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Friday Link Encyclopedia

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Another reason why my job is not easy is that people are completely unfamiliar with the concept of a metaphor. 

I now hate these “mommy arguments” even more than I did before I was a mommy.

But hey, there are even dumber arguments out there: “The more often people hear about free speech being used to defend NAMBLA, the less that anti-paedophiles are going to like free speech. The more often people hear about free speech being used to defend the KKK, the less anti-racists are going to like free speech.”

“Fucking in the Age of Trump.” This is simply hilarious. 

I would not welcome this sort of nomination. 

The true cost of Israel. 

A bizarre anti-Nazi trial is being held in Germany. 

The most hilarious subscription box ever. I wonder when they will launch a premium service with a flogger visiting the subscribers to give them a delightful public flogging. 

17 responses to “Friday Link Encyclopedia”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/why-do-democrats-feel-sorry-for-hillary-clinton.html

    It simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?” Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?”

    ..

    Let us review the facts: Clinton had the backing of the entire Democratic establishment, including the president (his biggest mistake in eight years by far), and was even married to the last, popular Democratic president. As in 2008, when she managed to lose to a neophyte whose middle name was Hussein, everything was stacked in her favor. In fact, the Clintons so intimidated other potential candidates and donors, she had the nomination all but wrapped up before she even started. And yet she was so bad a candidate, she still only managed to squeak through in the primaries against an elderly, stopped-clock socialist who wasn’t even in her party, and who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. She ran with a popular Democratic incumbent president in the White House in a growing economy. She had the extra allure of possibly breaking a glass ceiling that — with any other female candidate — would have been as inspiring as the election of the first black president. In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience, with a deeply divided party behind him, and whose negatives were stratospheric. She outspent him by almost two-to-one. Her convention was far more impressive than his. The demographics favored her. And yet she still managed to lose!

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yeah. . . That was an epic fail. You’ve really got to try hard to lose that badly and in these circumstances.

      Good article.

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        Good, except for that totally unrelated race-baiting in the end. But it’s Andrew Sullivan, so it’s expected.

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    2. JProf Avatar
      JProf

      LOL at the Michelle Goldberg quote. Yes, I too frequently worry about whether or not a privileged, rich, white woman is going to be OK or not after a situation like this.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I’ll be damned if I give a toss about the emotional well-being of somebody this rich.

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    3. Shakti Avatar
      Shakti

      It simply amazes me the hold this family still has on the Democratic Party — and on liberals in general. The most popular question that came from interviewer Nick Kristof’s social-media outreach, for example, was: “Are you doing okay?” Here’s Michelle Goldberg: “I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?”

      Some people identified with her. I wasn’t one of those people. ” People’s selective empathy is a truly wondrous thing. Perhaps that question is a proxy for “Are we going to be ok?

      In the general election, she was running against a malevolent buffoon with no political experience
      Except there were people who either saw all of that as positive or don’t actually see him as a malevolent buffoon. You forget that she’s History’s Greatest Monster ™. (-:

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        That’s what kills me. How can somebody identify with a person who is much richer than them? It’s incomprehensible.

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        1. Shakti Avatar
          Shakti

          Or maybe some people saw as someone to aspire to. :/
          Aren’t we all temporarily embarrassed multimillionaires and billionaires? No?

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          1. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            I went to school with the children of the very rich back in the USSR. That cured me of all desire to imagine myself as one of them. Curiously, those kids were all emotional wrecks, even against the background of the general Soviet / post-Soviet psychological ill health. Even I was a picture of psychological health next to them, as confirmed by the school psychologist. (There were no privacy laws.)

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      2. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        “You forget that she’s History’s Greatest Monster ™. (-:”

        Haha, no, but if politics were hollywood, she’d surely be called Box Office Poison.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “Box Office Poison”

          She’s Ballot Box Poison.

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    I was interested in the information about Syria and Lebanon in Uri’s latest article:

    \ BACK TO the dictator. Why does Syria need a dictator? Why isn’t it a beautiful US-style democracy? Why doesn’t it gratefully accept US-devised “regime-change”?

    The Syrian dictatorship is no accidental phenomenon. It has very concrete roots.
    Syria was created by France after World War I. A part of it later split off and became Lebanon.

    Both are artificial creations. I doubt whether there are even today real “Syrians” and real “Lebanese”.
    …
    Both countries needed to invent a system that allowed such diverse and mutually-suspicious entities to live together. They found two different systems.

    http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1492111523/

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  3. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    She says a lot of things you’ve been saying for years. Still, an interesting read.

    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species

    On campuses these days, outrage and anger is reserved for questions like, “Is this sushi an act of cultural appropriation?” When student activists do propose ways to “radically” reform the university, it tends to involve adding new administrative offices and bureaucratic procedures, i.e. strengthening the existing structure of the university rather than democratizing it. Instead of demanding an increase in the power of students, campus workers, and the untenured, activists tend to push for symbolic measures that universities happily embrace, since they do not compromise the existing arrangement of administrative and faculty power.

    It’s amusing, then, that conservatives have long been so paranoid about the threat posed by U.S. college campuses. The American right has an ongoing fear of supposedly arch-leftist professors brainwashing nubile and impressionable young minds into following sinister leftist dictates.

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    Рабство, крепостное право и взаимные образы России и США

    http://nlobooks.ru/node/8202

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      A really good conclusion. Thank you, it’s a good piece.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        \ A really good conclusion. Thank you, it’s a good piece.

        I am glad you liked it.

        I was very intrigued by the comparison, but worried about the quality of the research since you were talking how FSU has completely destroyed academy on its territory.

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  5. el Avatar
    el

    Christopher Caldwell on Christophe Guilluy on French Elites
    …
    At the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes twenty-first-century France as “an ‘American’ society like any other, unequal and multicultural.” It’s a controversial premise—that inequality and racial diversity are linked as part of the same (American-type) system and that they progress or decline together.
    …
    The real divide is no longer between the “Right” and the “Left” but between the metropoles and the peripheries. The traditional parties thrive in the former. The National Front (FN) is the party of the outside.

    French elites have convinced themselves that their social supremacy rests not on their economic might but on their common decency. Doing so allows them to “present the losers of globalization as embittered people who have problems with diversity,” says Guilluy.

    http://www.germanjoys.eu/2017/04/christopher-caldwell-on-frances-decline.html

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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