Posts Tagged ‘psycho-babble’
Gee, this is a bit harsh (Rick Santorum)
Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and “smart people” for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday. “We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country,” Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. […]
Well done Cameron
By chance, I caught a few minutes of The Nutter’s Club on Radio LIVE last night. Normally hosted by comedian Mike King, blogger Cameron Slater took the chair. The interaction I heard — a discussion with a talkback caller worried about the side effects of her prescription drugs, and concerned that her doctors weren’t listening […]
Acknowledgements page as self-promotion and commercial message. Ha!
For my author friends … a description of the ‘undercurrent of faux-modest self-promotion [which] runs like a viral strain throughout every acknowledgments page’. (We refer to them as ‘Ackowledgements’ — an inside joke after an unfortunate and undetected-until-too-late typographical error.) A lively, little-bit-snarky, enjoyable read: Against Acknowledgments by Sam Sacks at the New Yorker magazine. […]
My Side versus The Other Side. (Just beautiful)
Unspeakably good satire (or something) about two party politics and human nature from A. Barton Hinkle at Reason.com: The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win … it’s clear that the people on the Other Side are driven by mindless anger – unlike My Side, which is filled with passionate idealism and righteous indignation. That indignation, […]
Please read this post
This one: ‘Everything we know about you guys is wrong‘ Sometimes I feel I can’t improve on a thought, or how I expressed it first. – P
Wow. That’s intriguing …
One of the more formative books (‘most formative? Hmpf, doesn’t sound right) I’ve ever read was an eye-opening (and subsequently controversial) tome called The Origins of English Individualism: the family, property and social transition by Henry McFarlane … The Origins of English Individualism is about the nature of English society during the five centuries leading […]
Quick and easy reach for allegations of mental illness
I read (devoured) Bob Woodward’s State of Denial — Bush at War, Part III while on holiday last week. I spotted the book on a shelf, plucked it down and thought, This may interest me. Boy, did I misunderestimate. It’s a really great read. Woodward’s story is an extremely detailed and well sourced hatchet job […]
A nice description of the journalist’s conceit (as in fanciful notion, not pride)
From Jeff Himmelman’s NY Times review of Yours in Truth — A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee. Some journalists seem incapable of seeing flaws in themselves or their heroes. They suspend their professional skepticism as if they’re not bound by the usual rules of gravity. It’s a kind of self-important higher-calling disease that has made some […]
Good values, positively expressed
I briefly mentioned the challenges someone advocating for ‘better’ can face, with other ‘crabs in the bucket’ pulling them back as ‘sanctimonious and hypocritical’ (see Choking on one’s own sanctimony …) Here’s nice model from Bennetts Bookshops … pointing to their ‘Core Values‘. Bennetts exists to serve students and the campus communities of which they […]
Untangling from emotional habits
Reviving memories of Edie Brickell got me thinking about her, how happy she seemed, and how she seemed to disappear after marrying Paul Simon. Here’s a line from a Jan 2011 AP interview ‘Edie Brickell releases records full of joy‘ talking about how her long-awaited 2011 CDs, the eponymous “Edie Brickell” and “The Gaddabouts”. Both […]
Declaring where you’re coming from
Like most people (I think), I find it interesting, at times fascinating, to speculate about WHY people do and say what they do … WHY they might express views that they hold in the way they do … and WHY they enter into discussions or debates (and sometimes flame wars) on the internet. But I’ve […]
Depression is real stuff
From an excellent profile of the awesomely good Rachel Maddow ‘Rachel Maddow’s Quiet War’ in the June Rolling Stone magazine: “Yesterday was like a four-star show, I was totally into it,” she says. “Today and Monday – like, blaagh. Like, doesn’t get any worse. I’ve been doing this for four years! Why do I still […]
The curse of hypervigilance
Recent angst-ridden discussion about comments published on the internet have reminded me of a conclusion I reached when I was myself the subject of scurrilous anonymous comment: It can bloody hurt. But some of the pain is, sadly, self-inflicted. We’ve seen again and again how anonymity seems to loosen people’s grip on civility. Some of […]
Gaga
From Lydia Jenkns’ review (NZ Herald) of tonight’slast night’s Lady Gaga concert in Auckland … It was like an avante-garde opera for the modern age, which occasionally got confusing in it’s direction – Gaga began the show as an escaping prisoner, a warrior who will take over the earth for us, not alien yet not […]
