Jeff Jarvis laments the fact that there are no pictures of the party at Gene Volokh’s house the other night. Me, too.
I took Patricia’s Olympus 3030, but somehow both of the SmartMedia (TM) disks with me had become unformatted, and I didn’t have a manual with me to figure out how to sort it out in real time. C’est la vie.
Better luck next time. Are there any from the Northern California party?
“Nothing could be further from the truth.”
In addition to becoming a hackneyed cliche (a phrase which itself is a “hackneyed cliche”), this sentence doesn’t parse, at least to me. What does it mean?
Does it mean that it’s possible for nothing to be further from the truth than for something to be? It reminds me of the old proof that a ham sandwich is better than eternal bliss.
Premise 1: Nothing is better than eternal bliss.
Premise 2: A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
Therefore: A ham sandwich is better than eternal bliss. QED
I hereby declare unconditional war on this cliche.
“Make no mistake about it…”
That last one actually does makes sense, but I also want to stomp it out anyway because it’s so overused, especially in Washington.
I’m figuring that if we can fully eradicate both phrases, most politicians will be struck dumb(er).
I’ve tried to keep this a Rall-free zone, but Jane Skinner on Fox News just had on the publisher of the magazine who ran the latest outrage about the greedy firefighters (I think it was Bob Guccione? but I’m not sure), and he was of course defending the stupid thing.
His story:
a) Good satire sometimes offends;
b) He found it very funny;
c) He had no intent to offend anyone by running it;
d) We must draw a distinction between depicting greedy firefighters in the present, and those same firefighters projected ten years into the future, and anyone who can’t do that is hypersensitive.
I agree with (a).
I believe (b) (or at least I have no reason not to believe it–there’s no accounting for taste or sense of humor). To me, it was utterly humorless, and anyone who found it funny is warped, but then there’s no reason, based on that interview, to think that he’s not.
I don’t believe (c)–I think he’s lying.
But the real crux of the issue is (d). In addition to being utterly unfunny, it was utterly pointless.
Good satire has a germ of truth. If his point was that the money flowing into charities is being misspent, there are many appropriate targets at which to aim satirical barbs (like the Red Cross, or United Way). But I’m not aware of any misappropriation or inappropriate expenditures of funds by the NYFD, past, present or (especially) future.
If in ten years, there are some activities by the NYFD that even vaguely resemble what are described in the cartoon, then it might be funny then (or at least as funny as it’s possible for a Rall cartoon to be, which is, if history is any guide, not at all).
But to run it now is not only pointless, it is obviously meant to be simply iconoclastic and cruel, under the thin guise of satire.
But then, consider the source.
Just in case there was any doubt, Harry Browne has completely lost it. As a libertarian, this saddens me.
Dennis Prager is on fire about the Red Cross banning songs with the words “God” or “prayer” from their event in Orange County. His take is that they didn’t really apologize–they just regretted that anyone found their decision offensive. It’s not quite that bad. If you read their press release, they do admit that they made a “mistake in judgment,” but the general tone is as Dennis said. They stand by whatever “principles” resulted in that judgment.
This is political correctness run utterly amok, and it seems to have appropriately ignited a firestorm when carried out by an organization called the American Red Cross.
As Dennis says, by their warped criteria, they can’t say “American” and they can’t say “Cross” because these terms are deemed potentially offensive.
That only leaves “Red.”
Dennis Prager is on fire about the Red Cross banning songs with the words “God” or “prayer” from their event in Orange County. His take is that they didn’t really apologize–they just regretted that anyone found their decision offensive. It’s not quite that bad. If you read their press release, they do admit that they made a “mistake in judgment,” but the general tone is as Dennis said. They stand by whatever “principles” resulted in that judgment.
This is political correctness run utterly amok, and it seems to have appropriately ignited a firestorm when carried out by an organization called the American Red Cross.
As Dennis says, by their warped criteria, they can’t say “American” and they can’t say “Cross” because these terms are deemed potentially offensive.
That only leaves “Red.”
Dennis Prager is on fire about the Red Cross banning songs with the words “God” or “prayer” from their event in Orange County. His take is that they didn’t really apologize–they just regretted that anyone found their decision offensive. It’s not quite that bad. If you read their press release, they do admit that they made a “mistake in judgment,” but the general tone is as Dennis said. They stand by whatever “principles” resulted in that judgment.
This is political correctness run utterly amok, and it seems to have appropriately ignited a firestorm when carried out by an organization called the American Red Cross.
As Dennis says, by their warped criteria, they can’t say “American” and they can’t say “Cross” because these terms are deemed potentially offensive.
That only leaves “Red.”
Fifteen girls burned to death in a school in Saudi Arabia. They weren’t allowed to leave the building, because they weren’t properly attired.
[Thanks to Charles Johnson for the link.]
I thought that the purpose of Anaconda was to cordon off the area so as not to allow any of the “rebels” (and what’s up with that word, anyway? They’re not “rebels”–they’re colonial oppressors and terrorists) escape.
So why are we hearing news reports about some of them escaping?
Well, the Administration is 0 for 2 in policy in the last few days, once on the domestic front, and once on the war front.
First was last week’s totally unprincipled decision to protect the steel industry. And now the president is undermining Israel’s fight for survival (and our justification for our own actions abroad) by making a wretched moral equivalence between terror and defense against it.
Is he morphing into his father?