Saturday Afternoon TV
Feb 27, 2010 Saturday Afternoon TV, progressives
Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism
Morning Awful
Feb 25, 2010 Glenn Beck, Morning Awful, progressives
Wow, Scott Brown (R-MA) is a progressive. Who knew?
Mike Lux does a good job of examining Beck’s CPAC speech here.
Saturday Afternoon TV
Feb 20, 2010 Saturday Afternoon TV, progressives
“[Lecture 1 of 10] From the lecture series “The Truth About American History: An Austro-Jeffersonian Perspective.” Thomas E. Woods, history professor–and a prolific specialist in American Colonial history, the Progressive Era, and modern political history–presents this seminar covering the material in his books, and details and defends the Jeffersonian-Rothbardian perspective. Here is the cutting edge of libertarian history that completely rethinks the meaning and impact of the welfare-warfare state.”
Quote of the Day
Feb 17, 2010 Quote of the Day, elitism, political framing, progressives, words
“The Science of Liberty.” How’s that for a definition of political science? Timothy Ferris at HuffPo:
Science is inherently antiauthoritarian: If a theory fails experimental test it doesn’t matter how smart or powerful its proponents may be. Science is also highly social: No one scientist knows enough to go it alone for long. Hence science thrives under liberalism, which protects freedom of property, speech, travel, and association. Their alliance has already freed more people from poverty, ignorance, and an early grave than every other approach in all recorded history combined. (Emphasis mine)
Ferris’s book sounds interesting:
In his most important book to date, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—”the best popular science writer in the English language today” (Christian Science Monitor)—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy. Ferris argues that just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger, and disease, the Enlightenment values it inspired has swelled the number of persons living in free and democratic societies from less than 1 percent of the world population four centuries ago to more than a third today.
Ferris deftly investigates the evolution of these scientific and political revolutions, demonstrating that they are inextricably bound. He shows how science was integral to the American Revolution but misinterpreted in the French Revolution; reflects on the history of liberalism, stressing its widely underestimated and mutually beneficial relationship with science; and surveys the forces that have opposed science and liberalism—from communism and fascism to postmodernism and Islamic fundamentalism.
A sweeping intellectual history, The Science of Liberty is a stunningly original work that transcends the antiquated concepts of left and right.
Oooh! Sounds delightfully intellectual-elitist! And possibly even factually correct! There’s a diagram and everything…
Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of “Barack”
Feb 5, 2010 Culture Wars, Faux Noise Channel, Faux Noise™, Glenn Beck, Kulturkampf, Obama Derangement Syndrome, Obama antichrist, Obama smears, Obama's middle name, Scare Words, progressives
Okay, that’s it Glenn. You’ve gone too far:
BECK: He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.
Meanings of barack and derivations: to kneel, to bless, to invoke blessings, to sanction, to be blessed, to enjoy or find pleasure or delight, to ask a blessing, to seek a blessing, to be praised, to be sublime.
A bierka is a pool or small pond, which is a sacred item in desert cultures. Check the Old Testament and you’ll find that Hebrews had some harsh treatments for anyone who poisoned a well; it was considered a crime against humanity.
There are other nouns based of the root barak: blessing, benediction, bounty. There is a negation meaning “misfortune” or “bad luck.” There are several parts of speech made from the root: when an Arab needs congratulations, you should say mabrook.
This information comes from from my taxpayer-supplied copy of the Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which still smells of Kuwaiti sand.
Glenn, I understand your problem: you are a clown with a circus. You are forced to top yourself each and every weekday. Every morning, you must pray to god for inspiration to top the boiled frog episode. This would just be entertainment if not for the fact you serve a rotten agenda: to rally racists, idiots, lunatics, and otherwise good Christians to the banner of the Republican Party.
Not that I mind; you’re helping to marginalize your own side. But along the way, you’ve stolen the act of every wacknoggin in the history right-wing media from Alex Jones to Father Coughlin, and now you’re channeling Jack Van Impe. You never know what the hell you’re talking about because your reading list consists of John Bircher paranoia, Atlas Shrugged, and — apparently — Hal Lindsey. Not a far stretch for someone who believes in golden plates and spirit-wives, I know — but still, it would all be fine except for the part where you constantly fill the heads of millions with this kind of dangerous garbage.
Glenn, you’re pandering to religious extremism and invoking the culture wars somewhere they absolutely don’t belong. I get the timing, because religiosity is hot: first there was Brit Hume, then Rush Limbaugh, and of course we have the highly-questionable testimony of Tim Tebow’s mom coming up in the midst of the f***ing SuperBowl this Sunday.
But this is really, really dangerous. You are telling your cult of worshipful know-nothings that the president serves the dark side, and by doing so you encourage very un-Christian divisions. Fear and hate are the tools of darkness. The truth is that YOU serve the dark side, Glenn. Your entire line of attack on Obama is psychological projection, like when you call Obama a “racist” and then pander to racism.
In fact, as long as we’re on the subject of things you project, consider your employer’s cozy relationship with the Chinese communist party. Hey, look — I connected YOU to actual, living, breathing, non-imaginary commies in one step — and without a chalkboard prop to make people think I maybe know what the fuck I’m talking about.
As long as I’m on a roll: the president might have changed his name to Joe Wilson or Bobby Jindal; but he instead chose to keep his birth name “not (as) some assertion of my African roots … not a racial assertion. It was much more of an assertion that I was coming of age. An assertion of being comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I didn’t need to try to fit in in a certain way.”
Get that, Glenn? Barack Hussein Obama kept his name because America is already enlightened enough to vote for a black man with a funny foreign name. Which just goes to show that you’ve already lost. The most you and your colleagues in the wingnutosphere can hope to accomplish is to make it as likely as possible to come to violence — just like the fight against progress did in the 1860s and 1960s.
Oh, which reminds me of one other thing: I’m sick of you pretending to know what “progressive” means. You’ve filled up endless hours of airtime with horse manure about a movement you don’t understand one tiny bit. I’ve done a better job of explaining the history of the progressive movement in a five-minute rock video than you have done in your entire career:
We’ve all been in those mind-numbing, stomach-churning, sleep-inducing conversations with people whose brains seem to be smaller than their mouths. They’re always endlessly long, painfully agonizing and hopelessly futile. I’d attempt to get past the screeners and tell you all this myself, Glenn, but it would be pointless. Just grow the hell up, you stupid racist bastard.
Saturday Afternoon TV
Jan 23, 2010 Saturday Afternoon TV, progressives
George Lakoff explains how to present progressive politics to the American people.
System Maintenance
Jan 20, 2010 progressives
The computer I’m using needs maintenance; posts will be spotty today.
News of the day thus far: Webb, Lieberman, and Barney Frank all think it’s time to stop the healthcare bill. Jane Hamsher is making common cause with them.
Stay home in November, guys! That’ll move Obama to the left for sure.
Saturday Afternoon TV
Jan 16, 2010 Saturday Afternoon TV, progressives
The Progressive Era — from Discovery Education Channel
Watch The Progressive Era in Educational | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Your Progressive Future
Jan 9, 2010 progressives
The Progressive Politics of the Millennial Generation:
The Course Of Human Events
Dec 31, 2009 progressives
This video looks at the last decade of debacles in the context of the century-old progressive movement and the reactionary response to the progressive victory of 2008. It also features the metal sound of Séance Fiction, so turn your speakers up as loud as you dare.
