You were there, ergo you agree with everything that was said

[trinityvixen]

Worse, you were the same color as the guy ranting at other people of a different color, so you obviously think the same things as he does. AKA The bad faith trash-talking shit that passes for Op-Ed on the New York Times.

Apparently, according to William Kristol, going some place often enough means that you agree with, support, endorce and perhaps even wish to enforce the dogma being spouted at you. I went to church for twenty years of my life. Clearly, I believe all the horseshit I heard there. (And I went to liberal church, and I still called bullshit.)

But it's not even that. It's not just the tar-me-with-the-same-brush-as-the-guy-who-I-know's-worst-ever-thoughts-on-any-subject-you-please hit job. It's bullshit like OMG Obama is ambitious! He's calculating! He dares to claim young people support him!

Listen you diseased taint: no one who dares run for the presidency of the most arrogant fucking nation on the planet lacks ambition. They're going to wield the largest metaphorical phallic object in the world, they're gonna have to want it pretty goddamned bad. I don't fault anyone for being ambitious. Nothing wrong with ambition so long as it leads you to strive and succeed fairly. (A guiding analogy: be a Severus Snape, not a Tom Riddle.) I don't see Barack Obama carrying a cross on his shoulder, saying "Woe is me, I have to try to be president!" It's not conceit to think you might be good enough for the presidency, nor duplicity, nor hubris. (Unless, like our current president, you routinely say that you're not only good enough, that GOD HIMSELF has ordained you and smiles on all that you do. THAT is ego right there.)

And this is just fucking disgusting:
Now I’m actually a believer in the next generation, which one might call the 9/11 generation.

You know what, you odorous pig? I DON'T WANT MY GENERATION OR ANY OTHER TO BE REFERENCED BY THE GREATEST TERRORIST ACT EVER PERPETRATED ON AMERICAN SOIL. Why should we be defined by that? The thinking that led to 9/11 dominating everything we say, hear, or do was forced on younger generations by the old. The ones who beat the drums for wars we haven't been able to finish (or, as is the case in Afghanistan, just sorta given up on) were the kids who missed out on any war prior. The kids aren't constantly monkeying with the rainbow alert system (works for wars AND gays!); they're posting to MySpace (or LJ!). They are the MySpace generation if anything.

In short: Go back to sucking the conservate nutsack, Willaim Kristol. You must be getting some crazy good contact highs from it.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Generation Obama is far, far worse, and is reminiscent of Hitler Youth or other fascist movements--a youth movement dedicated to a man, not to an idea

Congratulations on losing the argument in your first post. You invoke Godwin's Law, and I don't have to listen past because basically all your comments boil down to: NAZIS.

Seriously, dude--the Hitler Youth!?! We're not talking forced-training to love der Fuhrer in school; the "generation Obama" generation are college kids and 20-30 somethings. Now, you might cry that they've been trained to respect celebrity more than legitimate authority, and you'd have a point. However, they're not being indoctrinated into a cult of personality and hanging whatever the equivalent of swastikas in their bedrooms. They're hip to something he's about, and that sucks if it's not policy, but it's the right of each American to vote as deeply or shallow-ly as they choose.

Methinks someone has been reading that ridiculously anti-academic polemic by Jonah Goldberg. Liking Obama for shallow reasons = FASCISM!!!! OMG!!!! Last I heard, no one, not even Obama, was saying you had to vote for him or the [fill in conspiracy here] would get us. Funny, though, I did hear that statement from several Republican candidates and while I can't recall McCain saying it himself, he never disagreed or distanced himself from it. So, by logic that he knows a lot of these people and is actively part of the party that fosters them and worked with a few of them, well, gosh, he must really believe that, too, mustn't he?

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Methinks someone has been reading that ridiculously anti-academic polemic by Jonah Goldberg.

Guilty as charged, though I wouldn't call it anti-academic. And I'm certainly not comparing Obama to Nazis--the racist violence isn't there. Fascism is quite different from Nazism. That being said, there are elements of "violence to win" among his followers--check out this report from the TX caucuses. There's something very creepy about the Obama movement, with its fainting spells, its glazed-eyed celebrity campaign song, and even a particularly disturbing propaganda poster. Then we have statements from Michelle Obama like this one:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Obama certainly isn't a Hitler, and he probably isn't a Mussolini, but he probably is another Wilson, and that's not something I want for this country either.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Guilty as charged, though I wouldn't call it anti-academic.

To make his point, Jonah Goldberg decided to redefine fascism to suit his own terms while simultaneously ignoring any contradictions inherent in the dictionary-defined word. I'm all for adapting vocabulary, but he's being dishonest and disingenuous about the word "fascism." The word he wanted to argue might have been "totalitarianism." However, that doesn't sound as condemningly hot-button as "fascism," and it's got too many syllables to be catchy. You can't implicitly call liberals Nazis (more on that below) by calling them totalitarians. Call them fascists, though, and suddenly there are pictures of eagles and red-white-black flags in the picture. As soon as you, for the sake of selling a book, attempt to corrode the English language, use words incorrectly, conveniently ignore a wealth of history pointing to incidences of conservative fascism, and blame some conservative fascism on liberals so as to remove the swastika points from one side and put them (unfairly) on the other, you've forfeited the right to call yourself an academic or to justify your work as such.

Passing off personal politics with selective, lying-by-omission or outright lying history goes further away on the bullshit to academic scale towards being anti-academic. Because he makes the argument in making his argument that any way you can redefine loaded terms is okay if it proves your point. (As opposed to using less charged, correct terms that already exist.) That's like having a vocabulary quiz and allowing the kids to make up their own answers. They'll get 100%, but they're completely wrong. If Jonah Goldberg submitted this thesis to a vetted, doctoral history professor, he'd get flunked out of school. (Which I'm sure he'd blame on the goddamned librul college conspiracy instead of his laughable disconnection from fact.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And I'm certainly not comparing Obama to Nazis--the racist violence isn't there.

Dude, two words: Hitler Youth. If you seriously were attempting to compare the Obama campaign to a fascistic movement, you completely derailed yourself because the Hitler Youth are not sufficiently separable--in forensic debating terms--from Nazis to not make the inference you made. Whether you meant only the fascistic indoctrination of children to love Hitler and not the fact that, alongside that, they were drafted into being junior members of the Nazi party, you had to work a lot harder than you did to make that separation. Besides which? I don't think you can separate the fascism out and leave the Nazism behind when talking about the Hitler Youth. No cherry-picking aspects of that movement--it was all about Hitler and the Nazi party.

As for Ann Althouse? If you listen to her anti-woman bleating, you'd already know she's full of shit. She calls herself a liberal while betraying liberal ideas by ridiculing them, the truly progressive people who pursue them, and toadying up to conservatives as the "reasonable liberal" (aka not liberal at all, just says she is so you wonder why all liberals can't talk like conservatives--er, Ann Althouse).

Fainting spells? Holy shit! Crowded, indoor places can sometimes cause people to get too hot and pass out! It happens everywhere. It's just getting attention because OMG it must be Obama making the Beatles girls of 2008 scream until their heads pop off. Also, how is that Obama promoting violence? They fainted, they got medical care. No one dragged them to a center of a room and chloroformed them.

The propaganda poster is a art project, part of a long running one. It has nothing to do with Obama other than having his face on it. The theme of the whole goddamned website is a meme on "Obey the {fill in the blank}." Did the conservative website mention, in the sentence with surely a thousand exclamation points, any of that? Art is by its nature going to be outrageous. And it is also, often, political. However, the Obey the Giant website also made "Obey the D" stickers for Tenacious D. Thus, Jack Black is a fascist, too.

And why is Michelle Obama's call to work hard, set aside cynicism (which is more damaging than helpful), encourage diversity and tolerance...bad? You posted that segment thinking that the call to abandon ignorance and the status quo is somehow hateful? It is perhaps forceful, but how is that any different from any other presidential candidate promising to do any other act of the impossible?

It's the "demand" part, right? Oh, she chose too strongly, there, surely. Obama's normal campaign rhetoric is much more embracing than forceful, which, because it doesn't make your point of Obama = fascist, you've ignored here. That article you linked to about the pastor was chock-full of it though.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

here's something very creepy about the Obama movement, with its fainting spells, its glazed-eyed celebrity campaign song, and even a particularly disturbing propaganda poster.

My God, that sounds horrifying. It almost sounds like... Beatlemania!!!!! How we will face this terrifying new menace?

And please, spare us Goldberg's nonsense about Wilson being a Fascist. A man who thinks Wilson is more of a Fascist than Mussolini doesn't deserve the time of day.