digamma.net - notes

If you’re going to write a whole article desperately looking for political incorrectness in Harry Potter, could you spare one clause to J.K Rowling’s depiction of Irish people? Come on. A British author is not allowed to put the phrase “me mam” in the mouth of an Irish character. That’s some minstrel shit.

The film producers aren’t off the hook either. They got this thug, who looks like the guy who mugged me in Dublin when I was 11, to play Seamus. And of course they cast Brendan Gleason as the flask-chugging Professor Fake-Moody, who was never mentioned as Irish in the books.

I, for one, am outraged.

Atlas Shrugs refers to Gates of Vienna as “some of the most coherent writing on the web.”

That’s high praise from the woman who wrote this:

GREAT great great news day! Iraq ! What is going on is so thrilling
Every school should be tuned to fox today
The world should be tuned in to fox today
“This man crawled on his hands to a voting booth.” all that is goings on in Iraq!
the building, the training, the new forces going thru newly learned manuevers
the children, the poor people, creating makeshift blockades on their own,to stop vehicles going down a street with a polling place
we are not getting the real story
and the better the prospect for democracy, the higher the higher the decibel of vitriole
i know all about the terrible attacks but we are witnessing the birth of a nation. So GREAT TO ALIVE.
there is soooooooo much more going on there and there i am no pollyanna
Condi is being sworn in what a news day Newsgasm!
Bush (speaking for him and Laura) to Condi WE LOVE HER (and he says” i dont think i’m supposed to say that")
SWOON ……………….*Snoopy Dance of Glee*
so so rare so great! Keep it on Fox!

Gates of Vienna, by the way, is hilarious for other reasons.

It’s a Sunday, not much happening, Google Reader says I’ve got…. whoa, 11 new posts on Atlas Shrugs? That woman is unstoppable.

Let’s see here…. she starts out with a long quote about the Holocaust. Well, OK. Then she notes, “I will not go quietly, ladies and gentlemen. Be warned.” Well, I don’t think she’s ever done ANYTHING quietly.

So after like three paragraphs, we find out that apparently nature.com has published a map that refers to Israel as “Occupied Palestinian Territories". Well, that’s obnoxious if it’s true. I guess I should click the link.

First line: “The 57 countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference are home to 1.3 billion people.” Since Israel is not a member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, why would you expect it to be on that map?

Once again, I am stupider for having visited that site. Atlas Shrugs is the lead paint of the Internet - delicious but deadly.

Today:

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader mocked politicians of both parties as “Republicrats,” equally subservient to corporations and the wealthy. It was nonsense, of course: the modern G.O.P. is so devoted to the cause of making the rich richer that it makes even the most business-friendly Democrats look like F.D.R.

But right now, as I watch Senate Democrats waffle over what should be a clear issue of justice and sound tax policy — namely, whether managers of private equity funds and hedge funds should be subject to the same taxes as ordinary working Americans — I’m starting to feel that Mr. Nader wasn’t all wrong.

It took a minor tax policy question to make you figure that out? Next thing you know, the Democrats will Republicans will propose an idiotic war and Democrats will vote to authorize the use of force. Oh, wait, that happened five years ago.

This post from Scott Lemieux reads like a parody of desperate Clinton defenders, but he actually means it:

As Ezra says, as long as the GOP has more than 40 Senators and the White House, major accomplishments are not an issue. This also comes up a lot in debates with my Naderite friends, but while there are any number of valid critiques of Clinton, to attack him for not achieving any major progressive initiatives after 1994 is bizarre; with a Republican Congress this simply wasn’t a possibility. The President has a lot of power to affect the implementation of existing policy and can do a lot to obstruct change, but his ability to create major domestic policy shifts without Congress is nil.

No one on the left ever dreamed that Clinton would create a major progressive domestic policy shift. The most they ever hoped for was that he wouldn’t actively push conservative policies. And he fell well short of that goal.

The Telecommunications Act? Communications Decency? Antiterrorism? Welfare reform? These were all passed with Clinton’s signature and, with the POSSIBLE exception of welfare reform (on which he waffled repeatedly), with his enthusiastic support. You can’t blame the Constitution for that.

I pointed these out and Lemieux replied:

Of course, Clinton can be criticized for not preventing bad policies from passing, but since nothing I said contradicts that I’m not sure what the point is.

This is a pretty bizarre move of the goalposts. It seems to me that allowing major right-wing shifts should be considered worse than failing to create major left-wing shifts. Right?