Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

America’s Shiniest Objects

By in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake

I swear by the shit-encrusted Birkenstocks of Christ, how many fucking hostages do I have to take to get the idiots of the progressive blogosphere (but I repeat myself) to drop their “all Palin, all the time” fixation? With only limited time online yesterday, I skimmed through the usual sites, and I must have seen five or six in a row all talking about whatever stupid thing she and her offspring said or did this time. Look, morons — she’s not going to hold office again. If she even bothers running for president, it’ll be purely to boost her Q score, get more eyeballs on whatever reality show she’s on at that time, or move more copies of her latest pop-up/coloring book. Otherwise, she’s perfectly content to keep milking her Oprah-meets-Larry the Cable Guy shtick for as long as people are willing to, ahem, pay attention to it. So by all means, keep doing your part. Yes, yes, she says lots of stupid things! And other idiots like to hoot and holler and clap when she does it! (And yet more idiots like to gawk and rubberneck at the whole spectacle!) How is this still fascinating to anyone?

Aren’t these the same people who complain endlessly about the vapidity of cable news and the endless trivialities it focuses on?

The Adam of Blogging

By in books, foolosophy, montaigne, writing

Nietzsche was very fond of him. Alain de Botton devoted an interesting chapter of The Consolations of Philosophy to him. I’ve had the Essays in the stack of books to read for a while now. And Sarah Bakewell has written what looks to be an interesting book about him:

These days, the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris. And it flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before.
Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago. Montaigne, in turn, might not have expected to be remembered so long, least of all in the English language—yet he always believed that such understanding between remote eras and cultures was possible. “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition,” he said. We are united in the very fact of our diversity, and “this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.” His book is such a world, and when we look into it there is no end to the strangeness and familiarity we might see.

For the Sake of Argument

By in atheism, foolosophy, nietzsche

Andrew Anthony:

Nonetheless, Hitchens mentions a “narrow but quite deep difference” between himself and Dawkins. Unlike the evangelical biologist, he has no wish to convert everyone in the world to his point of view, even if it were possible. In other words, he savours the counterargument. Like John Stuart Mill, he is aware of the empty end of achieved objectives. The true satisfaction lies in the means. Although Hitchens is often seen as a provocateur or a contrarian, and both are indeed aspects of his character, at heart he’s incurably in love with the dialectic.

Right on. Let me quote this Nietzschean aphorism again:

Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth – otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.

I Take Pride as the King of Illiterature

By in fresh hell, writing

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
…I don’t need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.
I haven’t been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don’t know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there’s Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I’ve taken hundreds of crash courses this way.
After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.
It’s like the job I’ve been training for my entire blogging career!

A Study In Contrasts

By in jests japes jokes jollies, world football

I just thought it was so funny to see both these stories on the same day.

Xavi:

When asked about his own possibilities of winning the Ballon d’Or, Xavi told FIFA’s official website: “I’ll repeat what I’ve been telling everybody: I hope that a Spanish player wins it and if not, I hope it goes to my friend Leo Messi.
“He’s indisputably the best player in the world, and he’s going to win the Ballon d’Or several more times. But in World Cup years the tournament is a big factor, and Andres (Iniesta) and I won it, while La Albiceleste didn’t hit the heights expected of them.”
…Xavi, meanwhile, also admitted he might not be as effective in a team like Real Madrid as he is for Barca and Spain.
“Let me say one thing: I depend on my team-mates. My football and my passing would be worthless without my team’s help. That’s something which is very clear to me,” he said.
“Sometimes I start thinking and I look at Madrid for example, who have truly great players, but I’d struggle with them. They play through the middle and I need players who open the play down the flanks, who make diagonal runs, who leave space for me in the centre and who never stop moving.”
The strike marked Nani’s seventh of the season and fourth in four matches, and the controversy sparked by the goal has not deterred the 23-year-old from singing his own praises.
“As a player, I think I’m close to being as complete as I can be,” said Nani. “Now I can say I’m one of the top players in the world.
“I play for the best club in the world and my role in the team is as a decisive player, scoring goals or setting up and so the team can win.”
So, to recap: Xavi, one of the indisputably greatest midfield generals in the world, the architect of Spain’s World Cup victory this past summer, gets nominated for an annual award given to recognize the most outstanding individual achievement in world football, and spends his time praising a club teammate who he feels is more deserving of it, before going on to stress how he’s only as good as the rest of his team and the system they play with. Nani, an undeniably talented player who has yet to achieve a starring leadership role at Manchester United or at the perennially underachieving Portugal, though one who is known as a top rival to his fellow Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo when it comes to cynical diving and theatrical playacting, scores a cheap goal in a recent game thanks to a referee’s blatant error and goes on to proclaim himself one of the top players in the world. You just gotta laugh.

I Don’t Really Care What Gentlemen Prefer

By in fresh hell, germans supported their troops too, jests japes jokes jollies, waiting for the barbarians

Inside every Swedish-Australian supervillain is an American trying to get out, apparently:

“I disagree with what he did. I think it’s un-American,” said McCain, acknowledging that Assange is not an American. (She went on, however, to characterize Assange inaccurately as a “creepy rogue Swedish guy”– Assange is from Australia but had applied for and was denied residency in Sweden, where he was accused of sexually assaulting two women.) “He looks like a James Bond villain. He harbors a lot of ill will toward America. To me he’s a villain.”

A creepy rogue Swedish guy! She’s brilliant, isn’t she? (I wonder if she has this map on her wall?)
I totally love the blithe assumption that people who are not American citizens, people whose, uh, rational self-interest (which I thought conservatives approved of) might lead them to stand for ideas and policies that do not necessarily dovetail with ours, are nonetheless obligated to take orders from us or be accused of un-American activities. Isn’t there some special House committee we could haul him in front of?

Mecagum Deu

By in atheism, religion

Even now, a decade later, you hardly have to expend any effort to find yet another right-wing blog trumpeting the perils of impending dhimmitude, warning us all to wake up and take appropriate measures BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Even now, you still have people shrieking in fear over anything even vaguely crescent-shaped, and you can marvel at the spectacle of godforsaken states feeling the need to ban the nonexistent threat of sharia law.

So, then, to revisit a point I made recently, I really have to wonder why our Islamophobic patriots don’t spend more time focusing on one of the things that truly makes America worthy of all the praise we can muster: the fact that we’re free to blaspheme our sacrilegious asses off.
Actually, wait — no. No, I don’t wonder about that at all.
(Image via.)

It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine

By in environment, extraordinary popular delusions, waiting for the barbarians

I still impatiently roll my eyes at Joe Bageant’s overgeneralized prose and romantic fancies, but I do agree with him and his Italian acquaintance here:

“What do you believe allowed such abuse and calamity?” I ask.

An intense young woman leans across the table, all black hair and red lips, making an old man moan and sigh inwardly.

“Fossil fuels, of course,” she says. “An unnatural supply of energy. But once that is gone, we’re going to have to go back to a whole different way of doing everything. Everything.”

“Spot on,” I agree. At that moment she could have gotten me to agree that the earth is flat.

But the truth is that each gallon of fossil fuel contains the energy of 40 man-hours. And that has played hell with the ecology of human work, thanks mostly to the money economy. For instance, a simple loaf of bread, starting with the fossil fuels used to grow the wheat, transport, mill, bake, create the packaging materials and packaging, advertise and distribute it, uses the energy of two men working for two weeks. Yet this waste and vast inefficiency is invisible to us because we see it only in terms of money, jobs and commerce. Cheap oil allowed industrial humans to increasingly live on environmental credit for over a century. Now the bill is due and no amount of money can pay it. The calorie, pure heat expenditure as energy, is the only currency in which Mother Nature trades. Period.

…If there can be a solution at this late stage, and most thinking people seriously doubt there can be a “solution” in the way we have always thought of solutions, it begins with powering down everything we consider to be the economy and our survival. That and population reduction, which nobody wants to discuss in actionable terms.

Almost all other issues pale in significance when you stop to think about it — what are we going to do when we exhaust our cheap energy supplies? It’s not as if we can just make an even trade of solar, wind, and hydroelectric power for oil, coal and gas, especially if there’s somewhere around nine or ten billion people on Earth within the next century.

The difference is, unlike so many others, I don’t gleefully anticipate the end of our fossil-fueled civilization, as if we’re going to “return” to an authentic way of life that was stolen from us, and we’re all going to sit around in leisure, having stimulating, philosophical conversations with ideal friends and lovers. One of the things I came away with after reading Bill Bryson’s latest book was a strong sense of just how uncomfortable and dreary a lot of human existence was before the last century or so. It’s something we all know, of course, but it was brought home to me really vividly in this case. I daresay a large percentage of people who pine for a pre-industrial way of life are allowing their familiarity to breed contempt — it’s easy to romanticize a simple life in “harmony with nature” when you know full well you can always go back to hot showers, soft beds and comfortable clothes whenever you feel like it.

I would never minimize the miseries of industrialism or its environmental consequences, but at the same time, I can’t help the urge to walk widdershins around what often strikes me as the smug moralizing and vindictive delight accompanying proclamations of environmental reckoning, the epicaricacy in the visions of humanity finally paying a steep price for its hubris. True, we may have catastrophically overreached, but some part of me takes an insolent pride in being part of a species that was even capable of doing so. There is no moral lesson to all this. Virtue will not save us either. We might return to a sustainable way of life for thousands of years, only to be wiped out by a convergence of disease, famine and a gigantic asteroid. Given that, I’m glad I was alive during the short window in time that may turn out to be the pinnacle of human existence.

Mentis Fugit

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation, science

io9:

People spend 46.9% of their waking lives thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing. It’s a terribly inefficient use of one’s mind and, worse, it actually seems to make people unhappy.

Letting your mind wander might seem like a bad thing, but really it’s just the natural byproduct of being capable of abstract thought. Humans are capable of thinking about things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that may never happen at all. (As a science fiction blog, we rather encourage doing that last part.) Sure, letting your mind wander is a good recipe for goofing off, but it’s also a necessary part of contemplation and reflection.

I’ve quoted this from Auden several times before, but it just sums it up so perfectly:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,

We anticipate or remember but never are.

But yeah, I think there’s maybe a little more nuance to this. As many have said, especially Buddhists, the future and the past are mere abstractions. We only actually exist in “now”. Alan Watts used the image of a ship’s prow to symbolize this — we only ever exist right there, at the prow, as it cuts through the water, and the past flows behind us in our wake.

If you spend every present moment wishing you were somewhere else, you’re going to feel perpetually dissatisfied, since the pleasures you’re so eagerly anticipating will seem boring once they become actualized, and you’ll already be looking forward to the next one. It’ll never feel like you’ve actually experienced anything fully. You’ve become attached to the wanting, not the having.

But on the other hand, meditation is, in many ways, a form of purposely letting your mind wander, tiring itself out. Personally, I do my meditating while listening to music, and I find it revitalizing, not distracting. It’s like a mental equivalent of a good workout. Sometimes I do it while performing simple tasks that don’t require my undivided attention, like washing dishes or cutting grass, and it seems to me that somehow, the repetitive physical activity keeps me grounded, even though my mind may be on various other things. I’m not sure how to explain that exactly.

Workin’ for the Man Every Night and Day

By in work, writing

“My blog, my blog, why hast thou forsaken me?” Don’t worry, loyal minions, I haven’t. I’ve just been on the road more than usual, working like a pack mule. Plus, I just haven’t seen much inspiring enough to write about when I do have time to make the rounds.

I gotta tell you, I start jonesing to sit down and write after just a short absence. I feel listless and mentally lethargic if I go more than a couple days without at least being able to make a post out of a bad pun. I really do enjoy this here blogging thing. Funny, considering that I never wrote much at all before starting this.
Anyway, with any luck, the Internet will be full of stimulating stuff tomorrow.

Half Baked

By in crime and punishment, drugs, ohferfucksake

Josh Marshall:

More generally though, I just don’t know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it’s that I’m getting into my 40s. And maybe I’m a hypocrite. I of course know people who smoke grass. And I don’t have any problem with it. Decriminalized? Yes, I think probably so. But that’s not the same as legalization. It’s very different actually. And let me be clear that I think our drug laws are catastrophic. They create endemic violence first in our major cities and now along the borders and it’s led to generations of Americans rotting in prison. The whole war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster. And the fact that people can’t use marijuana for clear medical reasons is crazy. But do I think it should be like alcohol? Anyone over 18 or 21 can buy it?

What timing! He says this during the same week that this story came out.
Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.
Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the deadliest. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Marijuana, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower.
Anyway, back to Pops and his incoherent rambling:
I remember, many years ago, talking to my father about the idea of legalization. And bear in mind, my Dad, God bless him, smoked a decent amount of grass in his day, said he didn’t like the idea. One reason is that he was already a bit older by that time. But he had this very contradictory and hard to rationalize position which was that he was fine with people smoking pot but keeping it at least nominally illegal kept public usage in some check. Again, how to rationalize that in traditional civic terms? Not really sure. But frankly, I think I kind of agree.
For what it’s worth, of course I’ve smoked pot. But for purely personal reasons I haven’t in more than twenty years.
Good for me, but not for thee. It’s fine for middle-class white guys to use while they’re young, as long as they’re discreet about it. After all, if they get busted for it, the worst that’s likely to happen is a fine, or maybe some probation. As for everyone else, well…
Maybe Josh should just stick to the old “Why do you think they call it dope?” gambit — see, kids? Smoking pot will make you stupid!

Your Neighbor as Yourself

By in foolosophy, philosophy, religion

It seems to me that a Buddhist perspective on identity would help resolve a lot of the apparent conflicts Judith Lichtenberg discusses here:
Still, doubting altruism is easy, even when it seems at first glance to be apparent. It’s undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return — at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled. Students in introductory philosophy courses torture their professors with this reasoning. And its logic can seem inexorable.
The defect of reciprocal altruism is clear. If a person acts to benefit another in the expectation that the favor will be returned, the natural response is: “That’s not altruism!” Pure altruism, we think, requires a person to sacrifice for another without consideration of personal gain. Doing good for another person because something’s in it for the do-er is the very opposite of what we have in mind.
A question: Why? Another one: Sez who? An acerbic response: Maybe the desire for purity is the entire problem here.
No, seriously — why is it a problem to consider that there’s always at least a subtle amount of self-interest factoring in to every decision we make? How does that somehow taint the beneficent effects of our actions? I mean, if I were a pure egoist, I would absolutely love for everyone around me to have been thoroughly inculcated with the idea that they should act to please and benefit others with no thought of reciprocation. If I wanted to create a docile group of pushovers, doormats and slaves, I think I’d find it quite useful to preach the virtues of extreme humility. There can indeed be too much of a good thing (as she admits later on, to be fair).

The point is rather that the kind of altruism we ought to encourage, and probably the only kind with staying power, is satisfying to those who practice it. Studies of rescuers show that they don’t believe their behavior is extraordinary; they feel they must do what they do, because it’s just part of who they are. The same holds for more common, less newsworthy acts — working in soup kitchens, taking pets to people in nursing homes, helping strangers find their way, being neighborly. People who act in these ways believe that they ought to help others, but they also want to help, because doing so affirms who they are and want to be and the kind of world they want to exist. As Prof. Neera Badhwar has argued, their identity is tied up with their values, thus tying self-interest and altruism together.

But phrasing it like that – “I want to help others because it’s part of who I am, and it’s the sort of world I want to live in where my values are embodied” – seems to reinforce the same “empty, unfalsifiable” egoism she wants to undermine, funny enough. To bring it back around to what I said to begin, perhaps a better way to encourage the healthy variety of altruism would be to focus on the lack of any essential separation between self and other. From that perspective, there is no more “I” or “you”, only right action.

Everybody’s Someone Else’s Nigger

By in fresh hell, language, race, tribalism

You know, when taking the moral high ground against expressions of racial or cultural stereotyping, one would probably find oneself on more firm footing, wouldn’t one, if one could refrain from using terms like lawn jockey and house nigger liberal to refer to a black man who has the temerity to hold political opinions different from the ones white liberals have deemed appropriate for him to hold in accordance with the voting bloc they’ve assigned him to. As the yutes of today like to put it, I’m just sayin’. And let me hasten to add that I’m not calling anyone a racist or bigot here; I prefer the phrase “people of colorful language”.

But then again, I’m not a formally trained logician or rhetorician, so it’s entirely possible that some linguistic alchemist has found a way to combine irony with tu quoque reasoning to form a sort of weaponized super-snark that’s beyond my comprehension.

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me

By in books, foolosophy, so many books, so little time

“I cannot live without books.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Despite having recently resolved to no longer recognize such cultural constructs as the heliocentric “calendar”, “linear time”, European “numerals” and the Hindu-Arabic “numeration system”, or “denial of impending middle age”, it nonetheless came to pass that sometime over the last week or so, I successfully completed yet another 365¼-day course of maintaining an uninterrupted heartbeat while managing to draw breath at more or less consistent intervals, a feat which our culture deems worthy of celebration and reward. That, in addition to a recent trip to the Green Valley Book Fair, has directly led to the accumulation of goods you see above. That is the current “To Read” stack, possibly a Sisyphean task, but one I accept with cheerful aplomb.
“Book addict.” “No-life-having loser.” “NERRRRRD!” These and other terms are sometimes thoughtlessly bandied about in response to such treasure hoards. But I look at it differently: this gives me something to live for when times get rough!
And in addition to the Socrates book I mentioned recently, I see another addition to the stack coming next spring. Bring it on, I say, bring it on.

As You Like It

By in gender, ohferfucksake, samesecks

I have to admit to getting just a bit verklempt while reading this:
Then as we got closer to the actual day, he stared to hem and haw about it. After some discussion it comes out that he is afraid people will laugh at him. I pointed out that some people will because it is a cute and clever costume. He insists their laughter would be of the ‘making fun’ kind. I blow it off. Seriously, who would make fun of a child in costume?
…If you think that me allowing my son to be a female character for Halloween is somehow going to ‘make’ him gay then you are an idiot. Firstly, what a ridiculous concept. Secondly, if my son is gay, OK. I will love him no less. Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.
…I hate that my son had to learn this lesson while standing in front of allegedly Christian women. I hate that those women thought those thoughts, and worse felt comfortable saying them out loud. I hate that ‘pink’ is still called a girl color and that my baby has to be so brave if he wants to be Daphne for Halloween.
I had totally forgotten about it, but this reminded me that my mom still has pictures somewhere of me dressing up in some of her clothes when I was probably four or five — hats, wigs, jewelery, coats, shawls, heels, you name it. I painted my nails more than a few times, and I used to play around with the rest of her makeup too. You know why? Because it was fun. Men’s and boy’s clothes are frequently just boring as hell. Nowadays I’m too lazy to dress for anything but comfort, but I can still harbor an sneaking admiration for dandyism, foppishness and general sartorial creativity.
Anyway, I’m grateful that I was never made to feel like there was anything wrong with it, even when I went through my gender-bending rock musician phase in my teens. Thanks, mom.

The Man Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

By in fresh hell, race, waiting for the barbarians

So, Barack Obama was in the general vicinity last week. Being in such close proximity to Evil Incarnate stirred many of my fellows and relations to rhapsodize ’bout revolution. The topic du jour was assassination. “Why weren’t you there with your hunting rifle, man?” “Shit, I thought you were gonna take care of it!” “Hey, what do Dallas, Memphis and Charlottesville all have in common? Change you can believe in! Haw haw!”

(Don’t let the reference to Memphis fool you. This has nothing whatsoever to do with race, you know. It’s just legitimate anger over taxes and bailouts, that’s all.)
In and of itself, this doesn’t bother me overmuch. I’m all for showing contempt for politicians as a general rule, and empty braggadocio from yahoos about gettin’ all Patrick Henry wit’ it up in this bitch rah cheer is just that. Still, I’ve been listening to this shit all my adult life. It’s wearying to go day after day, listening to idiots turn petty disagreements over policy, or plus-or-minus three percentage points in marginal tax rates into staging grounds for apoca-fucking-lyptic, arma-goddamn-geddon, good vs. evil, winner-take-all fights to the death. It just never fucking ends. The perpetual outrage machine never sleeps. I’m so goddamned sick of being around people who turn absolutely everything into a political argument, who treat politics as a blood sport.
Which is why, even though I can’t disagree with much of anything Chris Hedges says here, I find myself unable to feel too angry at Jon Stewart. Of course, many people, including myself on occasion, have criticized him for his false equivalencies. In general, it is intensely annoying when people always look to split the difference in an argument, regardless of the actual merits of either side, by assuming that both parties must be equally wrong. But then again, Stewart has never claimed to be anything other than a centrist. Much of the criticism of the Rally to Restore Sanity over the last few days has been tinged with a sense of betrayal, as if he owed it to us to single out the right wing for more criticism, as if he and Colbert should have revealed themselves to be the reincarnations of Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood. But finding fault with both sides is pretty much the definition of a centrist; if he came out staunchly in favor of the left, well, I guess he’d be a leftist. But he’s not, so I don’t see any point in criticizing him for that. And as a rule, court jesters probably don’t make good kings, so I’m not sure why people act like they want him to step up and lead us anyway.
And even given the limitations of working within the conventional wisdom, he still manages to do a fair job of presenting perspectives that the serious media doesn’t touch. A couple years ago, his show was more critical of Israel’s aggression than you are likely to ever see anywhere else in American media, and then he pissed a lot of the fanatically pro-Israel people off by interviewing Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer together, which isn’t trivial either.
So I guess I just tend to see the glass as half-full when it comes to Stewart. I’m pleasantly surprised at how well he does with his material, despite not being all that radical. And while it seems absurd to any objective onlooker to portray the emaciated, feeble, withered excuse for an American left as anything akin to the radical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, let alone the mirror image of the teabaggers, I don’t mind being used as a rhetorical foil if his words make people like my acquaintances stop, take a deep breath, and calm the fuck down.
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