Hard News: A Taxonomy of Poo
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O! The front page seems to be giving times in Japanese...
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I/S just said it better than I could.
I/S did indeed put it better than I could while I was off downloading some nice iPod apps (lightsaber effects, anyone?)
Marxism is certainly inherently authoritarian, in the same way that the catchphrase of all schoolyard bullies are authoritarians when they say "Don't piss me off or my Big Brother will beat you up."
Bullies will deny that they are bullies and claim that they are allied with some transcendent "good" - and they'll even believe it, which will only indicate that they've identified themselves completely with what they perceive as the toughest gang around. People will honestly believe that; it's called cognitive dissonance.
Orwell's devastatingly ironic point is that Big Brother need not exist in a corporeal sense at all - all the Party needs is the idea of Big Brother to personify "historical inevitability" (called by Robespierre and the like, "Providence" and by others "necessity" and Thatcherites, TINA - "There Is No Alternative". Alasdair Gray makes a nice play with it in his novella, "Five Letters From an Eastern Empire" where the Emperor is literally a puppet, treated by everyone as if he were a real man made immortal.
I've always found so-called libertarians of both the Left and the Right either disingenuous or self-deluding for the reasons above. Marxism's God may be an abstract, nonpersonal one, but it brings with it its Apocalypse (revolution) and it's New Jerusalem (the dictatorship of the proletariat) just like any other cult. I'll stick "market forces" and whatever gibberish the Scientologists use in the same category as "historical inevitability" too.
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Bleagh... grammatical mess that turned out to be. To much of Scotland's best-known exports again...
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... and if I must define myself with a neat, tidy cryptotheological/epistemological/ideological label, perhaps it's as an Epicurean who half-heartedly thinks that he should be a Nihilist if he were honest, but also honestly can't be fagged with it and will settle for Absurdism as a stop-gap (see Camus for that one). Hic!
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Kracklite, sounds like a hedonist?
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Not that there's anything wrong with that.
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Ah, but more pretentious!
The real epicureans advocated a form of restraint and evenness of temperament and indulgence actually - neurosis and hangovers are definitely not pleasurable. Personally, I believe in all things in moderation - including moderation.
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Kracklite, have you read A History Maker?
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Alas, it sits on my shelf, inspiring the odd thought of "Damnit!, I must get around to finishing it!" I expect it to be good, as I've enjoyed Gray's other works, especially the gargantuan Lanark. An increasingly attenuated PhD means that I've hardly read a book purely for pleasure in years, so it may have to wait a bit longer. Snivelling excuse, I know...
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Bumping, because the NBR has just set a new standard for Kiwiblog rightism in hitherto respectable print media.
The guy seems fairly sane in recent columns. Is he just having a Redbaiter moment?
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Coote by name and by nature it seems - must be one of those lonely Libz voters.
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... and if I must define myself with a neat, tidy cryptotheological/epistemological/ideological label, perhaps it's as an Epicurean who half-heartedly thinks that he should be a Nihilist if he were honest, but also honestly can't be fagged with it and will settle for Absurdism as a stop-gap (see Camus for that one). Hic!
Ditto
maybe less with the Nihilism
and more with the cooking, compost, bicyles and Absurdism
(well the cooking, compost and bicycles are more aspirational than anything at the moment) -
cooking composted bicycles sounds absurd enough.. :)
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Well, at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any (wo)man in the face.
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Or conversely:
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Video is no longer available ;-(
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Try reloading the page..
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Nope, yr right - embedding disabled. Here's the NZ Youtube equivalent:
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Fr fecks sake, I give up on this one.
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Wow. Striking use of the eliminationist vocabulary:
lentivirus
disease
HIV
scrapie
tapeworm
sucking blood
mongrelised
sickness
flesh-eating bacteriaTruly Streicher-like rhetoric. (Apropos Redbaiter, I'm intrigued to learn that Streicher was widely known as "Jew-baiter"...)
If you strip all that out, Coote's basically saying that if you lost money on the basis of a finance company's misleading claims, it's your fault because you're too stupid (like a dodo). If some bureaucrat tries to interfere in the dodo clubbing (for Coote is no conservationist), it's a perverse plot to interfere with the natural order.
This is a predator's manifesto, and we ought to be grateful to the NBR for reminding us that there are people in the business community who really think like this. I imagine Rod Petricivich's interior monologue would read something very like this.
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I guess that makes Petrecivich the club, then.
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Incidentally, I see that Coote is an investment manager at Tower.
I wonder how Tower feel about his ideology? He certainly seems to hold his clients (the dodos) in contempt.
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Actually, on close reading, Coote could be talking about sub-prime bailouts, and the way that naughty bankers are going straight to the public tit, and how lax regulators let them. It's very hard to tell, which is an unfortunate consequence of an inflamed prose style.
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And a new poo word, courtesy of Helen Clark on Agenda yesterday: Muldoonist.
Hum... content-free but rather scary, ay?
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I thought Muldoonist was quite a good description for somebody who plans to borrow money to pork-barrel the construction industry.
It's interesting how Labour are much keener on fiscal probity than National these days.
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