“And what was all that shit about Benghazi?”
Shorter some random NRO sixth-stringer: “Barack Obama calling the Holocaust senseless, fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
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One thing about the NRO the bench is deep but the talent is shallow
They’re like the Memphis Grizzlies of publications.
The Grizzlies are fourth in the West right now! Don’t insult them that way!
I still have my Vancouver Grizzlies t-shirt. Sob.
If the Memphis Grizzlies make you sad, how are you going to feel about the Oklahoma City Cannucks?
Hasn’t hockey been abolished?
I know. I was grasping for a good example but it seemed close enough in the wake of the Gay trade.
gay trade
I find your ideas intriguing. Do you perhaps have a newsletter to which I might subscribe?
Hey, the Grizzlies just got Tayshaun Prince. . . .
Violence can never fail; we can only fail violence.
Scott, this isn’t a second amendment issue
They are ALL Second Amendment issues! Read the Constitution, and this time read the Bill of Rights too! Only enumerated rights are granted to the government, all else is granted to the people!
Vote for -what’s his name, the minister from Arkansas, Hucklebee , Huckabee, something like that.-
For president! Save American freedom!
I don’t blog on shabbos!
And I don’t think NRO writing something ridiculous qualifies as an emergency.
Nazism is part of the Lord’s Plan to gather the Jews of the Diaspora back to the Promised Land and accelerate the Rapture and Second Coming (with the attendant nuclear holocaust, famine, etc.). Sure, it might seem senseless to you, foul heathen.
Finally, a voice of reason!
Easy there, cowboy, that’s Powerline’s Scott Johnson’s daughter you’re taking on. You could be in for a real intellectual tussle.
Wait, are you telling me there’s nepotism at the National Review? Next thing you know, you’ll tell me that NRO contributors publish books edited by Saul Bellow’s idiot son.
I learn something new every time I visit this site.
Jonah Goldberg II: Electric Boogaloo
I suppose it’s reassuring that such a person was hired due to connections rather than ability.
For people who publish in NRO, I think connections and ability are pretty much the same thing, aren’t they?
It’s the only way to explain, for example, Jonah Goldberg.
It is for those who read it.
Ability over connections? No, they’re conservative! God chose them for their positions by causing them to be born in those families.
Now I want to read more on Calvinism to see if the parallels go deeper than just born on third base/the select.
no, that’s pretty much it.
“Now I want to read more on Calvinism to see if the parallels go deeper than just born on third base/the select.”
This gives me an idea- an LGM Tourney: Dumbest conservative offspring, a commenter voted tourney March Madness style- Jonah vs. Bill, Powerline Girl v. Adam Bellow, etc. if need be we can expand it to include other famous nepotism cases- Luke Russert, Times and Wapo folks, Alex “my dad was one the greatest philosophers of the mid-20th Century” Rawls.
If Alec Rawls had a job I think he’d win hands down…
Isn’t poor nutty Alex Rawls rather renouncing his father?
I am not a Rawls expert, but I never heard senior obsessing about crescent shaped memorials
I didn’t know Lou Rawls had a son, wait that’s not right
Top prize in counseling for the poor sod who read enough of these excescences’ foul oeuvre to have a shot at winning.
Dr. Mengele makes objects into women, man.
Worse tragedy since 9/11 which was totally Clinton’s fault. See it’s all Clinton’s fault!That’s been the meal ticket for the NRO for two decades now.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! What?
It’s reassuring in a way that they’re that blatantly offensive. A normal human being (or a wingut trying to mimic one) might think, “I’m attacking the Kenyan Usurper for a negative statement he made about the Nazis. Although it is part of my job description to attack everything he says no matter how reasonable and uncontroversial, I should probably tread lightly here lest I look to be defending Nazism.” Although a large percentage of the NRO readership will look favorably on anything that criticizes Obama, I find it encouraging that these putzes either don’t care to try to appeal to anyone outside that demographic or are simply incapable of mimicking normal human emotions and this was the result of them actually trying to appeal to such people.
Really? I’d think that a normal human being would think something more along the lines of “It’s my job to find reasons to attack the President from the right. Here’s something he’s made a negative statement about Nazis and over here, here’s something else where he’s talking about anything other than Nazis. Let’s talk about that one.”
If they had any brains they’d use it as a chance to agree with the President, thus giving the centrist worshippers the warm fuzzies. Bonus points for making a pivot from the ‘Nazis Bad’ argument to a ‘Obama bad because Iran/North Korea/Whoever is just like the Nazis but he’s not seeing it’ line.
It’s NRO – they’re not interested in making centrists feel warm and fuzzy.
But, given how often they’ve had posters called out for racist nutjobbery, should at least know enough to leave this one alone. Apparently, lesson not learned.
Hm. Hard to do when he’s talking about the Holocaust, and not just totalitarianism in general – even given what we know about how awful North Korea is, any comparison between it and Nazi Germany would invite cries that the poster is belittling the Holocaust by the comparison.
Not an impossible pivot, but more than I would expect anyone posting on National Review’s blog would be capable of.
Considering that they screwed up posting “Yes, Nazis are bad.” I totally agree with you on that.
The pivot for Iran is pretty easy, just play up the whole thing about the jewish people facing another existential threat angle. North Korea would be a bit harder though, it’s true.
Based on what’s been learned in the last ten years, I’m not sure that’s true. It’s a different sort of mass atrocity, to be sure, but a half century of it…
We may never truly grasp it, any more than we grasp the Holocaust. We may be able to document it, if there’s a merciful end to it, as we document the Holocaust.
The funny thing is that she might’ve had a reasonable point. See Ta-Nehisi Coates’s discussion of Hobbes the other day*:
These are important questions, which she sort of alludes to with the line about all the Germans who willingly participated. Hitler’s Willing Executioners gets into the extent of it, if you can stand to read hundreds of pages of brutality descriped in unending detail (Hey, it worked in 2666?).
Unfortunately she framed it as nothing more complicated than “har har we have an infantile moron as president as my pointless pedantry will prove,” at which point Jonah Goldberg snuck behind the reader and farted.
*I’ve re-formatted because I’m not sure if I can embed one blockquote inside another. In case it’s not obvious, that’s Hobbes in italics and Coates in plain.
These are important questions, but she’s not actually interested in them. The NRO piece is just two-bit fisking.
Also: if one is actually interested in these questions w/r/t German behavior in the Holocaust there are far, far better accounts of it than Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Goldhagen’s answer to Coates’s question is too easy and very problematic: Germans behaved this way because they were Germans and thus infected with “eliminationist antisemitism.”* In a way Hitler’s Willing Executioners un-asks Coates’s question, instead explaining why, in fact, we (Americans and/or people living after 1945) simply could not have acted as Germans did during the Holocaust.
There are huge problems with Goldhagen’s story, not the least being that many perpetrators of the Holocaust weren’t German and that other nations, most notably the Soviet Union, were nearly simultaneously engaged in other bouts of mass killing of civilians whose relationship to antisemitism was, at the very least, a lot less direct. Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands is an excellent portrait of this larger context of mass killing. As for a more searching and plausible account of German behavior, you could do a lot worse than Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men.
_____________________
* To be more precise, Goldhagen argues that they behaved this way because they were Germans before 1945 and thus were infected with “eliminationist antisemitism.” He does admit that, somehow, Germans after 1945 totally didn’t have this virus anymore…though he has no good explanation for its sudden disappearance.
I appreciate the recommendations; I read Goldhagen for a class and at the time I mostly appreciated the chronicle of pre-Hitler anti-Semitism. There was another book I read for the same class that I thought did it all better, but its title was simply The Holocaust and I can’t think of the author’s name.
Could it be Martin Gilbert, a British historian?
Among them, Goldhagen’s penchant for simply making stuff up if he couldn’t find the evidence he wanted.
I’m actually embarrassed I mentioned it now.
Don’t be. I actually just finished the Goldhagen book not long ago. I was impressed, and really the only thing that bugged me was how relentlessly Goldhagen attacks historian/writer Christopher Browning in the footnotes, just over and over. And not just Browning.
So I start thinking, wait, WTF, how did everyone get it wrong except Goldhagen? Then I started reading about the book itself, and you may refer to the useful comment of the incomparable Incontinentia Buttocks, above. Which is not to say the Goldhagen book is useless.
“Warrant for Genocide” is interesting — Norman Cohn documents how much effort the Nazis had to put in, stoking the background anti-Semitism and dragging the Germans collectively on board with eliminationism.
+1 for “Ordinary Men”; both fascinating and disturbing.
For me, some of the greatest insight on the how-could-the-Holocaust-happen came from two classic experiments – the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. Taken together, they make a fairly persuasive argument that it’s distressingly easy to turn people into (what we imagine as) inhuman monsters using just the appearance of “authority” and a practice of “depersonalization”.
only in that particular situation, with a few people at a time. the nazi’s had to convince an entire population, and not under controlled circumstances.
“Taken together, they make a fairly persuasive argument that it’s distressingly easy to turn people into (what we imagine as) inhuman monsters using just the appearance of “authority” and a practice of “depersonalization”.”
what those experiments left out, because they really couldn’t re-create the exact circumstances, is the situation germany found itself in, post wwI and treaty of versailies. already reeling from both the economic and manpower cost of wwI, in a losing effort, germany then got dumped on by both the reparations required by the treaty, and the hit of the great depression. by the time hitler and his thugs were attempting to come to power, the average german was primed to blame anybody for their bad fortune. already having a strain of anti-semitism, as part of the national id, employing the jews, as national scapegoats for the kaiser’s fuckups was a natural.
no experiment can possibly replicate those unique circumstances.
Once, on a long driving trip, we got too tired to safely drive any longer, and stopped at the next Comfort Inn Suites. Then we drove into town looking for dinner.
Let’s see, “Honey, where are we tonight, anyhow?”
Well, we were in Forrest City, Arkansas… When I looked on the Google for places to eat, it couldn’t find Forest City, AK…
Forrest, hmm, that rings a bell somehow. Bedford Forrest, maybe?
Nathan Bedford Forrest, where have I seen that name? Hmmm?
Oh, yes, yesss, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, fraternity of honorable and wealthy southern war heros, Traitors in Defense of Slavery, all of them.
There we were, past a Christian school, at a Mexican restaurant.
In a town named for the founder of the KKK, leading into extra-legal slavery, debt peonage, lynching, hatred, bombings, little girls killed. Too late to leave, we’d already checked in…
Anyway, carry on!
For bonus laughs, the writer starts by saying that Americans collectively condemned the Nazis, and Obama still does… apparently everyone else has moved on and it’s only Obama who’s stuck in the past, still going on about who killed who.
The most charitable construction for Johnson’s words is that she wants Obama — whenever he talks about Nazis or Iran or Al Qaeda — to say “The violence wasn’t senseless, these people had reasons for what they did”… and then go on to refute the arguments that had been used for killing Jews or Americans.
If he does that, NRO will stop denouncing him for being sympathetic to terrorism.
I see a pattern emerging.
4 people dead = OMG BENGHAZI HOW HORRIBLE. FUCKING OBAMA AND HIS LIBTARD FOREIGN POLICY.
20 children dead = Librul hoax.
Millions of people dead = Logical.
Yes, this.
I work in a small office, and I’m the token liberal. I’ve had to listen to rant after rant about Benghazi and OMG, how horrible! (Which it was)
But Newtown? OMG, 2nd Amendment rights!!! and Dead children? Nah, Obama staged it all.
My head hurts from the constant bashing against the keyboard it gets.
It does get a little easier to deal with once you realize that a substantial portion of the GOP “base” is simply made of people who want that awful black president to just go away (for whatever political, economic, or racial reasons you care to imagine) and will seize upon any shiny object* they think might do just that. It’s the shouting of three-year-olds that don’t want to take a bath, and signifies as much.
*Benghazi, the long-form birth certificate, “Barry Soetoro”, ACORN, Bill Ayers, and Mitt Romney, for example.
there’s your problem,
“My head hurts from the constant bashing against the keyboard it gets.”
you’re bashing the wrong head against the keyboard.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the token liberal for the whole state…
Welcome to Indiana, my friends!
I need to move back to my home in Southern Indiana where everyone is oddly liberal (like Louisville). Then again, maybe my standards are just low.
Well, I do remember how outraged conservatives were over the government intelligence failure that allowed thousands of people to be killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. At least once they realized it could be blamed on Clinton.
So building a jungle jim out of the bones of children isn’t insane as long as it is structurally sound?
Excitable boy, they all said.
+1 for content
+1 for synergy with the blog title.
Speaking as a structural engineer, that’s more difficult to do than you’d think.
Pfft, I bet you haven’t even tried!
not if you use the right adhesive.
“Speaking as a structural engineer, that’s more difficult to do than you’d think.”
Personally, I want Obama to issue a nice innocuous statement about grandmothers, their wisdom and the benefits they provide to society. Then sit back and wait to see how long it takes for some wing nut to start arguing grandmothers are leaches on society who should be left on mountainsides to die of exposure, thereby releasing the job creators from the drag of paying for grandma’s social security and medicare.
I think the over/under would be about two hours.
This is a great idea! He should also endorse apple pie.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if Obama came out for respiration, we’d be a one party state within two minutes.
Obama needs to issue a Health Care Mandate to not drink Drano.
You laugh, but think what happened when Michelle Obama came out in favor of healthy eating and reasonable exercise.
You remember how wingers reacted in ’08 when Obama made the observation that people can do small things to improve energy usage, like keeping their tires properly inflated?
Yeah – I should have realized that was going to be a preview for the next few years.
It’s a shame that didn’t lead to wingnuts puncturing their tires and driving around all over the place.
i didn’t notice anyone laughing.
“You laugh”
when an entire segment of society goes clinically insane, laughter is probably not the appropriate response. unless it’s like, insane laughter.
And perhaps Bloomberg could restrict it to 16 oz servings.
“Leech!”
Well that’s a bit unfair. Republicans wouldn’t go so far as to attack Grandmas. You’ve gotta put an quasi-intellectual spin on things.
The wisdom and benefits grandparents provide? Is that all people are to Obama, just means to the end of promoting a Marxist collective good? The founding fathers created a nation presupposed on the idea that all men are granted equal dignity from the Lord. But of course, Obama wants to place himself as a false idol replacing God. Since he can’t admit that he wants to send our grandparents to death panels, he claims that they will be able to earn their keep by being forced to share their wisdom. But the cult of godless rationality and its so-called wisdom will not prevail as long as real Americans draw breath.
I’m not certain, but I think that I could convince one of my co-workers to post that on his door if I gave it to him with the right set up — and he teaches political science to impressionable youth for cryin’ out loud.
The “intellectual” flagship of movement conservatism digitally publishing the following sentence: ‘Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly “senseless.” ‘ because 1/3 of Germans voted for Nazis and they ALL couldn’t have been crazy.
It leaves me wondering why Johnson is sticking up for lefty thought like that (given the Goldbergian transitive argument of rubber/glue.). These people are beyond hope.
1/3 of Germans voted for Nazis and they ALL couldn’t have been crazy.
33% has got to be within one standard deviation of 27%.
Nazi Germany had one more standard deviation of standard deviants.
I have absolutely no idea why an NRO blogger would feel compelled to defend the rationality of a violent fascist ideology famous for using racist kulturkampf rhetoric to play on the financial insecurities and fears of middle class voters.
Also, I’m not sure why they would publish this article defending the rationality of Nazism.
Well, there are a few possibilities here:
1. They’re actually a fascist.
2. They’re actually a racist.
3. They’re actually really dumb.
4. All of the above.
Don’t forget: raised from birth by Scott Johnson of Powerline.
Resume entry
“Father once called himself ‘Big Trunk’ on a website”
I see the need for some alternative lyrics for “My Humps.”
They are not even pretending not to be fascists any more.
If I’m reading him correctly, Eliana is also making a defense of pandering to Nazis. Would it be Godwinning to suggest this post is, in part, the author trying to defend her own job?
It just gets so confusing. Was it senseless? Was it terrorism? Was it Pure Black-Hearted Evil Inspired by Beelzebub? It’s really important that the President use the proper word to characterize violent incidents.
Maybe Obama could take a lesson from St. Ronnie and simply say, “I forget.”
Could you imagine the screams of wingnut outrage if Obama answered a question that way? No matter how unimportant the question was?
I now want someone to ask him what he had for dinner six weeks ago, have him respond with “I can’t recall” and have it turn into a six month long DINNERGATE investigation. (Hey at the very least it would give the nuts in the House something to do).
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Eliana Johnson has been on the “OMG Hagel hates the Jews!” beat.
For having the temerity to refer to the Jewish Lobby as the Jewish Lobby? I still don’t understand that one
Jewish lobby really isn’t an okay thing to be saying, as it implies that Jewishness is synonymous Zionism, and specifically militant hard-line Zionism.
But it’s a relatively minor thing that Hagel’s shown contrition about, and this anti-Zionist Jew, at least, does see the need for crackers to get offended on his behalf.
That actually clears it up a bit for me thanks
no problem
*doesn’t see the need, obviously
I don’t understand the mentality of an anti-Zionist Jew. Would that be a Jew who opposes a safe haven/homeland, where Jews know they will always have a place to go, when needed?
My home is the United States?
Until it isn’t!
And, BTW, it’s not just about you.
And there’s not much difference, genetically, between the Palestinians and Jews.
As another anti-Zionist (half-)Jew, I certainly oppose the idea that it is moral to create such a safe haven/homeland by expelling most of the previous population and treating the rest as second class citizens, at best.
And as an American, I have absolutely no interest in ever moving to such a homeland, and no belief that such a thing would ever be necessary or even desirable for me or anyone I care about.
the “previous population” was jews, roughly 2,000 years ago, before the roman conquest/occupation/diaspora.
“As another anti-Zionist (half-)Jew, I certainly oppose the idea that it is moral to create such a safe haven/homeland by expelling most of the previous population and treating the rest as second class citizens, at best.”
it’s funny, how conveniently that seems to be forgotten. the palestinians were, at best, squatters, on land historically ancient israel, if you want to go the “historical” route. not that i’m suggesting that i am in full agreement with every single action, committed by the modern state of israel, since its founding in 1948, i am not.
as a half-jew, who had relatives murdered by the nazis, i can also appreciate the desire, of a people persecuted for millenia, around the world, for a country of their own, safe from the depredations of their enemies. when that country actually happens to historically be their ancestoral homeland, all the better. i can also appreciate their paranoia, based on those millenia of persecution, the most recent resulting in 6 million dead.
times are changing however, and hopefully, israel will be more amenable to addressing the injustices they, in their desire for freedom from persecution, have themselves perpetrated on innocent parties. violence tends to beget violence, a lesson that all parties, to the current conflicts in the middle-east, may finally be starting to learn.
Squatters? For TWO THOUSAND YEARS? I really hope you’re attempting a parody here, because if not, you’re insane.
First, you’re premises are false. Second, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana
Actually, cpinva and Dave, Arabs did not leave the Arabian peninsuala until the 8th century. Ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Babylonians and Assyrians are not arabs. Further, there have only been 3 sovereign nations in the land of Israel: the two Kingdoms of Israel and the modern Nation of Israel. Hope that helps.
Genetically, the Palestinians are descended from the people who have been living in Palestine for all of recorded history. They are Arabs because they began to speak Arabic after the Arab conquest, not because they are (for the most part) descended from Arabs who left the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century.
Also, the idea that the “historical” route, whatever that is, leads naturally to Jewish possession of Israel 2000 years ago is absurd. There are still Palestinians alive today who were expelled from their homes in 1948. Their children and grandchildren have been forced to be born and grow up either as stateless refugees, unwanted by the states in which they live and with few economic opportunities there. The ones who didn’t get expelled live either as second class citizens in a country that has little use for them, or under the heels of a brutal occupation.
This is a real injustice, happening to real living people in the present day, that is pretty close to a necessary result of Zionist ideology, which demanded a Jewish majority in a territory that had not had one for all of modern history. The idea that something that happened 2000 years ago is in any way comparable to this real, modern injustice is just absurd.
That’s not to say that the solution now is to reverse the last 100 years and kick all the Israelis out. That would obviously be just as great an injustice as what happened to the Palestinians. But it seems to me that it’s plenty to say that the Zionist project was inherently flawed, and to reject it in theory. The fact that whenever anyone points to the reality of hundreds of thousands of people being expelled from their homes and prevented from returning, and then having their property seized and given out to new people, all within living memory, is somehow answered by pointing to injustices committed by long extinct empires in ancient times, just shows how bankrupt the case for Zionism is.
That last was me. To continue, I’ll concede that the injustices that happened to the Palestinians are not unique, and that the twentieth century has seen many such injustices. I’ll concede that our own country was built upon similar injustices against the previous population.
That’s all true, and we live in the world that was created by those crimes and can’t really make up for them. But accepting the world as it is is not the same thing as defending it as a positive good, which is what Zionism demands. Zionism demands not just saying, “the state of Israel exists now, it is home to the millions of Israeli Jews who live there, and we have to accept that and not try right one wrong by committing another.” It demands saying nonsense about how the fact that ancient Jews lived in the region 2000 years ago somehow justifies expelling the people who’ve lived there for thousands of years, and pretending that there was no injustice there because they are “at best, squatters,” and all kinds of other lunacy – this coming from a commenter who from what I can recall is, on other subjects, perfectly sane.
Also, Dude, “Jewish Lobby” is not the preferred nomenclature.
+100
Perhaps instead of “Jewish lobby” he should have said “the Likud lobby, AIPAC.”.
It was sensible terrorism. Check out their shoes.
Speaking of Ronaldus Maximus(pbuh) the Wonkette post about the NRO bimbette’s piece included this:
Of course, there was the whole Bittburg cemetary thing, which I guess puts Ronny square with our winger Freunden.
They appear to be objectively pro ethnic cleansing so long as it is done on the basis of “an ethos”.
Good to know.
That’s Ethic cleansing.
As an exercise in rhetorical analysis, I recommend trying to determine what definition of “senseless” she’s using.
This might help.
http://www.google.lv/search?q=site%3Anationalreview.com%2Fcorner+%22senseless%22&ie=UTF-8&nfpr=1
Or it might not.
It’s a word which has never been used with such precision and such care.
If he should croak before I do, remind me to find his gravestone and add that phrase. It really should outlive him.
“Which gravestone are we looking for, again?”
“The damp one that smells like a urinal.”
You may want to credit Wonkette, unless they took the dude, ethos from you.
http://wonkette.com/499462/national-review-only-a-monster-would-say-the-nazis-didnt-make-sense
I heard the joke twice within five minutes of first reading the NR entry last night. I think it occurred to a massive number of readers. It just fits so perfectly.
Yep, DeLong used it as well.
It was honestly my first thought, too, when a FB friend linked to the NRO piece this morning.
Yeah, I tweeted it about 30 seconds after the article went up, MFers.
(In other words, it was a seriously obvious joke.)
Yeah, I really didn’t plagiarize it; I made a really obvious joke.
I believe that making this Blues Brothers quote when it comes to any mention of Nazism is what is known as an “internet tradition”.
It is, at least, among the many of which I am aware.
They hated illinois nazis. This is Walter from the Big Lebowski.
You mean, “I hate Illinois Nazis”?
Reference Fail.
“Fuck you, Reagan. Fuck you.” OMG! Too funny!
Eliana Johnson has no frame of reference here.
I beg to differ. Rather, Eliana is out of her element. Also, the Kenyan Usurper here is not the issue here. We’re talking about unchecked ethos mischaracterization. Against this mischaracterization, you do not…
Listen, Eliana, I’m sorry if your father is a wingnut…
Dude, wingnut is not the preferred nomenclature. Teabagger, please.
+1
And let’s also not forget–let’s not
forget, Dude–that keeping wildlife,
an amphibious rodent, for uh,
domestic, you know, within the city–
that isn’t legal either.
What are you, a (government-dependent, taxpayer leaching) park ranger?
Oh, come on, Scott. They were threatening heads on sticks! Are we gonna split hairs here?
From NRO:
a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points
Has NRO considered recruiting writers who speak English? Johnson means “a platform consisting of 25 non-senseless points”.
Or “25 non-senseless points comprising a platform”.
I figure that this is one occasion where I can afford to be pedantic without anyone calling me a Grammar Nazi.
The platform was considered by everybody from Hitler down as quite unserious. Hitler argued against any demand of changes with the argument that for propaganda reasons you should stick with your talking points, everything else would just be confusing.
Hahaha!
Part of the issue with Johnson’s screed is that she lists three examples of these points to show how non-senseless they are.
The first is “unification of all Germans”, which you can read and think “Yeah, that’s a fair request”.
The second has a certain face plausibility (“land and territory for the sustenance of our people”) until you realise that it’s about annexation and ethnic cleansing…
So we come to the third example, knowing by now that Johnson picked it out because she agrees with it as well — and it’s “no Jew can be a member of the race”.
Well, to give the devil her due, that’s actually a perfectly fine use of comprise. The word means “to be made up of,” more or less. Your first alternative is a reasonable alternate rendering, but the second is actually not a viable phrase, since it suggests that the 25 points are made up of a platform.
Otherwise, yeah, that post is hella stupid.
You might think you can afford to be pedantic, but you’d be wrong, because you are wrong. The whole comprises the parts.
Wrong Again!!
You Grammar Nazi!!
There, was that good? Did it ping your nerve endings?
Oh, you’re welcome!
Senseless?!? Who’s the fucking wingnut here!!
+1
I almost never click through links like this, but it was worth it. Not only is the article precisely as described, but the comments are a torrent of white-hot disdain, including a quote from Reagan saying almost exactly the same thing.
You know who else defended Nazis?
conservatives, generally.
The ACLU in Skokie?
I was reading through the whole thread hoping not to see this joke just so I could make it!
Consider the all-important internet tradition honored.
Her brain probably kidnapped itself. It’s like Lenin says, “follow the stupid.” Young, trophy columnist; big bad black president who won’t give in to her policy preferences…
I am the walrus.
At least this one didn’t try to carve an initial on her own face. On the other hand, that would have healed up pretty quickly, and this…well, Google never forgets.
Accurately edited quote:
“[The Nazi] political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including . . . that ‘no Jew can be a member of the race.’”
haha, no NRO sixth-stringers are “random”.
Here’s her unapologetic followup, which concludes:
OK, I get it. Liberals are sandal-wearing pussies, who spend their days chanting give peace a chance and are unwilling to grapple with the realities of human violence.
On the other hand, I thought we were also all closet Leninsts, eager to use the violence of the state against our enemies. It’s so confusing.
I love the appeal to the dictionary. Always a winner.
I knew that was her point (Orig.: “The idea that all violence is “senseless” violence is one that has taken deep root on the left; it’s also, unfortunately, one that poses a major impediment to understanding the world.”) & typed as much elsewhere. You dare not impugn guns or violence of any sort in their little world, you leftist wimps & weenies.