I haven’t engaged in my trademark “looks-ist” disparagement for quite a while but, honestly, this from Dan Foster at America’s Shittiest Website™ is just impossible to resist:
[L]adies, if I haven’t responded to your fifteenth eHarmony message, I’m probably not going to respond at all. There are only so many days in the week.
The notion that anyone, much less a “lady” with “lady” parts, would be importuning Dan with a barrage of desperate emails pleading for the opportunity to meet up is only slightly less credible than were I to claim that I had flat out refused a booty call from Chord Overstreet.
Hey, Danno, here’s a polite suggestion. If there is a one woman in the world, and that includes K-Lo or even J-Dough Loadberg in a dress, that expresses even faint interest in connecting with you, please understand that this may be your only opportunity to couple with something other than the crusty gym sock that you have been, er, filling behind the furnace in the basement while your parents are asleep upstairs. Or to translate this into the wingnut dialect of Freemarket-ese that you might understand: “Beggars Can’t Be Choosers.” Or to put it in plain English: “Dude, look in a mirror.”
Speaking completely objectively and non-partisanly, the only way to keep our economy from going down the crapper is for the federal government to give me a big tax cut.
The press coverage of Joe Paterno is a nefarious plot by the media to distract people from the real truth, namely, that most homos are child molesters* and should be executed.
How on earth could that stupid bitch imagine that she could just ask Herman Cain to help her find a job without him reasonably expecting a blow job in return?
Who cares about income inequality? What we should care about is making sure that the rich gain back the income that they lost during this recession, because if the rich get richer, the poor will get richer too.
Jesus came to Earth to preach an anti-tax gospel; and if he were to return today, he’d go straight to Zuccotti Park with a big-ass whip and beat the shit out of those OWS hippies.
Sometimes John prefers not to eat with the other inmates
This was going to be a shorter, but I think that it violates some basic tenet of shorterism to use the title as the shorter, even if the title is, fairly clearly, gobsmackingly stupid. We’re talking here “IF CORPORATIONS AREN’T PEOPLE, HOW CAN THEY BE GREEDY?”, which really is the best example ever of a self-inflicted shorter. Honestly, that’s the title, and John Hinderaker (né Buttmissile) waves this little nugget about as if it were the central inconsistency of liberalism that, when displayed like the monstrance on Corpus Christi, is bound to cause progressives and liberals to drop to their knees, beg for mercy, admit the errors of their ways, and subscribe to National Review.
It’s an odd bit of logic, since greed is no more a distinctly human trait than, say, corruption or power or size or thirst. If dogs aren’t people, how can they be thirsty? Huh? If corporations aren’t people, how can they be large and powerful? If Hinderaker isn’t an asshole, how come only POOP comes out of his mouth?
But really, there’s much more goodness in Hnderaker’s post, so it in fact deserves more than a shorter. Like this:
The corporation is merely a legal form in which people do business, now several hundred years old. It is absolutely necessary for any major commercial enterprise because its existence can continue without disruption beyond any one individual’s lifespan. So being “anti-corporation” is equivalent to being pro-medieval.
If Hinderaker isn’t the Wicked Witch of the West, how come he spends so much time fighting straw men? Arguing that certain corporations ought to be held accountable for their misdeeds is not arguing that the corporate form of doing business should be eliminated, any more than arguing that certain people should go to jail is not arguing in favor of genocide. Nor is it equivalent to arguing that people should drink mead, run around in suits of armor, and wear garlic around their necks to ward off the plague. Also, in what history class did Hinderaker learn that the medieval era was only several hundred years ago?
Now for the, ahem, money shot:
liberalism is the reactionary dogma of our age. If you hate progress and would rather live in poverty than see someone else prosper, you are a born liberal.
Apparently, corporate accountability will make the entire world poor, which is apparently the goal of liberals who want to be poor and want everybody else to be poor, I suppose, so that they can force the other poor people to undergo gay abortions in exchange for food stamps and welfare checks, or something like that. Also, it’s easier to establish the caliphate that liberals long for if everyone is poor.
Occupy Wall Street is part of a Communist plot to convince Negroes to take over Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi and turn those states into an independent Negro Communist republic.
If you have a website modestly titled “The American Thinker,” you would imagine that it would be a place where you could find probing scholarly commentary by articulate intellectuals. Sadly, No! Meet Josiah Jedediah Ezekiel Cantrall, the home-schooled, 12-year-old baby Republican du jour who has just written for The American Thinker the provocatively titled piece “Repeal Obamacare – but Keep Socialized Education?”
Of course, the title itself creates high hopes for Master Cantrall’s article, promising to fall right in line with the current wingnut weltanschauung that everything is socialist. Obama is a socialist. Public schools are socialist. Freeways are socialist. Stoplights are socialist. Glazed doughnuts are socialist. The 3-D version of “The Lion King” is socialist.
Just as the “public option” is merely a different term for socialized medicine, public education is simply a euphemized phrase for socialized education.
You certainly get the sense of the benefits from the superior and non-socialist home schooling that Master Cantrall received at the knees of his mommy in Wisconsin when he eschews the more direct, but less interleckshual, “euphemism” for “euphemized phrase.”
More benefits that Master Cantrall obtained from home schooling become quickly apparent.
In the early 1900s, Horace Mann led a movement to replace America’s community and parent-controlled school model with Prussian-style public schools.
A movement that Mann apparently led from the grave, having died more than 40 years earlier in 1859. Hey, Josiah, it’s your mommy calling. She wants your high school diploma back.
Not only is Master Cantrall too stupid to check a biography of Horace Mann before making him a twentieth-century reformer, but he’s intellectually dishonest too when he tries to marshal “Three-time New York City teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto” to his cause.
Gatto notes that archetypal Americans like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison were leading productive, fulfilled lives by the time they were in their teens, and yet “[t]hey were too unpredictable and insufficiently pliable. What better way to (change this) than by removing children from the steadying influences of their families, and placing them instead in the hands of (free government) schools[?] Just in case parents were unwilling to comply, the powers that be committed school attendance into law.”
We’ll give Cantrall a pass on the fact that the quote attributed to Gatto is not from Gatto but from a reviewer of one of Gatto’s books. That’s a mistake that any rigorous intellectual writing at The American Thinker could easily make and, besides, quotation marks are inherently confusing. But I’m not going to give him a pass on how he altered the quotation. Here’s the original quotation with the words that Cantrall conveniently omitted in bold:
Mr. Gatto details the lives of archetypal Americans like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, who were independent, free-thinking leaders, none of whom spent more than two years in any kind of school, and yet all were leading productive, fulfilled lives by the time they were in their teens. Mr. Gatto argues that big business knew that the development of these kinds of individuals needed to be hindered. They were too unpredictable and insufficiently pliable.
What better way to accomplish this shadowy goal than by removing children from the steadying influences of their families, and placing them instead in the hands of schools, where they could be easily molded into the kinds of people upon whom big business depended. Just in case parents were unwilling to comply, the powers that be committed school attendance into law.
That’s just sad. I mean really, really sad. Cantrall takes a guy who is arguing that public schooling was a capitalist conspiracy and quotes him to support his position that public schools are inherently socialist. I’d say that is a bit like quoting Jonah Goldberg in an article on the virtues of meticulous personal hygiene.
Young Josiah has a Wikipedia entry written by his admirers and other fluffers. Perhaps these embarrassing gaffes would be a nice project for a Sadlynaut who might want to, you know, edit that entry somewhat.