Our apologies to those in the fanbase who are wondering, why no posts? There just hasn't been that much to work with. There's a kind of "sweet spot" to making fun of Aaron: when he gets too stupid, there's not really anything there. I mean, look at something like this: he doesn't understand just how ideologically broad the pressure on Bush is, nor that among the White House's not-necessarily bad arguments against acting is the need to maintain intelligence cooperation from a fundamentalist Islamic government with ties to terrorism (and he even throws in something to boot to show he doesn't get Iraq either). I just can't make fun of that: it exceeds even the level of stupid I expect.
But that makes me kind of rapturous. I mean, too much is said about how the Internet gives average schmoes access to great information: you can read about international affairs from the very well traveled, get war commentary from people with a lot of respect for the military, learn history and economics and science from respected, published masters in those fields, and so on. Look, all that's garbage, man. What's amazing about the internet is you can do exactly the opposite of all that stuff - in Clarey's case, all at one site: the rise of the idiocracy, brought to you in one-stop shoppng! Amazing! Look at it this way: sure, when a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years produce a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls, that's impressive. But if you really want to impress me, start with stupid monkeys.
Consider all the bloviation lately over there on global warming. Now, there's a very small minority of people who know a lot about this stuff that don't believe in it, and of those there's even a couple without conflicts of interest. But the idea some moron using data
generated and interpreted by those very people, and saying, they just don't get the big picture -- now, that's laughably wonderful. And the proliferation of these little video gaming weenies talking about how the same people argued exactly the reverse in the late '70's -- hey, man, I was around in the late '70's. I remember those stories. And it wasn't nearly the same level of worry: and anyone who doubts it, can easily confirm it by scanning the scientific literature. There's just not a huge record of peer-reviewed 1970's studies concluding "global cooling" compared to what you're getting now. These are people who are utterly ignorant about how any kind of study is done, and yet claim to understand economics and history -- fields where the data are even noisier and the experiments less clear. And they're throwing up their hands and saying, oh, yeah, this system is so complex you can't pretend to understand it at all? Excellent! These are "capitalists" with a fundamental lack of faith in the very flexibility and innovation which makes capitalism desirable, who seem to think the whole system will collapse if it has to accommodate physical reality. Wow! These are the monkeys to impress with.
Anyway: sorry for the absence of stuff. Maybe we'll try a clever idea out in the next couple weeks.
UPDATE: We hesitate to put this up here because it's smart, but somebody sends us to this gloriously awake understanding of climate change and the stupid part of the right, written by the smart part of the right.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Free Aaron Clarey, you crooked evil Venezuelan mastermind!
So, there's a lot of hyperventilation on "Captain Capitalism" Aaron Clarey's website about Hugo Chavez. And that's sort of understandable because it's the strangest thing that the tinpot leader of a poor country should have become such a player internationally, a kind of proxy for America-bashing fools. I mean, the guy should be sort of a nonentity, and (at least until his legislature gave him new powers a couple weeks back) he's not even so much a dictator as a crude government bully and is hardly among the planet's worst such - so something is way screwed up that anyone pays so much attention to the guy.
But I don't get the repeated assertions that somehow Chavez is the darling of the American left. You can't find any love for Chavez in mainstream left-wing papers like the New Republic or the American Prospect. Even the Nation doesn't have much good to say about Chavez. Mainstream left-wing sources don't much like the guy and even the most repulsive of far left writers like those at Daily Kos seem to've gotten the whole thing about right, for a long time. Then again, liberal sources don't seem to care much about Chavez: it's the right-wingers who write so much about him.
Which suddenly makes sense, right? I mean, Latin America is now full of countries which have decided that the bits of financial aid Chavez doles out are worth more than any support from America (the sole exception, for obvious reasons, being Colombia). Even the President of Chile is willing to support Chavez' anti-US bid for a Security Council seat - and that's bad. And it's a gift, not from the left, but the right, which basically doesn't seem to have a Latin America policy. Which, in fact, got excited and sat on its hands during a coup d'etat, which really brought Chavez to prominence (this seems to be the only time I can find a lot of left-wing support for Chavez: when writers bashed the administration for failing to condemn the coup. Problem for the Clarey Crew is, the right came around to agreeing with them.) Because frankly, no amount of oil money should be enough to convince anybody in Latin America that the US isn't interested enough in the place, to be worth courting.
So suddenly I get this brilliant idea: maybe he's nationalized the right wing turkeys somehow? I mean, he gets all his press from the Aaron Clareys of the world. And they're the ones who seem to've decided that they just don't give a rip about the American sphere of influence in South America. So maybe he's made them all property of the Venezuelan government somehow? One moronic comment from Pat Robertson, means another round of international junkets for Hugo.
Well, we won't stand for that, Hugo! Free Aaron Clarey! Let our people go! We're wise to your little game.
[Not that there aren't topics about which those silly leftists and turncoat rightists go on and on about that Aaron never seems to consider interesting: like say prisoner abuse....]
But I don't get the repeated assertions that somehow Chavez is the darling of the American left. You can't find any love for Chavez in mainstream left-wing papers like the New Republic or the American Prospect. Even the Nation doesn't have much good to say about Chavez. Mainstream left-wing sources don't much like the guy and even the most repulsive of far left writers like those at Daily Kos seem to've gotten the whole thing about right, for a long time. Then again, liberal sources don't seem to care much about Chavez: it's the right-wingers who write so much about him.
Which suddenly makes sense, right? I mean, Latin America is now full of countries which have decided that the bits of financial aid Chavez doles out are worth more than any support from America (the sole exception, for obvious reasons, being Colombia). Even the President of Chile is willing to support Chavez' anti-US bid for a Security Council seat - and that's bad. And it's a gift, not from the left, but the right, which basically doesn't seem to have a Latin America policy. Which, in fact, got excited and sat on its hands during a coup d'etat, which really brought Chavez to prominence (this seems to be the only time I can find a lot of left-wing support for Chavez: when writers bashed the administration for failing to condemn the coup. Problem for the Clarey Crew is, the right came around to agreeing with them.) Because frankly, no amount of oil money should be enough to convince anybody in Latin America that the US isn't interested enough in the place, to be worth courting.
So suddenly I get this brilliant idea: maybe he's nationalized the right wing turkeys somehow? I mean, he gets all his press from the Aaron Clareys of the world. And they're the ones who seem to've decided that they just don't give a rip about the American sphere of influence in South America. So maybe he's made them all property of the Venezuelan government somehow? One moronic comment from Pat Robertson, means another round of international junkets for Hugo.
Well, we won't stand for that, Hugo! Free Aaron Clarey! Let our people go! We're wise to your little game.
[Not that there aren't topics about which those silly leftists and turncoat rightists go on and on about that Aaron never seems to consider interesting: like say prisoner abuse....]
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