fresh hell

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.

Cosmic Slapstick

By in fresh hell, history, religion

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson:

Because of the limits on his funds, Bazalgette could afford to take the sewage only as far as the eastern edge of the metropolis, to a place called Barking Reach. There mighty outfall pipes disgorged 150 million gallons of raw, lumpy, potently malodorous sewage into the Thames each day. Barking was still twenty miles from the open sea, as the dismayed and unfortunate people all along those twenty miles never stopped pointing out, but the tides were vigorous enough to haul most of the discharge safely (if not always odorlessly) out to sea, and ensured that there were never again any sewage-related epidemics in London.

The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.

People have been pointing to natural disasters as proof against the existence of a loving God for centuries. What moral lesson can be drawn from mass destruction and casualties following an earthquake? What does the “free will” justification so often used to explain evil in the world have to do with fires and floods?

That kind of suffering is bad enough, but I wonder why events like this don’t get similar attention. After all, this isn’t just a case of needless death on a grand scale. It’s almost like this was designed to additionally inflict the maximum loss of dignity just for the sheer, gratuitous hell of it. But if it was designed, rather than symbolic of an uncaring universe, you’d have to conclude that God is one seriously disturbed motherfucker. Or even more terrifying, perhaps God is something like a character from a Mike Myers or Wayans brothers movie gone stark raving mad, forcing humankind to endure real-life toilet humor just to make Him giggle.

Malachi 2:3 — “Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces…”

Attention Must be Paid

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, work

I was reading yet another positive review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and wondering if anyone was ever going to point out the fucking obvious. So thank you, Evgeny Morozov:
Had Carr looked beyond the neuroscience, he may have found that many of the problems that he blames on the Internet — constant busyness, shrinking attention spans, less and less time for concentration and contemplation — are rooted in the nature of working and living under modern capitalism rather than in information technology or gadgetry per se. In fact, as Pinker correctly points outs, Carr’s are very old complaints.
Exhibit A: back in 1881 the prominent New York City physician George Beard published “American Nervousness”, a book about the sudden epidemic of “nervousness” sweeping America, which he blamed, in part on the telegraph and the daily newspaper (the book later proved a great influence on Freud).
Exhibit B: in 1891, almost 120 years before The Atlantic published Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, the same magazine ran “Journalism and Literature”, an essay by the polymath William Stillman, where he attacked the cultural change enabled by the telegraph-enabled journalism much in the same vein that Carr attacks the Internet. Stillman complained that “we develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives”.
The Internet may be amplifying each of these problems, but it surely did not cause them. When the famed sociologist Manuel Castells speaks of the “black holes of information capitalism”, there is as much emphasis on “capitalism” as there is on “information”.
If anyone ever listened to me, I’d have probably bored them to death by now as often as I go on about this, but all of our techno-gadgetry fetishes are merely a symptom of a restless mentality that sacralizes work and accomplishment. We’ve been hearing for a couple centuries that new inventions would relieve us of most of the drudge work that made our lives so punishing…and they did! The problem was, and still is, that we just invent new things to do with all the time we saved, and we expect our gadgets to let us do them all at once. No one knows how to stop and say enough is enough, and quite possibly, they instinctively fear discovering how empty they are even if they did.
The part I found most amusing in the review is that she had to download a ten-dollar program that turns your computer off for you for however long you specify. The idea being, restarting it is such a huge chore that you’ll be less likely to just aimlessly drift back online out of habit. I can’t help but think that if you’re so undisciplined that you can’t turn the computer off yourself and walk away to do other things, maybe you should take that ten bucks and go pay someone to teach you how to sit zazen. That’s been shown to rearrange neural pathways as well!

Afterbirth of a Nation

By in fresh hell, non compos mentis, race

One of the strangest things about the teabaggers I know is the way they vehemently deny holding any racist beliefs while making no effort to hide their, well, racist beliefs. I’ve heard radical right-wingers laugh at black people for being “too stupid” to get out of the way of Katrina, blame them for being the primary group responsible for taking out loans they couldn’t afford and thereby crashing the economy, and suggest that the reason Europe can afford to have such strict gun control laws is because “they don’t have a problem with the niggers like we do here.” A violent incident involving a basketball player leads to muttering about uncivilized thugs, but routine brawls in hockey don’t seem to reflect poorly on white people in general. Despite the majority of welfare recipients being white, the ones who always inspire apoplectic tirades about freeloaders and parasites are referred to with names like Shaquanda and Tyreesha (and good luck convincing a teabagger that the majority of their taxes are not going toward keeping “those people” living the high life in Section 8 housing, wining and dining on food stamps). And the only part of our “heritage” that my fellow Southerners seem interested in celebrating are the years 1861-1865. The bolder ones even argue that slavery gave blacks at least a rudimentary work ethic, not to mention Christianity.

It’s like they’ve internalized the idea that being accused of racism is a slur upon their honor, but it doesn’t seem to follow that actually being racist is a bad thing. Like I said, strange.

Shall I Compare Thee to Summer’s Eve®?

By in fresh hell, moralizing, religion, samesecks

Thou art more douchey, and more intemperate.

Now, while it’s obviously normal to feel repulsed at what a sociopath Vox Day is, I have to point out to those who have heretofore been blissfully unaware of his existence that I don’t think he has any special animus toward gays (or the “orientationally challenged”, as he calls them); the Scourge of Atheism seems to have issues with females and dusky foreigners as well. And woe betide any toddlers that happen to step between Vox and his God!
Pay attention, parents: this is what happens when the only bedtime story you let your son hear is the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
Yeesh. Are you feeling a sort of numb chill in the core of your humanity that won’t seem to thaw out after reading all that? Are you stunned as you try to contemplate how a “Christian libertarian” managed to distill the absolute worst traits of both into a uniquely poisonous brew? Are you baffled as to how the orderlies don’t notice him chewing through the straitjacket and leather restraints in order to blog? Well, let’s try to laugh through the horror, what do you say? How about a classic joke?
Q: What’s the first thing Vox Day does after sex with his wife?

I Refute Voltaire Thus

By in fresh hell, history, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, science, the madness of crowds

So, my parents have gotten into the whole “raw milk” thing, thanks to some quack doctor they went to see. Just to make sure I didn’t space out through science class all those years ago and hallucinate about the whole reason we started pasteurizing milk to begin with, I did some looking around on the Internets. This made me laugh…

Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the 20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.

…and it also reminded me of a recent righteous rant by Ed about an outbreak of pertussis in California, related to the trendy anti-vaccination movement.
See, there’s a part of me that appreciates this on some meta-level, the counterintuitive “victim of our own success” phenomenon. Science has done such a good job of freeing people from having to worry about dying from contaminated food and drink or formerly terrifying diseases that they’ve become complacent and ignorant, enough so to become contemptuous of their benefactor and deny that they ever needed its help in the first place. Of course, public policy deserves a lot of the credit as well, and it, too, has ironically helped breed a superbug of stupidity in the form of so many Joe Republicans, convinced that they never got nothin’ from no one and don’t see why they should have to pay taxes to help anybody else. Indeed, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have so many thankless, functionally retarded children.

And if you need further proof that history is not progressive but cyclical, not a steady advance of knowledge and compassion but alternating periods of high-minded cosmopolitan and knee-jerk provincial values, consider the fact that Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé The Jungle was written in 1906. What do you think the reception would be for a book like that today, 104 years later? An earnest portrayal of the hopeless plight of the working class, the corruption of unregulated business and the need for social programs, written by an unabashed !socialist!, of all things?
Progress? Age of Reason? I laugh in your face.

Athena Shrugged

By in augean stables, foolosophy, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, psychology

What does it take to be a Megan McArdle? I’m really, truly fascinated by this phenomenon. What kind of psychological contortions must you put yourself through in order to suffer this kind of humiliation on a regular basis without losing faith in your intellectual abilities?

Bear in mind, those are just examples from the last couple of weeks. She’s been getting pantsed like this for years. There’s a whole subgenre of the blogosphere devoted to razzing her. How can you possibly be exposed to that many people on a daily basis telling you in loving, annotated detail how completely full of shit you are without ever taking any of it to heart?

The Enemy of My Enemy Wants to Shove Us All Into Ovens

By in fresh hell, psychology

I’ve learned over the years that when you see someone called a “self-hating Jew”, it refers exclusively to left-wing critics of Israel like Noam Chomsky. So what do we call a Jewish woman whose ferocious hatred of Muslims (and blacks) leads her to sing the praises of an actual neo-Nazi group? I mean, I refer to Geller as “a Pez dispenser with breast implants and a shrieking harpy head”, but I can see how that isn’t quite as pithy, nor does it address the strange psychological mechanisms at work here.

Same as It Ever Was

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, the madness of crowds

Raw Story:

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent.

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: “As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?” In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn’t know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn’t know.

Bob Harris once provided a slightly more in-depth analysis of similar gobsmacking statistics, but I don’t remember enough details to track down the post. Basically, though, he showed pretty conclusively that no matter what the specific issue, 20-25% of the population can be counted on to be just insanely ignorant, even when it comes to things you thought were utterly beyond debate or misunderstanding. So take a deep breath and relax. One out of every four or five people is eye-poppingly, jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly ignorant. ‘Twas ever thus.
Update: Bob graciously raises the property value on this here blog by about a thousand percent by checking in and letting me know where I could find the post in question, and it’s even better than I remembered it! To wit:
65% couldn’t describe the basic facts about Watergate
56% think in war, the media should support the government over questioning it
48% say the news media acted responsibly during the Clinton Wars
45% characterized Watergate was “just politics”
43% attended religious services in the previous 7 days
40% believe the media was biased in favor of Bill Clinton
35% say the government should not fund stem cell research
34% think Rock and Roll has had an overall negative impact on America
33% believe a wife should “submit herself graciously” to a husband
30% say the Bible is the “actual word of God” to be taken literally
29% think people will be “more likely” to afford college for their kids in 2020
28% disapprove of labor unions on principle
28% say the government should have the right to control news reports
27% believe divorce is “morally wrong”
26% thought various disasters in 1999 might “foreshadow the wrath of God”
26% think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank their kids
24% describe themselves as interested in what celebrities think
21% told a pollster they’d never met that they had cheated in a relationship
21% say justice was served in the O.J. Simpson case
20% approve of the how the Catholic Church handles pedophilia
20% believe that the killing of civilians in Vietnam was “relatively rare”
15% were upset at Diana Spencer’s death like “someone you knew”
12% think the United States should have a British-style royal family
11% stockpiled food and water in advance of Y2K
11% think “Titanic” was the best American movie of the 20th century
11% would like “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” as their personal physician
10% would eat a rat or an insect on a “reality” TV show
10% think it’s advantageous to be a woman in American society
10% believe Oswald acted alone
10% say they are “very likely” to become rich someday
8% could not name a single TV network
8% fear they are “very likely” to be shot or badly hurt by a stranger
7% think Elvis is possibly still alive
6% say Garth Brooks is the best male singer of the 20th century
5% are ?very afraid? of thunder and lightning
5% would be “more likely” to buy food labeled as genetically modified
3% wanted to see the questions on “Millionaire” become less difficult

Everything Dies

By in buried alive, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, technology

So, we’ve recently learned that printed books and blogs are both dead. Anything else? Any more traditions or trends on their way — oh, what’s that, Wired magazine? Gasp! The web itself is dead? Goddamn! How can it— ? What the— ? I just saw it yesterday, and…*sniff*…and…oh gods, we were just talking about how we had finally gotten to a good place and there was still so much to look forward to! *Sob*

There’s just one thing…

I hereby proclaim the death of fatuous, sensationalist proclamations of death from hipsters who can’t be bothered to differentiate between hyperbole and analysis. Let the word go forth.

The Recline of Western Civilization

By in buried alive, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, writing

Richard is talking primarily about the China blogosphere, but what he says is of course applicable to blogging in general, and it reflects a similar sentiment I’ve started to see expressed with increasing frequency; namely, that blogging itself is outdated, obsolete and generally not what the cool kids are doing anymore (in the comments, his exchange with Bob Page fleshes out the theme a little more).

Twitter has obliterated what I used to use the blog for, namely sharing links and offering some commentary. And the China blogosphere is so fragmented it’s much harder to be heard above the din. The fact that I’m caught up in my own issues (I’m planning to launch my own small business soon; I’ll keep you posted) hasn’t helped make this blog more productive. But even if I were as productive as in 2003, the site would be in decline. China blogs are too many, and blogging in general is becoming increasingly antique.

I do miss the “golden age,” from 2003-2005, when I could open a thread before bedtime and wake up to 300 comments. But that required full-time posting and, at its peak, the help of three or four other bloggers all putting up copy throughout the day.

I was running down the blogroll last week, and I saw where Micah Ian Wright of the Propaganda Remix Project had stopped the site’s blog over three years ago:

C’mon… this blog is, like, dead, already
Come Join Me On FacebookI found blogging on Facebook to just be a LOT easier than using Blogger… maybe if I get super famous or something I’ll start a -real- blog, but if you’re just a friend or a fan (or an enemy) looking to touch base, Facebook is the site where you’ll find me.

My first thought was, what the fuck does “easier” have to do with it? Where does “effort” enter into this format at all? You mean I have to save a totally different bookmark for Blogger? And then I have to log in and everything, even if I let my browser save my ID and password? OH GODS THE PAIN MY CLICKY FINGER CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Seriously, I remember way back in the mist-enshrouded days of, oh, just under a decade ago when a couple friends and I were talking about building a blog/website from scratch, and what a godsend it seemed like by comparison to go to Blogspot with a name in mind, get a URL, choose a template, and start blogging five minutes later. I can understand people simply preferring Facebook for whatever reason, but it seems insanely spoiled and lazy to act as if it’s too much trouble for people to come to a blog to read your thoughts as opposed to a Facebook wall, just like it flabbergasts me to see how people act as if emailing is a laborious chore when you could just be texting instead. If only we could have electrodes implanted in our brains that would process and distribute our thoughts for us so we didn’t have to go to the excruciating effort of typing them by hand…!

Like I was just saying about the prophesying of the printed book’s extinction, I think we’ve always been infatuated with portentously declaring the death of traditions and trends, when often all we mean is that they don’t have their glitzy novelty anymore. I can understand why people would say that about blogs, but to be honest, I rarely find the mega-blogs worth reading anyway, so I really don’t care if they start to suffer precipitous drop-offs in traffic and commentary (comments at huge political blogs are comparable to YouTube for sheer inanity) as users flock to newer social media. They tend to be lowest-common-denominator sinkholes who only link to other members of the blogosphere’s upper-class, so good riddance in any event. (Though if someone like Atrios started posting exclusively on Twitter, would it even make a difference in his writing style?)

At any rate, it greatly amuses me to think that I could already be some sort of dinosaur by preferring to stick to blogging and email for communication. A digital Luddite. But I prefer a small audience anyway, which is why I make zero effort to promote this space. Aside from the apparent correlation between number of commenters and lack of intelligent discussion, I like being able to actually talk back and forth with those who do comment; I wouldn’t want to have to take a removed role of regulating trolls and refereeing fights. And I imagine I can’t be the only one who prefers a format that allows us to attempt to make Proust look like a haiku poet with our witless ramblings. Hasn’t anyone considered what will become of all the windbags if no one reads blogs anymore? We’ll be right back to bothering you in person again, that’s what.

Let the majority move on to twatting and friending each other silly. Those of us who remain can possibly settle down to making blogging into something more artistic and substantial, free of trendy, superficial attention.

My Shame, Let Me Show You It

By in augean stables, fresh hell, spiritual-not-religious

Separating from the TM movement in the 1980s, physician Deepak Chopra began promoting a mixture of Eastern and Western self-help healing philosophies that has come to be called “quantum healing.” The notion is that we can make our own reality, solve all our problems, and heal all our ills by just thinking about them. In recent years, this idea was picked up (and treated as newly discovered) in two highly successful films, What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret. In all cases, the proponents claim quantum mechanics shows that human thought can change reality by an act of will.

One of my oldest friends is my massage therapist, someone I’ve seen more or less regularly for a decade now. Naturally, there’s lots of time for conversation in an hour-long session, so we’ve talked about anything and everything over the years. Frequently, I’d bring along a book or DVD I’d referenced in an earlier discussion to let her borrow. Probably a quarter of the music on her computer came from me to begin with. Lots of sharing. You get the picture.
So, one day, she said it wasn’t fair that I kept giving her all this cool stuff and she didn’t have much to share with me. But she wanted to reciprocate. She lent me a DVD. Can you guess what it was? Yes. What the Bleep Do We Know?
Not only did I force myself to sit through the whole thing, I managed to choke out my thanks and claim to have enjoyed it. I mean, what was I supposed to do? This was the first thing she’d lent me! How harsh would that have been, after she’d been so happy with all the things I’d introduced her to, to launch into a critique about what a bunch of New Age drivel it was? Maybe someone with better people-skills than me could have done it, but I just chose to cold-cock my intellectual principles, wrestle them into a storage closet, and lean against the door, whistling nonchalantly as they pounded and kicked and hollered all sorts of hair-raising retaliatory threats against me.
You see what I do for my friends. So cut me some slack the next time you think I’m being too unforgiving of human foibles here. I still have this stuck in my craw all these years later!

The Cut of Her Gibberish

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, language, waiting for the barbarians

Los ticka toe rest. Might like a sender doe ree. Your make a doll a ray day sender bright like a penalty.
Exitease my ray day member half lost a beat away. Purst in like a one way sender war give a heart like a fay.
Cuz I can ford a red eed a only street a wide a ree land. Die-mond make a mid-evil bike a sake a like a ree caste. Cuz I can ford a red eed a only street a wide a ree land. On a ree land. Find a ree land.
You sink a my swan. Rolly a get a worst in. Maybe minus way far central poor forty duck a pin.
Milk maid dud bean. Master a load a head. Pill pop a dope a well run general hash pump a gonna led.
– Melvins, “Hooch“
Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne once explained his lyrical philosophy thus: it’s hard to play guitar and concentrate on singing at the same time. It’s much easier to just open your mouth and let the, uh, “words” flow, all stream-of-consciousness-like. Besides, he said, fans will get what he means just by the way he sings it. The voice becomes just another instrument, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So, anyway, I was just sitting around the other day, when I abruptly felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of English teachers had suddenly cried out in terror and anguish. I feared something terrible had happened. So I says to myself, I says, “Self? Did Sarah Palin just say something incredibly stupid again?”
Why, yes. Yes, she did.
So, it appears that Refute was cruising merrily down the weed-choked dirt road of Sarah’s mind, hands at ten and two o’clock, music at a sensible volume, on its way to a job interview, when suddenly, Repudiate comes barreling down the old washboard side road, checking its makeup in the visor mirror and texting while trying not to drop that awesome BK® Quad Stacker on the floor, and by the time it notices the sign, there’s no way to come to a full stop with all that gravel on the road. You can imagine the rest.
Whereupon Sarah, never being one to let fresh flatmeat go to waste (it’s like huntin’ without having to use up any precious bullets!), scurries over with her handy Roadkill Removal kit to stake her claim. Now, after a trip to the taxidermist, she’s parading around, brandishing the trophy like Trig at a campaign stop, proud of what she’s done.
An actual new word would be one thing. Even a portmanteau could be clever, a way to define a nuance that had previously been ignored. But nobody ever saw any shades of grey between “refute” and “repudiate” that needed addressing. Even if you wanted to be generous and chalk it up as a typo, the P and the F are too far apart on the keyboard for that to be plausible. (And what did adding the prefix “mis-” to “underestimate” accomplish anyway? Wouldn’t the “mis-” cancel out the “under” in that particular instance?)
Psst, Lewis Lapham: the wait is over. You were looking on the wrong side of the gate. They were inside all along.

Don’t Give Me That Do-Goody Good Bullshit

By in fresh hell, the wire, work

We follow the same rules in our family, and one of them is: Always stop to buy lemonade from kids who are entrepreneurial enough to open up a little business.
My brother immediately pulled over to the side of the road and asked about the choices.
The three young girls — under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them — explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.
Then my brother asked how much each item cost.
“Oh, no,” they replied in unison, “they’re all free!”
I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: “But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I’m really thirsty!”
His fiancee smiled and commented, “Isn’t that cute. They have the spirit of giving.”
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things — the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
I hope no one ever clues this woman in to what goes on in kindergartens across the country. All that propaganda about sharing and cooperation, when what they really need is a Lord of the Flies-style environment to separate the producers from the parasites!
As the urban philosopher Omar Little once said, “Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.” Fucksakes, man, whatever happened to the idea of noblesse oblige? Carnegie and Rockefeller would probably look like bleeding hearts to a Randroid cultist like this, what with all that philanthropy they engaged in.
Anyway, Mrs. LifeoftheParty mentioned earlier that they were riding through her brother’s “upscale neighborhood” when they encountered this Marxist outpost. Later, she says:

Or maybe it’s the other way around: The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there’s no free lunch — and all they see is “free,” not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

I agree! Rich kids probably have learned from the “society around them”; namely, that you can take all the risks you want with other people’s money while creating nothing of value and still demand exorbitant rewards while standing in the smoldering wreckage you leave for other people to clean up. Private profit, public subsidy. But somehow I suspect that’s not what our Galtian heroine meant by that…
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