URLs du Jour

2018-08-01

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  • King Solomon delivers up another wet firecracker in Proverbs 10:14:

    14 The wise store up knowledge,
        but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.

    Oral fixation. Ugh.


  • Jonah Goldberg (at National Review) finds the Bannon vs. the Kochs feud to be aumusing. And who doesn't? Bannon is quoted:

    “We can have a theoretical discussion later, OK? This is why they don’t know what it means to win, OK? We don’t have time to have some theoretical discussion and to have their spokesman come out and say the president is divisive,” Bannon said.

    Among other Goldbergian comments:

    This whole thing is a pas de deux of asininity, because the candle of dumb burns from both ends. Not only is it barmy to think David and Charles Koch would bend to this, it’s even barmier to think that Steve Bannon is the person to lecture anyone about losing elections. I know there are people out there who think Bannon singlehandedly won the election for Trump (pollsters call this demographic “Steve Bannon”). But even if one were willing to entertain that idea, look at his record since. Nearly every goblin, Morlock, and troll that he’s supported in his vaunted war on the establishment has gone down in flames. One of his favorites, Paul Nehlen, revealed himself to be a full-on hater of the Jooooz. The golden nugget in Bannon’s turd parade was Roy Moore, whom Bannon bet on big. It was a power move in which Bannon broke with the president, who fired him on the theory that Bannon was building a movement. The result: He gave Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat to the Democrats. In Alabama.

    I'll probably always despise Steve Bannon for running the post-Breitbart Breitbart into the ground.


  • At Power Line, John Hinderaker comments on the latest Facebookian move: Facebook Removes “Inauthentic” Left-Wing Accounts. Samples of the fake accounts' tendentious blather are provided, so you can see what you almost certainly missed. Example: one of the accounts was listed as a sponsor of an upcoming protest, "No Unite The Right 2 -dc". Here's an embed of that event, from a different (authentic?) account, "Crushing Colonialism":

    Yeah, fine. I'm with John:

    Perhaps I am missing something, but there is such a vast quantity of authentic nonsense on Facebook that the presence of a tiny amount of inauthentic nonsense–whatever that means, exactly–does not strike me as very important.

    [Comment]


  • At Reason, Brian Doherty lists 3 Things People Don't Get About the Homemade Gun Making Story. Just three? Well, that's plenty, because number three is:

    3) The case is as much about free speech as it is about gun rights. Since the case ended via settlement and not a decision, no explicit precedent has been set that these specific computer instructional files count as expression protected under the First Amendment. But that was the core of the legal argument Defense Distributed was making, and is still having to make against all the new authorities trying to restrain it.

    Just kidding. The first two are important too. But that leads me to…


  • Of course our state's junior Senator was outraged and disturbed, and tweeted her outrage and disturbance. I replied:

    I wonder how long it will take for Senator Maggie to follow her true instincts and sponsor legislation to ban all expression that might make it easier to do something illegal?


  • Robert Tracinski (The Federalist) has bad news for people who like to laugh: The Age Of Didacticism Is Out To Kill Comedy.

    I’ve been tracking the growing didacticism of today’s art, the tendency of the mainstream culture’s gatekeepers to subordinate esthetic merit to the imperative of blasting a political message that matches the Left’s orthodoxies. Didacticism has been taking over every form of art, from television to movies to fashion to sculpture to poetry. Now it’s coming for the unlikeliest target of all: comedy.

    Did I hear you say that there’s no way to make comedy didactic, that this is the ultimate contradiction in terms? True enough, which is why the age of didacticism is coming to destroy comedy altogether—and it is openly proclaiming that fact. The latest buzz in the middlebrow media is a stand-up comedy act that The New York Times praises as “comedy-destroying.”

    Yup, chalk me up as a "must-miss" for this at Netflix.

    Streaming Netflix really likes comedy specials, I assume because they're cheaper to get than good movies or scripted series. They also host one of those tedious "news commentary" shows with unfunny Michelle Wolf.

    But if you're casting around Netflix for an hour or so of actual-funny entertainment let me recommend: Mike Birbiglia, John Mulaney, and Iliza Shlesinger. The guys occasionally veer into politics, but that's OK. Iliza can occasionally break into didactic feminism, but that's OK too. Still 95% funny.


Last Modified 2024-01-25 5:26 AM EDT