Sarah Palin’s favorable ratings among Republican voters: 91%. This despite the fact that some high school glee club rejects on McCain’s staff are taking out their rage at losing the election by blaming it on her. I hope they get good jobs in the Obama administration. For example, his kids’ new puppy will need someone to clean up after it. (Via Jim Treacher.)
Update: added a link.
And here we go; the Anchoress is called a “mean fake nun,” Mark Hemingway’s measured response to the From 52 to 48 website is called “howling for blood,” and so on. Go ahead and check all the links alicublog uses as examples of the right’s intransigence, and tell yourself this is the way gracious winners behave. I can see the future, and it’s headlined “48% of Americans still racist.”
There’s been some talk back and forth on how to properly respond to being in the opposition once more. Some want us to be “dignified” — as in, don’t fight dirty like the Bush-haters, it will only make us look as bad as them, etc. Others are saying hells no, after the way we’ve been treated for eight years they deserve to get it back in spades. What I say is: no matter what you do, remember that we don’t need to use the other side’s rhetorical sticks and stones — we’re the ones who have the intelligence to know how to use stilettos and rapiers. And we have this in our favor as well: we have the truth. All the left has is lies.
You know, I’m not sure what I feel about this. My natural tendency is to say “Ew, get away!” My more civilized tendencies (I haven’t removed all the implants yet) want me to say “Aww, that’s sweet.” I suppose it would all depend on just how many of these people didn’t spend the past eight years calling people like me racist fascist babykilling warmongers. And as that’s something I’ll probably never know…
(Via Jim Treacher’s comments.)
Okay, one more political post for the night, and then I have to do things like eat and, uh… write, that’s it. Anyway, I’ve been reading some conservative Canadian and British blogs and columnists on the election, and they all seem to share one attitude in common — shock at the way the American voting public seemed to turn 180 degrees to the left. But I’m here to tell everyone now that the problem isn’t some sort of sudden brainwashing syndrome. The fact is that the problem with my country isn’t that it’s suddenly fallen to some sort of delusion, it’s that for at least the past twenty-five years if not longer, around half of the population has been delusional to a greater or lesser degree. Yes, some elections had a bigger majority than others on one side or the other, but in this one at least the division was almost even between the two candidates. Unfortunately the wobbly center is what splits the halves, and this time it wobbled towards Obama — probably because the wobbly center consists of people whose primary desire is to be “nice.” Obama’s campaign could be boiled down to “if you don’t vote for me you’re not nice” even more so than “you’re racist.” I’ll bet a significant number of Obama voters just wanted the whiners to shut up, and also thought McCain was a cranky old man even though his crankiness seemed quite absent this campaign. In fact, he’s been and is still being accused of being too… nice.
So the problem is long-standing (half a population of enablers and victims is half too much) and right now insurmountable, because the only way to break people of life-long bad habits is to force them to face the truth, and that’s not very nice. (By the way, the older usage of “nice” included meanings such as overly-fussy and delicate, as well as discerning. Now we mean it to mean “amiable,” “bland,” “non-trouble-causing.”)
I forgot to add — the problem is also the other side of the coin; people who aren’t “nice” enough. What I mean by that is not only are they needlessly rude and angry, they lack discernment. Many of these people either didn’t vote or voted for one of the third-party candidates out of some misplaced sense of pique — the most common reason I came across was that neither candidate was perfect. Third-party voters are probably worse than the stay-at-homes, because they know that their choice won’t mean anything except that they’ve taken a vote away from the Imperfect Ones, stuck it to the Man, whatever. I think in a situation like this past election such an action is irresponsible. There hasn’t been a third-party candidate with any sort of pull since Ross Perot, and we know how that turned out.
And yes, someday when I have extra cash I’m going to buy this book. Of course, right now I have several sacks of books I’m trying to get rid of, not to mention several e-books and two library books to read.
Update: Iowahawk sticks the knife in so nicely that you don’t even feel it until everything starts to go dark and fuzzy.
The thing about the internet is you find stuff out that you wouldn’t have in the days before global communication. For instance, this Finnish documentary on Obama supporters caught one bullying a McCain-supporting student in her class. Now, in the pre-internet days this might have made a stir in the local area where it was filmed, and in Finland and wherever else the documentary was shown (which I doubt would have made the network broadcasts), but it would have disappeared into the general larger life of the world. This is why I’ll bet that after they get the radio waves wrapped up tight the new administration’s enforcers of all that is Good and Fair will try to go after the internet next. However, the internet isn’t structured like radio, and they might find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew… (Via Ace and Ace’s comments.)
On a related note, even though I have never wanted to teach I am enough of a teacher’s daughter that, after watching this comedy routine, instead of just laughing I found myself thinking: “You know, he lost control of the situation. Instead of zapping her with the sonic screwdriver he should have realized that she was a lot smarter than she acted and cleverly drawn her out of her defiant pose. That’s what a good teacher would have done.”
I mentioned a few days ago that I was going to work on a novel. I haven’t really started yet, but I think I have the vaguest of story outlines. It’s going to be a sort of fantasy/science fiction thing. The main character is a guy who has ended up living as a somewhat eccentric loner after three attempts at relationships ended very badly. I will then insert the common plot device of other characters breaking into his personal world, and then things go haywire as he finds out that 1) he isn’t from Earth, but another world in a galaxy far, far away, 2) he goes back — somehow, haven’t worked out how yet — to what he thinks is his home world, and 3) since there were very good reasons his parents fled to an isolated planet that knew nothing about the existence of other worlds, hijinks ensue, though not very amusing ones. In fact, he gets himself and his friends into an assload of trouble and the novel will be how he tries to get himself and his friends out if it though not without much pain and suffering. It sounds stupid and boring outlined like that — I’m hoping that the finished work is more interesting.
I don’t even have named for any of the characters yet. Well that’s what the internet is for — lots of “baby names” websites to waste my time on instead of writing look up character names. The tentative plot came about from me thinking about the standard fantasy “prince in exile returns home” story and how it might be played a bit with to be something other than the standard sparkly unicorns, dragons, and wizards tale. Or the scifi version — the shiny starships and planets stuff. I’m not going to go all deconstructionist, though. I like sympathetic characters and happy endings, or at least happyish endings. The environment I’m conceiving is kind of “crapsack world,” but not to excess. One thing I liked about Star Wars when it the first movie came out was the way Lucas conceived of a science fiction setting that actually looked as if people lived in it — especially in the bar scene and the other scenes on Tatooine. (The later movies seemed to mostly drop this, unfortunately, in favor of flashy special effects and big speeches.) For example, instead of “space clothes” (i.e., goofy uniform-looking things and jumpsuits on everyone — I guess no one will have to piss or shit in the future) characters got to wear clothes that looked like stuff real people would wear.
I may post excerpts here from time to time.
As much as I love Washington DC as a place to visit and soak up some history and good food, there’s nothing much about that town I’d miss if a meteor hit it. At the very least, it would be a great opportunity to move the capitol to someplace more… sane.
(Via Ace of Spades in the comments.)
Via Hyacinth Girl comes this bizarre, pathetic article in the Times Online (of what used to be called the London Times before, I guess, it became a faux pas to remind people that London exists) about Michelle Obama. The article is entitled “Michelle Obama: a new type of First Lady” and might as well have the subhead “black women are prettier than white women; now it can be told!” It reads like something that would be posted in the gossip column of a college newspaper, to turn up later tacked anonymously on the notice boards of sororities, leading to midnight hair-pulling fights in the girls’ dorm.
The article is all gushing, fawning praise for Michelle Obama’s looks and cat-claw hisses of various kinds on the inadequacy of several other leaders’ wives, including, for some reason, the wife of France’s President Sarkozy (who, unless Mrs. Obama can speak French and sing like a chanteuse, can run rings around our new First Lady in the accomplishments department). Miss Sarah Vine writes that Mrs. Obama’s “demeanour is a reassuring mixture of sassy and self-deprecating.” Personally I get the impression that she is tense and angry underneath all the smiles. But that may just have been campaign jitters and memories of her life as the seventeenth child of a poor black sharecropper who had to work her way through college by washing the soiled menstrual cloths of rich white women. That would leave me looking a tad hard and bitter too, and I too might want to give my face Angry Clown eyebrows just so people will be too terrified to write anything about me but sycophantic praise.
I was reading this thread of Doctor Who fans cranking on about the excess Jeebus imagery in the new series (yeah, tell me about it — it almost makes me wish they’d go back to the hippiefreak Buddhist-lite garbage of the old series, at least of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison years) and my thoughts wandered, as they tend to do on a couple of glasses of merlot, to things Scottish, and for some reason things Eighties (update: I thought I’d just add that my thoughts on merlot or any other kind of wine don’t exclusively wander to the Scottish and the Eighties, that’s just what they did tonight), and how some people on my side of the pond are probably crying in their beers right now about the Reagan years, so I thought I’d give you a present of a video from the Best Band in the Universe, Simple Minds. (Better than U2! And Scottish — because if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!) Here ya go:
Or click if the embed doesn’t work.
An update for Doctor Who nuts: this is an even better fan critique thread of the intrusive religious imagery in the current Doctor Who series. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s one reason David Tennant decided to leave the show. He probably will never say so, since admitting to any sort of Christianity-based qualms is a career killer in showbiz, but he was raised in a religious household (his father was a Presbyterian minister). So I wonder if the Messiah stuff ever made him uneasy. I can tell you that to me it looks like in stills of some of the scenes — for example, the ones where he’s all I-forgive-you to his archenemy the Master at the end of “Last of the Time Lords” — he looks like he can barely keep from laughing, and in the scenes they are discussing at the above thread in “Voyage of the Damned” the “WTF am I doing here this is stupid” expression on his face is almost worth sitting through the whole silly episode. (It’s not one of the series’ best. There is one scene where he gets to show real distress that breaks through the cheese, and a scene where he’s struggling against being restrained by two strapping members of the ship’s crew. We take what we can get.) Anyway, four more episodes and he’s well out of it, and maybe Moffett will restrain the holiness in 2010. Then again, he’s the one who came up with a secular version of Heaven for the Doctor’s girlfriends, so I don’t know. I just want a show that’s about aliens instead of humans and their neurotic preoccupations with having sex with the most exciting person in the universe. If I wanted a show about humans, I’d watch The Gilmore Girls or something like that.