Sixteen Volts

The irony is that if soccer were a traditional American game, these same commentators would be excoriating it as politically retrograde. Around the world, soccer fans are far more explicitly nationalist, uneducated, working class, and reactionary (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) than those of any American sport other than professional wrestling. To the American alienists, however, lauding foreign nativists illustrates their cultural and moral superiority over their fellow Americans.

But that's enough of soccer. Now, you probably might not believe this, but only a few years ago I generally tended to mentally support liberals over conservatives, even though I already hated the fact that American liberals allowed feminists and other disgusting hippies to have a free ride on their shoulders. I was, for example, somewhat annoyed for all that jebusoid triumphalism when Bush won the 2004 election, and remember laughing when conservatives once took two seats out of hundreds in the Canadian elections. And there are quite a few well-known left-wing blogs out there still active that I remember once mentally supporting, laughing at the way they mocked conservatives, but which disgust me today. Thinking back about this, the whole thing feels almost surreal now (although I still believe that the great nation of America could have done a lot better in its choice of leader, and that the whole war or Iraq was a rather stupid move in 20/20 retrospect), and I can still remember how weird it felt the first time that somebody explicitly called me a conservative. Conservative thought and ideology were for me pretty much equivalent to fundy Christianity and general worship of stupidity, so there was no chance in hell that I'd be in that camp.

But I guess that I am a paleoconservative, why dance around it. I have previously written something about my personal conservatism, how I one day simply realized that all conservatives whose ideas and writings I like, such as Steve Sailer perhaps being the most important one, belong to subgroups of political conservatism that are only a small minority these days, while the mainstream bulk of conservatism is elsewhere putting the American flags in their cars and going rah-rah to supporting Bush, the Red Team and the troops in their Godly mission against the French and the ragheads, invading the world while inviting the world.

Now, as much as I, a nasty reality-based atheist, tend to dislike fundy Christians and biblical creationists (although I can fully acknowledge their usefulness in many situations, at least when I am in a pragmatic mood), I have often wondered why they seem to be such a rarity in the blogosphere and the whole landscape of public political and intellectual discussion. Even though something like 60% of all Americans are biblical creationists of the Young Earth variety, you certainly couldn't tell this by looking at the political blogosphere where this vast majority is virtually invisible. (Go on, start from the top of the TTLB Ecosystem, and see how far down the list you need to go to have encountered along the way a total of three political blogs whose proprietors are explicit Young Earth creationists. I'll wait.)

The poison-tongued blonde firebrand Ann Coulter is currently perhaps the best-known creationist in the public limelight. But lo and behold, with the publication of her latest political polemic "Godless", she is being accused of plagiarism! Unfortunately, with the examples listed on the page ""Complete" List of Coulter Plagiarism Allegations", I again have to say that I must have totally misunderstood the whole concept of plagiarism. See for yourself the Exhibit A, the very first example they provide. Coulter:

As New Hampshire attorney general in 1977, Souter opposed the repeal of an 1848 state law that made abortion a crime even though Roe v. Wade had made it irrelevant, predicting that if the law were repealed, New Hampshire 'would become the abortion mill of the United States.'

whereas the original says that

In 1977, Souter as state attorney general spoke out against a proposed repeal of an 1848 state law that made abortion a crime -- even though the measure had been largely invalidated by the Supreme Court in Roe. vs. Wade… 'Quite apart from the fact that I don't think unlimited abortions ought to be allowed . . . I presume we would become the abortion mill of the United States[.]'

Could somebody who considers this to be plagiarism demonstrate how you would explain the same idea so that it would not be plagiarism? Ace of Spades examines the topic further in the post "Kos And Joshua Micah Ezekiah Boutros-Boutros Marshall Are 100% Right". My views on the notion of plagiarism are generally similar to what Steve Dutch expressed in his essay "Sense and Nonsense about Plagiarism". But I am not going to summarize them with my own words in the simplest possible way, since that would apparently be plagiarism.

While I am at the topic of American political polemics, let me say a few words about Rush Limbaugh, the literal and metaphorical giant of the American political radio whom the mainstream media has completely ignored --- until he finally got in trouble with drugs (curiously enough, I don't remember reading even one pun about getting a "rush") and when he said something about that black football player. I remember when I went off to the university and learned about Usenet, and once came upon a curiously named Usenet group alt.fan.rush-limbaugh. I had no idea who this amusingly named man was, perhaps he was some crooner or comedian or something, perhaps even a cartoon character. I got the point pretty quickly, though. For amusement value, when I first visited my future wife in Canada, I actually bought his book "The Way Things Ought to Be" as a paperback, and this book coloured my perceptions of conservatism for a long time. I looked at this book again a few years ago and Jesus, were its contents ever embarrassingly stupid. (On the other hand, this was perhaps an important step for my general realization that all political polemic printed on dead tree is for all practical purposes dead.)

I have only seen Rush on TV once and never heard him (or any of his myriad little wannabe clones) on the radio, but I can certainly vividly imagine what he would be like. It's not like this would be a hard stretch of imagination. I can easily understand the slight dislike (and the near-perfect radio silence) that the more intellectual American conservatives who I like seem to have about him. Come on, just look at the top of the political blogs and notice the perfect absense of anything that is Rush Limbaugh in them. I guess these people get their news and worldview from somewhere else! Bad little dittoheads. Come to think of it, this rejection of El Rushbo might stem from the same phenomenon that makes Young Earth creationism such non-entity in them, namely that American conservatives are in reality just as "elitist" as liberals. But of course, elitism is a necessity for the elite, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with elitism, that is, the idea that some things, opinions and people are simply better than others. The simple masses also need their own mouthpiece who makes the complex things simple for them, since we can't all be "above average" (to paraphrase another well-known American radio personality) by belonging to the top half of the Bell Curve. If Rush had been born a Finn instead of an American, he probably would have had a great political career in the populist Agrarian Party (see my old post "The party for the rest of us").

And oh yeah, in that newsgroup I always laughed at the great "Rush Limba: Lying Nazi Whore" posts that always seemed to puncture the rushian conservatism where it hurt, while the other critics seemed to concentrate on the Hindenburgian girth of Rush and how this flaming gasbag "rushes" to the dinner table. Later, these posts of course became BartCop, my favourite leftist site ever. Speaking of Old Bart, it's really been quite a while since I have seen Limba (let alone "Doc Meng", "Slappy", "Senator Pissquick" or "Tennessee Tuxedo") mentioned anywhere in BartCop either, except for that drug thing. This despite the fact that he still holds the largest radio audience among all American talk radio hosts.

With his radio contract that is worth something like 500 million dollars, I also find it rather amusing when some people (and it's probably needless to say at this point who) seem to believe, in all apparent seriousness and without irony, that this thrice-married and yet childless paragon of family values would have even a slightest trouble of finding himself an endless horde of attractive women who are decades younger than him to bang, should he feel like it. Heck, just look at what Howard Stern immediately got himself, once he finally dumped his plain and dumpy wife. We can certainly see what attractive women tend to look for in men. But then again, the way that women use the word "loser" in practice has very little objective content, since this word just means somebody who they generally dislike, regardless of any objective real-world qualities and achievements of the said person. If a woman thinks that a man is a "loser" in this sense, she probably believes that all other women think the same way, good little collectivists and hivemind that women are by nature.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, July 11, 2006 at 12:21 PM