Wednesday 17 February 2010

Glenn Beck may be dim, but his appeal proves dimmer...



Thanks to the guys at Think Progressive for this wee piece of news.

Turns out that Glenn Beck lost 103 sponsors as his UK television broadcast runs for five days straight without any ads. 

Guess the Teabaggers' champion in just another lone lune to that leaderless rabble - whose message is so repulsive that it's losing support and sponsors hand-over-fist.

Hey! Sarah! Why not spend one of your $100K+ speaking fees to help buttress this assclown?
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Monday 15 February 2010

Define Irony


Rather neatly put.



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Friday 12 February 2010

When bumper-sticker sloganeering meets rampant paranoia


Thanks to New Left Media for their endeavours in putting this package together.

In February 2010, the group Tea Party Nation organized the first Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, a for-profit event. Some 600 people paid $550 to attend, and Sarah Palin was reportedly paid $115,000 to the be the keynote speaker. After criticism of the convention's cost, for-profit status, and payment to Palin, multiple national Tea Party organizations withdrew their participation.

But the event went on.

And so did the paranoid, conspiratorial assertions--that President Obama was born in another country, that he has covered up his college transcripts, that he is pushing a communist/socialist agenda, that he is protecting terrorists and endangering our country, etc.

The organizers of the convention made great efforts to limit access to the press, and even held "new-media training" sessions to help the Tea Partiers sound and look better on camera--the more people see inside this movement, the less they like it. But we got ourselves into the event, where the right-wing, fringe sentiments were on plain display.

That said, these Tea Partiers - at least those able to pay the cost of attendance - are more affluent than those at the 9.12 DC March, and more self-conscious of how they are portrayed in the media. There were fewer signs and homemade t-shirts here, but the attitudes, if more subtle in delivery, were the same.
 


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Thursday 11 February 2010

The Republican's Deficit of Honesty



The notion that the Tea Party movement is not about fear, lies, and an aversion to change is silly. If some of them could turn back time and nail themselves to the founding fathers, they would do.

There was no Tea Party when the US went from a surplus in 2000 to a deficit in 2008 because of unfunded wars and moronic/ill-advised/misconceived (delete as appropriate) tax cuts.

Where was their so-called "fiscal responsibility" movement then? Oh... You're right. It's just a coincidence that they sprouted under Obama.


PS: mainlining memories of Ronald Reagan, or simply regurgitating the line "I'm a fiscal conservative" doesn't actually address the very real problems which the US acquired as a direct result of electing a president, Bush jnr, with the IQ of a coffee table; nor does it absolve Republicans and Teabaggers alike from their head-in-the-sand ostrich management attitude to the devastation of the Bush administration's fiscal fuckwittage.


But Mark Fiore's satire says it much more succinctly and pointedly than that - enjoy!









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Tuesday 9 February 2010

Learn to Speak Tea Bag


Given the chimps' Tea Party going on in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, here's an aide-mémoire on its vocabulary, argots, cadences and syntax (to say nothing of mindset): Mark Fiore's satirical animations are works of pleasure!



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Saturday 6 February 2010

Teabaggers' Convention Pushes 'Birther' Agenda



You could not make this shit up!

From the Tea Party Conference in Nashville today - Tea Party speaker World Net Daily's Joseph Farah said:

"Unlike Jesus, Obama has no documentation of birth"



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Two other countries Sarah Palin hasn't visited


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Before, during and after they were famous...

Thanks to Erin O'Brien for bringing this site to my attention - something here for everyone, I feel: and the one of Sean Connery is not remotely homoerotic, and you'll never think of George Clooney the same again!


Famous Peoples extremely rare photography | Beautiful World | Sex | Drawings Arts | Illusions | Amazing Facts | Sculpture

Enjoy!
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Thursday 4 February 2010

Motivational Posters - Know Your Audience



I think at some stage in our working lives, we've all been subject to these implorings of team-huggery & corporate masturbation; and of course, the preferred antidote is to lampoon them mercilessly. Enjoy.



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Wednesday 3 February 2010

Afrikaner Hick Rap - or 'Care in the Community'?


Check-out the action at 1 min 14 secs - it's not just the mullets that are in bad taste! 

To be fair, I can't see this troubling any of Simon Cowell's products...


(via @davidschneider)

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End of Days



All film reviews should be this well done!


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On this day in History...



On this day in 1959 Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens & J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed when their plane crashed in Iowa. 

Fox News suspect al-Qaeda.
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Tuesday 2 February 2010

Study: The Full Measure of Republican Neuroses




For those of you who read this blog, you'll perhaps know that two of the things I struggle with most are entrenched dogma, and certain people's inability to deal with the myriad grey areas in politics (nuance, in other words), and any corresponding, yet apparently contradictory, principles which claim to underpin those politics (bizarrely, those who claim to be 'principled', in reality, turn out to be some of the most flagrantly unprincipled people you're likely to come across) - and notably, these being two aspects for which the Right, in both the UK and US, can invariably be relied upon to display a supreme comfort.

And whilst perhaps they don't see it in those specific terms, the reason why these personal traits irritate other people is simple: unbeknownst to them, dogma, intolerance and inflexibility were created to confuse and confound their proponents and practitioners - and hence catch them in the web of their own self-donning contradictions. And, frankly, that's where the fun starts as, let's face it, if you ever get the opportunity to de-bag a blinkered-by-choice merchant, it takes a strong person not to want to go for gold!

So, imagine my feelings of manna from heaven when I was sent, via Twitter, the Guardian article, below, from an ex-pat Austrian lady who's been living and settled in the US since 1987 (thank you Irene!)

And as you'll see in just a second: there is a delicious irony here...

This study - by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers - was conducted in 2003, when president Gump Bush jnr was poste restante in the White House; so it's not like it can simply be tossed-off or dismissed in one of their rote claims of it being a 'leftist trick', or propaganda. Although, true to form, they do manage to carp about the source of funding for the research.

So, whilst no doubt a number of us have had our suspicions over the years, and schoolboy smirks aside, it's somehow reaffirming to have those suspicions confirmed once in a while; and to find that being a conservative/Republican is actually a known condition: and that condition a suitable case for treatment.

Now, one final test: when you read what follows, try and avoid picturing any of those toxic individuals in the above picture. I'll be honest: I couldn't.

Enjoy!



Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve

* Julian Borger in Washington
* The Guardian, Wednesday 13 August 2003 02.33 BST


A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic clichés and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false".

Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he insisted that the study "is not critical of conservatives at all". "The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said. "These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less loyal."

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses."


Further reading:

Psychology Today: Is Political Conservatism a Mild Form of Insanity? 


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