman is dead. Long live the restructuring contractor!
-- alec, Sadly, No!, comments
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
-- John L. Perry, "Obama Risks a Military 'Intervention'," Newsmax
