Gentlemen:

“Dod Grile” (Mr. Bierce) is a personal friend of mine, & I like him exceedingly — but he knows my opinion of the “Nuggets & Dust,” & so I do not mind exposing it to you. It is the vilest book that exists in print — or very nearly so. If you keep a “reader,” it is charity to believe he never really read that book, but framed his verdict upon hearsay.

Bierce has written some admirable things — fugitive pieces — but none of them are among the “Nuggets.” There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.

Ys truly

Samuel L. Clemens

That two star review on Amazon sort of loses its sting now, doesn’t it?

Colleen Lindsay:

Thank you for making it clear, through your response to my query, that you are unquipped (sic) to represent fiction writers who are working at the very highest level today.

Best of luck with your list of minor writers, third-rate writers, irrelevant writers, non-writers.

You lose, silly woman.

Patrick Roscoe

I pointed, I laughed, I moved on with my life. Imagine my surprise when today, in my spam filter, I find a comment from someone coming to defend Mr. Roscoe’s honor from such ill deserved mocking engage in an attempt at their own mockery at the expense of myself. Turns out, someone put my Roscoe post up on Reddit and it started a tiny little flame war with Mr. Roscoe’s champion. I’m sort of flattered.

I might also note that chief among my libertarian friends are a pagan SF author and a long-haired dude who makes guitars for rock bands, while every single progressive I know is pretty much part of the establishment.

Ok, I know that’s not exactly what he was trying to say.  Mr. Wonk here was just arguing that the founding document of this country is open to some measure of judicial interpretation.  Though, it almost appears here that he’s dismissing the use of any legal framework that’s open to such interpretation.  How can any system function with such ambiguity?

I think he’s actually chafing against the constraints of any legal framework at all.  The following quote I think gives a truly frightening view into the mind of Mr. Wonky Wonk Wonk (h/t):

The problem with the Nazis was that they were genocidal white supremacists with an appetite for continental hegemony. To invoke them in order to tar, by association, privatization, or “appeasement,” or socialist policies, or other policies that were not related to their murderous crimes is a noxious debate tactic that should be widely and rapidly condemned

Yeah, that was a clarification he added to a post praising the economic miracle of Nazi Keynesianism, as if their economic policy could be decoupled from their totalitarianism.  If you think that, I have this neat little book for you, and it’s a quick read.  In Mr. Wonkster’s little Fascist brain, if the Nazis just eased up on the death camps and the foreign invasions, they would have been a perfectly fine regime.   It’s like he learned his political philosophy from bad Star Trek episodes.

Needless to say, if if that’s the only thing you find objectionable about the Nazis, you may just have some problem getting the concept of a constitutionally limited government with strictly enumerated powers.

Most of the supporters of the move may be correct in the effect of the proposed rules.  In fact the problem with the FCC has very little to do with exactly what they are attempting to do, even though it is a solution still in search of a problem.  The problem is that the FCC has absolutely no jurisdiction in the area.  The idea that they should be allowed to go forward after both courts and the legislature have said they don’t have the authority just because this particular rule by executive fiat is not that objectionable is absurd and shows a political naïveté that borders on the pathological. After all, what could be wrong with letting executive power do whatever the hell it wants to do without regard to the courts or the legislature, after all we all know that when executive power is unchecked it is never ever used to impose political orthodoxy, suppress dissent and persecute dissidents. It’s not like we would ever again elect a chief executive that wasn’t all rainbow progressive smiley faces. . .

Dear Liberals: when you advocate executive power grabs like this for the sake of political expediency, you are handing the successor regime the power to do whatever it likes, and I doubt you all will be happy with that outcome. Don’t believe me? Look at all the unhappy Conservatives who gave the executive branch obscene powers when their guy was in charge.

You really don’t think this can have a bad outcome?  If the FCC has jurisdiction, how long before it starts regulating content?  You really want to see fines on bloggers for saying fuck this shit?

Simple.  What if Private Bradley Manning had not been interested in embarrassing us, and was more interested in harming us?  Would he have gone to a public website with his trove of secrets our Government had failed properly to secure?  Or would he have gone to our actual adversaries, say Iran, or China, or Venezuela, or Russia?  What would have been the result?  Well, it would not have been made public, the recipients would be all too eager to continue exploiting this hole.  This information could have leaked out of the State Department sieve for years, radically altering the results of our diplomacy with no one the wiser.

This way, at least, the U.S. is aware of everything that’s been compromised which minimizes the damage.  (Think, what good would cracking the Enigma have been in WWII if the BBC started broadcasting intercepted Nazi communications?  Not very.)

What worries me is the fact the hole was so damn large that I find it hard to believe that Private Manning was the first to think of exploiting it.

The last two decades are particularly notable, the evil Bush tax cuts for the wealthy barely shifted the bottom line.  So, all these people who are whining about people making $250K can afford these frakking tax increases, you may be right, but you aren’t going to do a damn thing about the deficit with them.

Government revenue is a function of economic growth, and that factor overwhelms any fiddling you do on tax rates.  Our complicated tax code is an exercise in social policy, not fiscal policy.  It is a means for the State to engage in social engineering by rewarding some activity and punishing other activity.  It only affects revenue in the long term by how it affects economic growth.

And you really want to put downward pressure on this economy because you think people above a certain income level can afford to feel more pain?

Bubba ain’t going to give me cancer.  And the TSA is underreporting your radiation exposure by a factor of ten.  And they don’t have a great history of maintaining x-ray machines safely.

Bubba ain’t going to take a photo of my junk and leak it onto the internet.

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things. But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!

Editor fail.  Copyright fail.  Ethics fail.  And, public relations fail.  (Just note the comments on their Facebook page.)  You see, when you decide to be an asshat to a blogger, especially in such an interestingly twisted and completely asinine fashion, they tend to blog about it.  And, when your statements have reached such an epic level of complete  cluelessness about the nature of the medium itself, it becomes entertaining for other people to blog about it.  So the relatively unknown person you’ve stolen from blogs about it and gets a linkback from the relatively known Nick Mamatas.  The latter, being relatively known, inspires even more relatively known bloggers to mock the stupid whose name is  Judith Griggs.  Scalzi takes a swing with the cluebat and makes a palpable hit in front of his 30K of daily eyeballs.  (What’s the circulation of that magazine again?  Just wondering.)  And the Smart Bitches of equally vast viewage take multiple swipes and offers a present of Google.  Then, at last, the meme goes nuclear when it crosses the radar of Instpundit.

So, Judith Griggs, you are now an internet meme.  I wonder if permanently associating yourself with this kind of asshattery in the minds of a few hundred thousand people was worth the few hundred bucks you saved by not actually buying the rights to your articles.

(Liberals reading this should note that the purpose of Jon Stewart in this universe is to show that a doctrinaire liberal can actually have a sense of humor.  Don’t be a counter-example.)

If you use “teabagger” in a post, I know the following about you:

• You refer to G.W.Bush as a Fascist and our government as a Democracy, but you become obnoxiously anal and pedantic about definitions of political terms when someone calls Obama a socialist.
• You believe that it was a miscarriage of justice when this black person was fired for allegedly bigoted comments that were taken out of context, but when this black person was fired for allegedly bigoted comments that were taken out of context, he had it coming.
• You believe Anita Hill was a martyr for women’s rights and Paula Jones was opportunistic trailer trash going after someone for partisan political purposes.
• You think George Soros is a benign philanthropist doing his best to support charitably progressive causes, and the brothers Charles and David Koch are shadowy puppet-masters funneling money into American politics to further their own sinister agenda.
• You thought enacting the Patriot Act was a horrible miscarriage of civil rights, all the way up to the point it was made permanent, when it wasn’t worth complaining about anymore.
• You think Janeane Garofalo makes sense when she says that calls for a smaller federal government are a coded message meaning “we hate black people.”
• You think that Media Matters would never slant a story.
• You think Al Franken was funny, once.
• You don’t find it ironic that an allegedly anti-establishment comic is holding a political rally that’s pretty much in support of the satus quo over an insurgent political movement.
• You’ve never watched an episode of Glen Beck or listened to Rush Limbaugh but not only do you know their position on every issue of import, you regularly condemn them for those opinions.
• You never thought speculation about Trig Pailin’s maternity the least bit creepy.
• You believe dumping a trillion dollars of stimulus money into the economy is the only thing that saved us from a great depression, but you believe that taking the same amount back out of the economy by taking it from rich people will have no adverse economic impact.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.  This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick.

Which is quite right. The dystopia in Atlas Shrugged is as frighteningly plausible as the one in 1984 and Brave New World, since it is based, in large part, on applying Soviet-classic modes of thinking to the US political system. If Rand had written a dystopia like Orwell and had Dagny Taggart broken by the system ala Winston Smith, I doubt Scalzi would have found the premise nearly as ridiculous. The problem comes when we place a set of characters into the crapsack world who know exactly what to do to fix it.

In a novel, that can work. John Galt can shut off production to the rest of the world (in an ironic echo of Stalin and Mao inducing famines through state control of agriculture) because he is RIGHT! He has the revealed knowledge that millions of people must die in order for the world to be saved from disaster.

That brings us to blog number two, which was inspired by this horrid little video:

From Shannon Love’s reaction on Chicago Boyz:

However, these kinds of thought experiments do demonstrate how absolute certitude makes it easy for anyone, no matter how humane and compassionate, to calmly rationalize the deaths of billions. At the extremities of events and the associated moral choices, the ends do definitely justify the means.

As a corollary, ideas that claim to predict extreme events with great certainty create the justifications for associated extreme acts. These types of ideas turn abstract moral thought experiments into concrete realities on which people feel compelled to act.

Notice a theme? Maybe we can make it a little more specific:

Those early members of the French Revolution who created The Declaration of the Rights of Man believed that reason could absolutely replace tradition They would never have believed their ideas could possibly lead to the Great Terror, Empire and contienent wide war.

The geneticists who created the idea of eugenics used the best available science of their day. With the imprimatur of science, eugenics became widely accepted by all educated, secular individuals across the political spectrum. It was considered “settled science”. No eugenist envisioned their idea would justify the greatest of wars and the Holocaust.

Marxists the world over who rushed to join the newly formed Communist party in 1917 sincerely believed they were contributing to a world free of want, ignorance, oppression and inequality. They did not imagine in the least that the ideas they promulgated would create totalitarian, megacidal regimes that would push humanity to the precipice of extinction more than once.

Or, to put a fine point on it, as soon as some ideology decides that an abstraction is more important than an individual human life, you have established a moral framework for mass murder on an industrial scale.  All Utopias are based on the idea of eliminating the undesirables.

I actually had someone try and pull that on me in a debate, more or less in the sense “BUSH HAZ WORST RECORD ON CIVIL LIBERTIEZ EVAR.”

This was true, when he was in office.  But Obama has doubled down on the fascist police state with nary a noise of dissent from the left.  Let us review:

• Obama renewed the Patriot Act.
• Police now get to place GPS tracking devices on your car without warrants.
• X-Ray vans now patrol American streets, and the Feds won’t give anyone details where or what they’re looking for.
• FBI: “All your Internets belong to us.”
• Obama upps the ante defending Bush’s eeevil Warrentless Wiretapping.
• Oh, politicizing DoJ law enforcement to give favored groups a pass?  check.
• And about Gitmo.
• And those military tribunals.
• And if you’re getting criticized on abusing the power to detain enemy combatants indefinitely?  Stop calling them enemy combatants.
• Targeting American citizens by executive order, no due process required.

Yeah, vast improvement.

The fact that she likes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  Really.  This is cause for her to question someone’s mental stability and connection to reality, the fact that O’Donnell decides to praise one of the major writers of the 20th century for his treatment of women.

“Look at the significance that he gives to Eowyn, the Lady of Rohan,” O’Donnell said on C-Span in 2003. “She was a warrior spirit and, to me, that’s who I love. I mean, I aspire to be soft and gentle like Arwen, but realistically, I’m a fighter, like Eowyn.”

O’Donnell said she liked Tolkien’s outlook on gender: “On the one hand, there’s the attitude that’s normally on the conservative side — as a conservative woman, I feel I can say this — that stifles women. There’s almost the stereotypical attitude of, to be a true woman, you have to stay at home. And I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Why do you choose a career over marriage?’ Honestly, I’ve had only a few significant relationships, and they’ve broken up with me. And one of the things I’ve been told is, ‘If you weren’t so strong, you’d be married by now.’ ”

That passage is apparently worthy of Dowd’s mockery, more so than O’Donnell’s views on masturbation.  (Which my wife has had a field day with.  And which, in the video I saw, had a lot in common with a Playboy interview with a certain infamous ex-president, including use of similar language.  Of course, given the results of that guy’s election, it probably is a disqualification on its face.)  Apparently, if you are a fantasy geek of any stripe, you need not apply to the hollowed halls of seriousness that admitted this guy.

Worse, she decides to bring up C. S. Lewis:

“We’re rowdy, we’re passionate,” she told the enraptured crowd. “It reminds me of the C. S. Lewis Narnia books, where the little girl asks someone about Aslan the lion, who represents God, and she says with a little concern over such a fearsome lion, ‘Is he safe?’ And her friend says, ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’ ”

Yep, that disqualifies her right there.

You know, in policy terms I probably have as as little in common with Christine O’Donnell as I do with Charlie Rangel. And I agree with all of the critiques of her on tactical grounds, as the woman has had a colorful history, and a lot of it has been in front of the TV cameras. I agree on a lot of the critiques of her on policy grounds.  (As opposed to the knee jerk critiques of her because of her scary religious background. Please remember the guy who first popularized the term “lust in my heart” during a political campaign.)  But just because you’ve decided to professionally despise the woman does not mean that dissing both Tolkien and C.S.Lewis does not make you a prime asshat.

And by the way, the above thesis was so frighteningly thin that Ms. Dowd had to downshift midway into the article and and start talking about how Obama is the first African-American President and those Tea-Party people are all mostly white. Thanks for the stunning original insight, I have been waiting with baited breath for someone to come up with that analysis.

Lastly, you don’t get to use the phrase, “We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy,” in an ironic fashion unless there are actually people out there that think you are part of the “Ruling Class Elite,” and after viewing the drainage from this intellectual abscess,  I think everyone is only looking on with sad bemusement.