PRE-POST NOTE: I actually wrote this series last week, when the “annoying trickle” of pointless,mindless, baseless slander of conservatives was pretty much background noise.

Of course, since I wrote the first three parts of the series, Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security – which would seem to have become completely politicized in the past three months – has essentially declared all conservative thought and dissent (not to mention military service) as probable cause for government suspicion.

My friend and radio colleague John Hinderaker at Power Line, shreds this report in one of the essential fiskings in recent blog history; I’m sure it’s just the beginning.

But the extent of the defamation of all conservative thought in this country goes way beyond a witless bureaucrat and her minions, and won’t end in the unlikely event Napolitano is fired in the disgrace she deserves.

My timing, sadly, could not be better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.

———-
As I noted yesterday – the usual annoying trickle of leftybloggers and “alternative” media types grasping onto examples of bad behavior by conservatives or (more usually) inflating off-handed remarks into “evidence” and outright mangling of context has turned into a babbling runoff-swollen brook of cultural defamation.

Few brooks babble more than local leftyblog icon Mark Gisleson, who wrote last week:

On Sunday’s The UpTake live news show [no archive available], host Tom Elko’s conservative blogger guest Mitch Berg turned to the camera and implored his 2nd Amendment buddies to not get crazy. No clue if JammieWearingFool listens to Mitch’s radio show or reads his blog.

Now, haven’t seen the video of the Uptake appearance – if there’s anything I hate more than listening to my voice, it’s seeing myself on TV – but I’m pretty sure the subject was the nutcase in Pittsburgh who shot the three cops, due to (he and the media claimed) his fear of Obama’s anti-gun proposals.  Now, despite that fact that most of us Second Amendment/Human Rights activists deal with this by joining the NRA (and  you’ll note that there have not been four million of these incidents), I was urging fellow human rights activists to not panic; we’ve beaten back worse than this, and done it not only by civil means, but means we can be proud of a civil Americans.

It’s hilarious, of course – this is the same Mark Gisleson who five years ago earned undying infamy for pining for armed revolution, in the Twin Cities’ Reader’s late, unlamented “Babelogue” (whose archives have perhaps mercifully gurgled down the memory hole):

In my heart, I still believe in revolution. In my heart, I still think I have the ‘nads to put my life on the line for a cause. In my gut I think this is the only way we’ll ever achieve our goals of economic and social justice. But in my head, I want to win the next election so we don’t have to have a revolution.

…and who’s boasted about a purported past as a “labor goon”, has suddenly gotten the vapors over the odd bit of (let’s take him at his word, by which I mean “humor the delusion”) borderline-militant rhetoric.

Vapor-y enough to refer us to…:

And TBogg has more on the eliminationist Right.

Ah. TBogg.  Well, if TBogg says it, it’s…

…well, it’s someone else’s talking point, only lobotomized.  TBogg is the ultimate metastasization of the anonymous leftyblogger; intellectually vacuous, given to broad sweeps of cultural group slander (while shielded from accountability by his precious anonymity) and waves of nasty, petulant, juvenile snarkiness, and…

…well, pretty much everything that the local anonymous leftyblog community aspires to.

But is the right “eliminationist?” Wow.  That’s a word you don’t see every day; Daniel Goldhagen used the term “eliminationist anti-semitism” to describe the German people before and during WWII – but he took a whole book to do it, in which me laid out a case that German society had in it a long tradition of a desire to, y’know, kill Jews.

So since it’s such a big word, curiousity triumphed over experience. I read “TBogg”, wondering as to the “evidence” of the “eliminationist right” that apparently lurks outside the gates of our civilization.

Read it if you feel compelled to do so; it tries to link the story of James Adkisson, the deranged Knoxville man who, let it be known, really really did hate liberals (WARNING! PDF FILE! GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF USABILITY OR PERFORMANCE!), and followed up on that hatred by killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church.

Mr. Bogg (and the various leftybloggers who are his only real sources) ties Adkisson to Timothy McVeigh, which is trite and facile but not uttelry inaccurate, and thence to “Right-wing hate radio”, the diabolical cabal of Limbaugh/Hannity/Bernard Goldberg (?), who we are assured are really behind it all.

And there, in the bleatings of a gutless anonymous blogger and his dotzy fanboy in Saint Paul and of a thousand similar intellectual copulations, is the nucleus of the real story; the left wants you, and the population at large, to make the following leap:

Conservative dissent leads to murder.

More tomorrow.

EPILOGUE:  Again – I wrote the above late last Friday.  I’ll write more about Secretary Napolitano’s slander on Friday.

Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”:

JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber

JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta

MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something

CHRIS HAYES: gmta

JONATHAN CHAIT: ya total echo chamber

BRAD DELONG: echo-o-o-o-o-o-o cha-a-a-a-mber-er-er-er

ISAAC CHOTINER: lols

EZRA KLEIN: ok,,, we agree. Yglesias its your turn to write it

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: cant, I have h/w assignment due for rahm emanuel

OK, that’s a spoof – but I have a hunch I know what one of the recent topics must have been. There’s been such a wide-spread synchronicity of – for lack of a better word – “thought” among so many regional and national leftybloggers, I can’t help but think it’s not only no coincidence, but in fact a symptom of the most caustic initiative on the part of the American left.
———-

Before we get to the story, let’s talk aphorisms.  Aphorisms can be taken way too far – but they can be useful memes for categorizing things like human behavior.
One of my favorites I get from watching the odd episode of House.  In and among all the glib causticness, House trips upon the odd ingenious bit of human nature.

Many of those bits tie back to his main rule – his Prime Directive, if you will – for human nature; everybody lies.  It’s true, really; at some point or another, everyone finds it in their self-interest or sense of emotional self-preservation to bend the truth.

I’m positing that this rule as a corollary when it comes to the left-leaning “alternative” media.  Indeed, let’s call this “Berg’s Second Law of Leftyblogging”:  whenever liberals toss out defamatory generalizations about conservatives, they are projecting. (Classic example comes about 1:04 into this video).

You can pretty much name your slur; the party that yaps about “fatcats” is the party that owes its soul to plutocrats.  The party that whinged about Bush’s record on civil liberties has always been the party that actually did crush civil liberties (see the ’94 Crime Bill, the ’96 Counterterrorism Act, and the various Dem plans on the “Fairness” Doctrine, bank takeovers and the ). The party that complains about violence, corruption, wastrelcy and incompetence is violent, corrupt, spendthrift and incompetent.

It’s a theory, but I’ll stand by it. Indeed, you’ll see why as this piece continues.

There’s one more aphorism.  It’s George Orwell’s note that dictators always need enemies to keep the people occupied.

They don’t even need to be dictators!

———-

It’s a running joke among conservatives; if you order a pizza, and a lefty hears about it, it’s an example of extremism.  Pushing to liberalize charter-school laws and vacant-housing ordinances? Activism for the Second or Tenth Amendments?  Extremism.  To paraphrase the old drill sergeant aphorism, “everything you do can get you labelled an extremist, and everything you don’t do can get you labelled an extremist”.

I started seeing little trickles and dribbles around the regional Sorosphere a couple of weeks ago: references to “right-wing extremism” (this in reference to a quip by Michele Bachmann that uses some kind of guerrilla warfare reference to refer to conservatives in Minnesota), usually with more-than-muted warnings about “militancy” and “violence”.

It’s tempting (and in the case of the link above, accurate) to write it all off as examples of intellectual laziness, of the febrile thrashings of inferior minds.  Indeed, both of these play into the larger point.

But there is a larger point. The leftybloggers involved in these casual, petty, paranoid defamations are unwitting tools in a long-running campaign to control the English language, if necessary by devaluing it to uselessness.

More tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to write a post for the past few weeks about the Dems’ new fixation with cutiepie word games – but Bobby Jindal says it all, when asked if he wants the President to fail:

Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Jindal said at a political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. “This is political correctness run amok.”

This, of course, from the party that said “dissent is good!”, and whinged about their precious patriotism being insulted if they were questioned.

Here’s one of the GOP’s problems; the Dems are playing the battle for the language as a full-contact sport, while Republicans think it’s a sideshow.

The bad guys are winning.

Bogus Doug has an excellent critique of Brit slang for those who’ve not encountered it.

More?  Sure! Here  you go.

I’m a linguistics geek.

You’ve been warned.

———-

Languages borrow from and give back to each other in a constant ebb and flow of words and ideas that, often as not, reflect cultural shifts. 

English is, of course, a language made up of borrowed words.  It’s really a hash arising from the collision of two linguistic families – Anglo-Saxon languages descended from German and Dutch, and romance influences descended from the Norman conquest of Britain.  And American English is even more so – a melange of immigrant dialects (the southern drawl is a descendant of the Scots-Irish brogue the south’s original inhabitants brought over; the various New York and Boston dialects are combinations of Northern, Eastern and Southern European accents).

Of course, the booming success of American pop culture has meant that American English has given back to the world; the ascendancy and dominance of Americana has led to American-English words popping up in languages all over the world; “Okay” is found in a great many of the world’s languages, and considered perfectly acceptable usage, to denote that something is “Okay”; Japanese absorbed “Besoboru” and “Aisukurima” and “Disokujokii” for Baseball, Ice Cream and Disc Jockey, among many others.  This has led some nations – mainly France – to try to plug the hole in the cultural, linguistic dijk (there’s another!) to try, in vain, to “preserve” their language in its “pure” form.

Of course, American English has borrowed much in return, not just from immigration, but from its expansionist past – everything from “Boondocks” (from the Tagalog bundok, or “mountains”, brought back in the early 1900’s from the Philippines by US servicemen) to “pow-wow”, to “Jazz” among many, many others terms derived from the argot of Afro-American slaves. 

So it’s always interesting to watch new words getting borrowed. 

I started noticing the prefix “über-” popping up in my kids’ conversation four or five years ago; it is (says the guy with the undergrad German minor) a German modifying prefix meaning, roughly, “Super”.  “That was übercool!” became a common expression among the local Twilight-‘n-Jonas-Bros set.

Then, last fall, I heard it in a TV commercial for the first time, as I wrote in a piece I never got around to posting.  Which, as it turns out, is a good thing, since the piece has apparently taken the next step. 

What the “next step” exactly is, of course, is a matter for debate; it might be “on the brink of entry into the AP Style Guide”, or it might be “further proof of the decline of Journalism”.

Via Allahpundit, you be the judge:

With apologies to D.L. Hughley, it’s The One’s “Stefan Urquelle” moment.

…The president-elect, looking uber-cool  [sic] with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.

AP goes on to ask: 

Does he really need the hat to attain uber-coolness [sic]? Being married to a “goddess” should be enough. And hey, nothing says creepy hip like a president who hits the gym every morning. Exit question: What other fashion conventions that have been passe for, oh, at least 20 years are we about to learn are “uber-cool”? [sic]  Obama should start wearing skinny ties just to dare the press to call him outmoded.

I’d be the last one to judge fashions, über-or-unter cool. 

But borrowing superlative modifiers from Germans?  The idea so über-fills me with angst, I’m verklemmt.

UPDATE: Viä Hässlingtön, I see I’ve förgötten certäin rüles aböüt ümläute…

UPDATE 2:  Unless you are a highly-trained speaker of German or Finnish, do not try to pronounce all the words in the previous update correctly.  You could sprain your tongue.

Chris Steller at the Minnesoros “Independent“: “Blagociation”

Although to be fair, Steller might not have written it; it could have been the M”indy”s editors at the Center for “Independent” Media.

I try to hope for the best in people.

Sarah Palin’s biggest drawback – and this was amply confirmed after months of reading the mainstream and left-media – was that she didn’t win over any of the movement liberals who were never going to vote for a Republican anyway.

Her greatest strength – and this is something that the mainstream media would have a hard time catching – was that she reminded an awful lot of people between the Adirondacks and the Sierra Madres of people like them.

And – just as with Ronald Reagan – talking about (or to) “people just like people between the Adirondacks and the Sierra Madres” in front of the media is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Camille Paglia – no conservative,she – on Dick Cavett’s drive-by sliming of Palin (emphasis added):

However, Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first language.” I will pass over Cavett’s sniggering dismissal of “soccer moms” as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

Although it’s certainly worth discussing, since it would be a real slap at the feminist movement, if movement feminists actually cared about their purported goals.

Onward:

I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?

Leaving slang aside, there are a bunch of major linguistic groups in this country. For Dick Cavett (or, satirically, Tina Fey) to make someone’s American-English dialect a “qualification” to serve is…

…like, wack, dude.

A:  “Only one, and that’s not funny”

Joe Lieberman appears in an ad for a phone company.

It’s kinda funny.  Not “wet your pants” funny… 

 …but, y’know, droll.

Look for the Obama Administration to get calls for a central humor vetting office from this guy:

…this is a horrible ad, because speaking as a progressive, the last person I want to see on an ad for things that matter to me is Joe Effing Lieberman. And I really don’t want to see it with the tagline “switching is easy,” because I interpret that as an insult. See, I didn’t take Lieberman’s words on the campaign trail lightly. When he blithely suggested that a question about whether President-elect Obama was a socialist was “interesting,” I took offense to it.

Er…yeah.  I’ll bet he did. 

…And when, after the election, the Democratic caucus voted to retain Joe Lieberman as Chair of the Homeland Security committee when he didn’t offer so much as a public apology for his statements, when he so easily switched his allegiance back to the group that he had so vilified repeatedly on the campaign trail, I took offense, not only at the Democratic caucus who let him off the hook, but at him, for making it clear that his personal honor is a joke, that he never gives more than lip service to anything he claims to care about.

[Which is a bad thing with Democrats, but a good one for Republicans, apparently – Ed.]

I’m guessing that Working Assets means this as a tongue-in-cheek joke, but it’s falling flat on me right now. It’s a little too soon for that kind of humor, especially since Lieberman is in a position where he can do great damage to progressive causes if he desires…

AIRMAN CRONAUER:  “You in more dire need of a &*(#(#$*#()^^^^^^CARRIER INTERRUPTED #*$#*(#))))))++++++++  than any human ever born”. 

In the wake of the “historic change” on Tuesday, the question “who has a better sense of humor – liberals or conservatives?” may become a pivotal one.

And the answers? Well, they’ll surprise…

…well, anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, or who is driven entirely by media meme and dogma. You know who I’m talking about.

Psychology Today notes:

To look into this question we approached 285 individuals in public places in Boston, asking them to answer a few questions about their political beliefs, and most importantly to rate how funny they found 22 jokes (see all jokes below). Some of the jokes we used were more funny, some were less funny, and in general they fell into seven categories: race, religion, golf, employment, Jack Handey’s deep thoughts, marriage, and family. Participants were asked to rate each joke on a scale from 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious).

At the end we had 140 self declared liberals and 145 self declared conservatives, and the results were not at all what we expected. As it turned out conservatives gave significantly higher rating to the jokes in each of the seven categories (see table below)!

So, is the stereotype of liberals as being funnier completely off? When we asked our respondents to self-report how funny they are, liberals indicated that they were funnier. This means that liberals are not finding life to be funnier, but they think they are.

If you’ve comparison-shopped a MOB party and “Drinking Liberally”, or gone to both Nihilist In Golf Pants and Clicking Spot for entertainment, this comes as no surprise.

This piece in the NYTimes analyzes the “issue” further, and draws more – and similar – conclusions:

“Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general,” said Dr. Martin, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. “A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a sense that things need to change before one can be really happy.”

And of course, there’s a certain amount of Pauline Kael Effect going on, too:

Another possible explanation is that conservatives, or at least the ones in Boston, really aren’t the stiffs they’re made out to be by social scientists. When these scientists analyze conservatives, they can sound like Victorians describing headhunters in Borneo. They try to be objective, but it’s an alien culture.

The studies hailing liberals’ nonconformity and “openness to ideas” have been done by social scientists working in a culture that’s remarkably homogenous politically. Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one on social science and humanities faculties, according to studies by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. If you’re a professor who truly “seeks new experiences,” try going into a faculty club today and passing out McCain-Palin buttons.

Could it be that the image of conservatives as humorless, dogmatic neurotics is based more on political bias than sound social science? Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviews the evidence of cognitive differences in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” said that while there were valid differences, “liberals and conservatives are roughly equally closed-minded in dealing with dissonant real-world evidence.”

A friggin’ commie professor would say that.

(Via Sanden Totten @ MPR’s LoopHole)

In the wake of the flap the agenda media and the Sorosphere manufactured over Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statements a few weeks ago on Tinglyball with Chris Matthews, I wondered – is it possible to question other peoples’ motivations anymore?

I’m convinced – having not only read the accounts and seen the video of Rep. Bachmann’s appearance, but having talked with Rep. Bachmann about the subject – that Rep. Bachmann meant “people who don’t have the nation’s best interests at heart”, and “people who love America exactly as it isn’t and has never been”, when she said “anti-American”.  And when she said the media should be exposing this, she meant “doing its job, and giving people some means of critically examining candidates’ views”, rather than “witchhunting”. 

Not that facts or context matter, of course.

Are there “anti-Americans” out there?  In the sense that there are people who want America extinguished from the planet?  Probably none in public life that matter, Jeremiah Wright and his invocation of the Sixth Commandment notwithstanding.

But can someone’s commitment to “American” ideals – the things that our founding fathers enshrined, things like “one person, one vote” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, “the rule of law”, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – be criticized?

One of the most popular posts that’s ever appeared on this blog came out four and a half years ago, during a previous spate of demands that nobody question anyone’s motivation (“Don’t you dare question my patriotism!”).  Entitled “You Might Not Be An American If…“, it kinda summed up how I feel about Bachmann’s statement and, yes, the targets:

If You Believe: that America has problems – huge problems – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that America’s problems make it an inherently rotten concept, then maybe you should think about whether you’re living in the right place. 

If You Believe: …that America’s projection of power around the world is immoral – then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that any projection of American power is inherely unjust because it’s America, then maybe you should be living in, say, Sweden? Just an idea.

If You Believe: …that capitalism is wrong because its inequalities are inherely unjust, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that the free market is inherently, irrevocably evil, perhaps China would be a better fit? Just suggesting…

If You Believe: …that invading Iraq was wrong, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that our temporary administration of Iraq is worse than Hussein’s 30 year reighn of horrors, then perhaps you should rot in hell we need to have an attitude adjustment.

At four years’ remove, I might add a few:

If You Believe: …that racism still exists, and that people (or even just White People) inflict it on others, then dissent is American.
But If You Believe: …that all of America (or just White America) makes its every decision based purely on racism (unless they vote for Barack Obama), then you might be Anti-American.

If You Believe: …the Constitution is a “living document”, then dissent is hunky-dory.
But If You Believe: …that the Constitution is itself a corrupt, vile document that never did anyone any good, then perhaps you should find a different society to live in, just on basic principle.

Wanna swat at Bachmann’s statement?  You gotta bring more game than most of her critics seem to be able to manage.

I don’t lose a lot of sleep about how other people choose to express their political beliefs. 

Wanna demonstrate?  Chain yourself to a fence?  Make a big papier-mache doll head?  Knock yourself out. 

But one thing Obama supporters consistently do, I gotta confess, rubs me way the wrong way.

Constantly calling the Senator “Barack”. 

No, I know it’s his first name.  And if one were talking to him, calling him “Barack”, while a little informal for my conservative rural tastes, might be one thing.

But I get emails, constantly, from Obama’s campaign, like this one: “Take Election Day off for Barack”

I don’t recall a single piece of literature, ever, saying “Come out and work for Ronald” or “Let’s get behind John and Sarah”.   Not even being partisan here – the whole concept just gives me the creeps. 

Is it just me, or does anyone else think it smacks of personality cultism, just a little?  

Seeing this story – about a Maryland hotel in a heavily Democrat area being threatened with organized boycotts for displaying a pro-McCain/Palin sign – is yet a further symptom of the most depressing factor in American political life; the notion that to waaaay too many people, dissent, dissonance and difference of opinion aren’t something to tolerate, much less understand, challenge and in the end celebrate; it’s something to suppress, squash and destroy.

I don’t doubt for a moment that there are those on the right that do the same; I can imagine being a Democrat in Utah could be pretty dicey, especially if you run into any GOP operatives who take things waaaaay to seriously.  I say I don’t doubt it – because while I am sure it could happen, I have not actually heard of any such incidents any time recently. 

On the other hand, the incident with the hotel ties in with events small (Ashwin Madia staffers’ spouses stealing lawn signs, and the vandalism of Republican lawn signs in Saint Paul which, in some years, has seemed downright systematic) to big (the Tic impetus to reinstate the “Fairness” doctrine, the Obama campaign’s threats against the broadcast licenses of TV stations that broadcast ads critical of the candidate) to weave itself into a pattern of intolerance that is going to make politics very difficult in coming years.

But let’s leave all that aside for a moment.  The real question at hand here is…

…how can the other guys find racism in what I’m writing here?

Because it’s not bad enough to actively suppress your opponents’ speech; it’s much, much worse to set it up in your heads that everything they say is base, benighted and evil even before they say it.

(more…)

First, it was the “classic” bumpersticker

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention

Yesterday, I saw…:

If you’re not overwhelmed with anger, you’re not paying involved enough.

Not quite sure why we had the rhetorical escalation. But I will commence looking for:

If your constant rage hasn’t made you incontinent and given you a heart attack, stroke or some hyperadrenal disorder, you should kill yourself because you’re a useless piece of garbage.

Keep me posted.

So I was reading this bit, on this website – the website of a company of British paratroopers – and I saw this graf.See if you can spot the further evidence of the overwhelming spread of Yankee cultural hegemony:

The CQMS was pleased to be the main effort through the month of June. It gave CSgt Walker the opportunity to actually figure out what he was responsible for within A Coy. Since he had taken over the stores whilst deployed, he had his work cut out for him to complete the Board of Officers. In his usual fashion, CSgt Walker dedicated himself (and his storemen) to getting everything 100% ahead of time. Although the undertaking caused many long nights and headaches, we came through with flying colors.

Didja see it?

Answer below the jump.

(more…)

Last week, I wrote about the left’s rather unimaginative reliance on “Gitmo” metaphors; it’s only gotten worse.  Last week, I was in the Dunn Brothers on Grand Avenue, across from Macalester College (a local far-lefty hotbed).  A rather aromatic twentysomething white boy with dreadlocks and a Che Guevara t-shirt tried to order free-range vegan Guatemalan coffee, but was told that they were out.  The barrista asked the lad if he could wait two minutes while another pot brewed.

“What is this – Guantanamo?” the be-che’d fellow fumed [1]

At any rate, in a comment to that post, someone said:

With the frequency of the Gitmo moniker thrown about to mis-label every perceived wrong against liberal causes, someone should coin a “Godwin’s law”-style statement.

While I do appreciate the idea and take the point, adding another law to the books is, as with most things in the civil arena, not really the answer.  “Godwin’s Law“, [“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”] – is a bad one to mimic, since it (like the Nazi comparisons themselves) are most often invoked by people with feeble understanding at best of the history or issues involved, and tends to be used to squelch even the (rare) literate, appropriate comparisons.  The lower 80% of Godwin users tend to employ the law as a rhetorical Daisy Cutter, indiscrimimately mowing lines of conversation good and bad.  Inappropriate reference to Godwin can cause problems in some serious cases.  At one point, I even codified a corollary to Godwin: 

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illiteracy – 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

I minored in both History and German; hence, I invoke Nazi references both very sparingly and, when I do, with surgical aptness.  And I get a little peeved when, after coming up  with a thorougly impeccable comparison, some commenter bleats “Godwin’s Law!  Godwin’s Law!” in a perfect duckspeak accent, not really knowing what they’d doing, but fatally hobbling the conversation anyway.

What we have, in summation, is two conflicting problems:

1. Ill-informed, hamfisted use of inflammatory metaphors (Naziism, Guantanamo)
2. Misuse of memes intended to nullify #1.

Being a conservative and free-marketeer (unlike too many Republicans), I believe I have a comprehensive, free-speech-enabled, market-based answer; a certification program that allows internet users to use these memes, while assuring the reader/consumer that the user is qualified and competent to use them. 

I propose the following certifications:

• Certified Godwin’s Lawyer (CGL): Bearer of this certification will have exhibited an ability to discern between apt and inapt Nazi analogies in the application of Godwin’s Law to online dialog.  Hopefully, as technology advances, blog posts, comments, podcasts and even Youtube videos written by non-CGL-credentialled users can be automatically filtered out.
• Registered Totalitarian Analogist (RTA): Registered Totalitarian Analogists have the necessary background in history, ethics and logic to appropriately and aptly employ Nazi, Communist, Maoist, Khmer Rouge, Klan and Fascism-related metaphors.  (NOTE:  Having used unironically, even once, the term “Bushitler” is a lifetime disqualification from this credential).
• Authorized Guantanamo Referrent (AGR): These Authorized Referrants will have sufficient background in current events, the law (especially the actual text of the Geneva Convention as re: combatants who are not members of a military or indigenous partisan group) to competently use “Guantamo” similes and metaphors.  Additionally, AGRs will at least be aware of the irony behind the term “International Law” when referring to it.

I did note that this was a market solution.  I am the market.  To get your CGL, RTA or AGR, send $10 to my PayPal account.  (Limited time offer: all three for $25!).

Thank you.  That is all.

[1] The quote, like the story, is “fake but accurate.”

Emily at X Perspective notes:

The New York Times reports a new movement of Barack Obama supporters who are “expressing solidarity with him” by adopting the middle name “Hussein” on Facebook pages and in daily life.

A cursory look at the results for a search of “Hussein” on Facebook today netted: Tonya Hussein Van Tol, John Hussein Hartman, Dustin Hussein Hamari, and Kyle Hussein Randall, all in the first 2 pages.

I have a hunch a lot of people are going to look back on this campaign in about 20 years the same way people just a couple years older than me look back on feathered perms, The Village People and parachute jumpsuits.

ASIDE:  Other than policies and proposals and personality cultism and peek-a-boo/ is-or-isnt’-he playing of the race card, y’know what really bugs me about the Obama campaign?

How his supporters fans call him “Barack”.

He’s a Senator, and a potential President of the United States.  He should be “Mr. Obama”, “Senator Obama”, or even just “Obama”.

Call me old-fashioned; the word, I guess, is “conservative”.

Chris Steller at the Minnesoros “Independent” is asking for town-related political plays on words:

Sen. Barack Obama has shown a remarkable willingness to fly across the country for appearances in especially apt-named places like Independence, Mo., and Unity, N.H. Here are some other possible destinations for Obama and others:

Obama explains for the 60th time that he’s Christian, not Muslim

– Dead Horse, Alaska

Sen. John McCain announces Gov. Tim Pawlenty as his running mate- Boring, Maryland

Oh, and he asks – perhaps to his eventual chagrin…:

Got more? Use the comment feature to add to this itinerary.

Loath as I am to send traffic to a Soros propaganda mill, this could be fun.

Steven Karlson at Cold Spring Shops – the best blog in the business that is simultaneously about economics and railroads (on a totally geeky level – as if Sheila O’Malley got onto a jag of reading about locomotives and rolling stock) notes a book lamenting the dying art of diagramming sentences:

 Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Digramming Sentences, the direct object of Book Review N^o. 19, makes that case. Perhaps it’s a lost art in part because the main title parses as DOG \ SISTER BERNADETTE’S \ BARKING. Author Kitty Burns Flory enjoyed showing off her skills to Sister Bernadette. She also demonstrated other methods of modelling sentence structure, some of which were less intuitive than the manual according to Sister Bernadette and John E. Warriner. A passage that refers to a model called a tree diagram notes (p. 138)

These are considered more complete and, according to a friend of mine who teaches them, easier: traditional diagrams not only distort the original word order of a sentence, but, as I’ve mentioned, can also be insanely complex even when they’re dealing with a relatively ordinary sentence.

Never mind some of the constructions of poets and novelist, see chapter 4. And perhaps the method does not help distinguish sensible from incoherent writing. Quickly: diagram “Farmer Bill Dies in House.” (See p. 61). If it did, perhaps we could ask Congress to use a diagramming method as part of crafting legislation. Try this.

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Does that prepositional phrase “in restraint of trade or commerce” attach to “conspiracy” or to all three of “contract, combination, conspiracy”? Would the Supreme Court have an easier time discerning the Intent Of Congress with sentence diagrams in the Congressional Record?

Dunno, but the whole Heller case could be settled with a pretty simple diagramming of the text of the Second Amendment.

But I digress. 

Back in college I – as the most-identifiable English major in my senior class, a writing tutor, and the editor of the college paper – was approached on cold January evening by a group of Business majors who were struggling with their BizLaw class (the “Physical Chemistry” of the business degree, the rocks on which many a Biz career were dashed).

“Mitch?”  What does this sentence…“, they said, pointing to a two-column-inch swath of text highlighted in yellow in their Business Law textbook – the most-accepted undergrad BizLaw textbook in the country at the time “…mean?”

And I sat for half an hour, attempting to diagram it several different ways…

…before realizing – and confirming my friends’ suspicions – that the sentence/paragraph literally meant nothing. 

The good news: Here’s an excellent article on one of the jobs I do, the “Usability Expert” (technically, I do two – I am also the “Interaction Designer” – although the two jobs really bleed into each other pretty heavily).

The ‘bad” news: It’s in German. Which isn’t a problem for me, but very well may be für euch.

The other good news: Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we have the Google translation thingie, which renders the German article into English.

The bad news:  There’s a reason I used the term “render” rather than “translate”.  It reads like something from Engrish.com.

Question:  “What are two people divided by a common language three common languages?

…on Kool Aid Report.

Say what you will about immigration – I, for one, favor making it safe, available and legal. 

People have different takes on the “enforcement” side of things, of course; last week’s roundup of illegals in Postville, Iowa was a rallying point to pro-legal immigration supporters and a poke in the eye of the anti-sovereignty forces…

…one of whom, it seems reasonable to assume, is the Minnesoros Monitor‘s Anna Pratt. 

But it’s not really the immigration talk that grabbed my attention about her piece in the mSM on Saturday.  No, it was this bit here:

Late Friday afternoon, a crowd assembled on a vibrant street corner in Minneapolis…

I, for one, would like to find that “vibrant corner” and kick back on a chaise lounge.  It’d be like one of those “magic fingers” beds in the hotels, only free.

Well, given that it’s Minneapolis, we’re not sure about the “free” bit, either.

To: The Software industry

From:  Mitch Berg

Re:  Mislabeling.

To whom it may concern,

A “support forum” where you can go ask questions of other equally-frustrated users of your crappy product is not, in fact, “support”. 

No, keep the forum.  Just quit calling it part of your “support service”. 

That is all.

MBerg

Charlie Quimby notices something I’ve noticed, albeit noticed differently, as well:

Nicholas Kristof writes about research into how our biases filter the information we will accept as authoritative.

[Farhad Manjoo, Salon staff writer and author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society] cites a more recent study by Stanford University psychologists of students who either favored or opposed capital punishment. The students were shown the same two studies: one suggested that executions have a deterrent effect that reduces subsequent murders, and the other doubted that.

Whatever their stance, the students found the study that supported their position to be well-conducted and persuasive and the other one to be profoundly flawed.

“That led to a funny result,” Mr. Manjoo writes. “People in the study became polarized.”

Other experiments demonstrated how people seek out information that confirms their prejudices and resist information that doesn’t fit their beliefs — certainly not news in the blogosphere.

Of course, Quimby and Kristoff are writing for liberal audiences, so they have to make it safe for their consumption, presumably lest they end up getting “managed“:

Kristof says the blinkering “afflicts both liberals and conservatives, but a raft of studies shows that it is a particular problem with conservatives.”

Now of course I could follow up by responding “check the biases of your “researchers””, the subject samples, etc, etc, but, honestly, let’s let crabbling about the (proven) bias of most academics go for now.

The larger thesis – that people are predisposed to believe research that supports their biases and undercut or devalue research that disagrees with them – seems obvious enough.

But since I experiment on peoples’ perceptions of things for at least part of my living (usability testing), a more interesting experiment suggests itself.

Bear with me, here.

I was involved for a couple of years with a Saint Paul email discussion group. The group has devolved into, essentially, a DFL press-release forum, where DFLers argue about who is more DFL. Which is fine.

Periodically, conservatives would join the group. And there’d shortly be a spasm of arguments about what constitutes a “civil” discussion. And Republican commenters would leave comments that would give DFLers the vapors over “incivility”, that wouldn’t draw a comment if they had been aimed at Republicans instead.

I’ve wanted to try this experiment:

1. Make up a bunch of more-or-less caustic political phrases from whole cloth. They could range from really confrontational things like “Being a [liberal or conservative] is like having a lobotomy – although easier to detect in polite company – [right or left-wing commentator]”  to more neutral statements.
2. Get a series of test subjects.
3. Have the subjects rate their politics – left, right or center. (Also get the last four presidents/governors they voted for, or would have voted for, to help weight the answers).
4. Read them a series of these fictional statements, attributing them alternately to well-known left and right wing commentators, with appopriate subjects. For example – to a “left” leaning subject, read “Being a Liberal is like having a lobotomy – although easier to detect in polite company – (Ann Coulter)” and “Conservatism is to intellect what rape is to education (Michael Moore)”.
5. For each statement, rate them from 1 (not uncivil at all) to 10 (caustically uncivil).

The catch is, of course, that the statements are fictional and identical, and will have their “authors” and subjects shuffled an even amount of times – so the only actual variable will be the audience’s preconceptions.

I wonder how that’d turn out?

Well, no. I don’t wonder. I have a pretty fair idea, although it’d be fun to confirm or reject that idea. I have a pretty fair hunch that a fictional statement attributed to a “hostile” commenter aimed at someone the subject approves of will be judged far more harshly than the exact same statement from a “friendly” commenter aimed at an “enemy”.

I’ll go out on a limb with this next bit; I’d suspect that with conservatives, the effect would diminish with higher education. I will almost (but not quite) bet money that the opposite is true among liberals; the effect of taking offense at “incivility” in others will become more rather than less enhanced.

Hm. Where to do the experiment?

Hmmmm, indeed.

My site ranks friggin’ “Low” on the durn burned “Cuss-O’Meter”.

Created by OnePlusYou

Shiznit, I’m good!  Actually, I’d figured it’d be a lot lower than that.  Must have been my commenters.  Yeah.  That’s it.
So I had to go and find out how the late Norwegianity, by the not-late Mark Gisleson, fared:

Created by OnePlusYou

Wow. That was a kick in the yarbles.