An Analogy (Presented As If Tweeted)

Grapes are like twelve pressure treated 2x4s.

If you don't understand why that is you must be an idiot.

#shitobamasays

Is John Cole The Dumbest Person On The Internets?

Granted, there is a lot of competition out there, but when you read pig ignorant crapola like this you have to think we've got the new king of stoopid:

Democrats tell us that photo ID requirements disenfranchise minority voters, who, inexplicably, have limited access to photo IDs. Yet, at their own convention, they insist that all delegates provide a photo ID to even have access to the convention floor.

I guess they don’t understand the concept of the basic right to vote and how that differs from being one of a very few delegates to a party convention.

Uh, sorry to break it to you John but there is no "basic right to vote." Never has been. Its not a recognized "right" in the English common law tradition; its not a recognized "right" in the Natural Law tradition; its not a "right" in the liberal democratic tradition.

In order for something to be a "basic right" it has to be inalienable (or unalienable if one wishes to echo Jefferson.) Thus, if John Cole were to become a convicted felon, and we can only hope one day he manages to do so, he could lose his ability to vote. In other words, his vote is alienable and therefore not a right.

On the other hand, John Cole's right to liberty and free speech means he has the inalienable right to go on the Internet and make an ass of himself.

And aren't we all lucky?

Spending Too Much Time With The Stupids

A quick show of hands: Who believes, along with super-genius James Fallows, that Pete Hoekstra knows how to code HTML?

I should know better than to be spending any time on The Atlantic.

I apologize.

It won't happen again.

UPDATE:

Ah, I see from another site, Fallows and his fellow sleazeballs got their "evidence" by selectively editing out the parts of the HTML they didn't like. So, they aren't just scumbags, they are frauds to boot.

Excellent.

(And, yes, I checked. There is no correction on the Fallows story.)

Matthew Yglesias Comes Out Forcefully Against The Enlightenment

From Think"Progress" (or is that "Think""Progress"?: Let Children Vote

Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten.

Uh, no. The usual objections would cite John Locke or John Stuart Mill and acknowledge children have insufficient reason to be held responsible for their actions. That Yglesias is seemingly unaware of any such fact, and instead believes children were not voting because of the difficulty in molding them into a coherent voting block - I'm not joking... he actually says that is what he believes is the rationale - really, it's impossible to have an argument with such a person. After all, Yglesias is denying reason itself as being anything other than an arbitrary notion.

I really fear for our civilization. Half of our "educated" classes are morons. I'm sorry folks but intellectual doofism will be our downfall.

A Message To Everyone On Earth: With All Due Respect, Screw Your Delicate Sensibilities

Meet the straw that broke this camel's back: Pub singer's 'racism' arrest over Kung Fu Fighting performance

A pub singer has been arrested on suspicion of racial harassment after singing King Fu Fighting in front of two Chinese people.

Simon Ledger says he fears he will end up with a criminal record for performing the 1974 disco classic at a seafront bar on the Isle of Wight on Sunday after two people walking past apparently took offence.

The 34-year-old, from the island, regularly features Carl Douglas’s 1974 number one hit in his set when he performs at the Driftwood Beach Bar in Sandown.

But after striking up the melody in front of customers at the weekend he noticed a man of Chinese origin walking past with his mother, making gestures at him and taking a picture on his mobile phone.

He said that he later received a telephone call from police - while he was dining in a Chinese restaurant - asking him to meet officers about the incident.

He was then arrested and questioned before being bailed.

You know what? I've had it with this bullshit. Someone say something you find offensive? Well, welcome to the real world where things are tough all over. If you don't want to be a "victim" then stop play-acting the part. If you want to confront something you find offensive then learn how to construct a logical argument and write a goddam op-ed.

What began as merely sickeningly annoying "woe is me and my kind" shtick has now become a serious threat to human freedom and dignity (well, as much dignity as one can muster singing "Kung Fu Fighting".)

So to all you "sensitive" types in the world out there, you can stick your "feelings" where the sun don't shine. Freedom is a hell of a lot more important.

Of course, you could try growing up and becoming an adult, or is that just crazy talk?

Steve Benen = World's Biggest Moron

The sheer ignorance of it all is amazing:

If our political system made more sense, this would be an astounding scandal that would dominate the discourse.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday during a meeting in New York that the new GOP majority in the House will "serve as a check" on the Obama administration, a statement unusual for its blunt disagreement with U.S. policy delivered directly to a foreign leader.

Yep, you heard it here first. Steve Benen is shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, to discover that one branch of the United States government can serve as a check upon another branch of the United States government!

The real scandal is that foolish maroons like Benen are not dismissed out of hand when they say things so stupid a fourteen year old could correct them.

Steve Benen, either resign or prove you can pass high school civics.

I'll Have To Designate A New More Moronic Kind Of Moron To Categorize This

Yikes! Conservapedia Launches Effort to Translate the Bible Into Conservativespeak

There's a verse in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a withered hand. "And they watched him," according to the King James version of the Bible, referring to those in the temple, "whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him."

But a new—and still evolving—conservative translation of the Bible prefers a more populist, Glenn Beckish take: "The intellectuals watched Jesus to see if he might catch and accuse him of healing on the Sabbath."

The new translation is part of the Conservative Bible Project, sponsored by Conservapedia, a Wikipedia for the right. "Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations," the project's home page explains.

You've got to be kidding me. Oh, don't get me wrong, there are some silly things going on with modern translations of the Bible (like the constant neutering of God), not to mention an almost pathological dislike of beauty and poetry. Richard John Neuhaus put it this way:

Back in May 2001, I wrote in this space, under the title “Bible Babel,” about the translation that is the unfortunate New American Bible (NAB). It is a subject that should not be dropped. Not, mind you, that I expect anybody to do anything about it any time soon. But some day, please God, there will be a real reform of the misguided reforms of recent decades, and the NAB (along with the Revised NAB and the Amended Revised NAB and whatever version of the NAB that crops up in this Sunday’s Mass guide) should be on the agenda. Robert Louis Wilken has written wisely that the Bible is the lexicon of the Church and the liturgy is the grammar of the Bible. Among Catholics subjected to the NAB, and all are now subjected to it, the lexicon takes a terrible beating.

Everyone who has sung or listened to Handel’s “Messiah” knows the words: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6, KJV). Magnificent. Here, as of this week’s amended Missalette, is the New American Bible: “For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.” Try singing that.

Absolutely right. So, I'm certainly not against curbing the excesses of the soul-less translations that abound.

But attempting to read Smith, Hayek and Friedman back into the Bible is just plain nuts. And, yes, that is exactly what they want to do. Among their "guidelines":

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias...

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census...

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

As I said before.... yikes!

Others on this:

The Anchoress: This is where I get off the boat.

Rod Dreher:

More seriously, the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it's wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology.

Ed Morrissey:

... if one believes the Bible to be the Word of God written for His purposes, which I do, then the idea of recalibrating the language to suit partisan political purposes in this age is pretty offensive — just as offensive as they see the “liberal bias” in existing translations. If they question the authenticity of the current translations, then the only legitimate process would be to work from the original sources and retranslate. And not just retranslate with political biases in mind, but to retranslate using proper linguistic processes and correct terminology.

All good thoughts, but I'd add this; No conservative, someone who had read (and understood) Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshotte, would have even begun such a process. A real conservative would have honored the tradition and not attempted to pervert scripture to suit the partisan aims of a given day. After all, for the conservative, our role in this world is to pass on to future generations those things that are good we have received from generations past. We don't get to mutilate them first.