Ramblings & ephemera
This quotation is directly about politics, but it’s about anyone – or even anything – we emotionally attach ourselves to.
From Glenn Greenwald’s “My friend the president” (Salon: 8 December 2009):
Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar [...]
Posted on December 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Berlin Johnson’s “Old Growth Media And The Future Of News” (StevenBerlinJohnson.com: 14 March 2009):
The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “The O’Reilly Procedure” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 14 June 2009):
The seven propaganda devices include:
Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
Glittering generalities — the opposite of name calling;
Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, on writing, politics | No Comments »
photo credit: bobster855
From Andrew Sullivan’s “Who Will “Sister Souljah” Them?” (The Daily Dish: 5 May 2009):
… the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?
Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their [...]
Posted on May 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” (Rolling Stone: 13 April 2000):
The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | No Comments »
From David G. Post’s “Jefferson’s Moose” (Remarks presented at the Stanford Law School Conference on Privacy in Cyberspace: 7 February 2000):
In 1787, Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the “complete skeleton, skin & horns of the Moose” shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his hotel. One can only [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China – that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, religion | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious. For instance, there are verses in both the Old and New Testament that seem to show that the earth [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, religion, science | No Comments »
From Dan Shelly’s “Former News Radio Staffer Spills the Beans on How Shock Jocks Inspire Hatred and Anger” (AlterNet: 17 November 2008):
To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Damon Linker’s “The Future of Christian America” (The New Republic: 7 April 2009):
hat will provide the theological content of the nation’s civil religion now that the “mere orthodoxy” of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Danner’s “Words in a Time of War: Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President” (Tomgram: 10 May 2007):
[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]
…
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, politics | No Comments »
From James Bennett’s “Let’s talk about Python 3.0” (The B-List: 5 December 2008):
There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.
You build [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, language & literature, law, politics | Enter your password to view comments
From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):
The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, language & literature, law, politics | Enter your password to view comments
From Jared Jacang Maher’s “DIA Conspiracies Take Off” (Denver Westword News: 30 August 2007):
Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA [Denver International Airport] were constructed as a kind of Noah’s Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, politics, religion, security, weird | No Comments »
From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
I hope to see all proprietary software wiped out. That’s what I aim for. That would be a World in which our freedom is respected. A proprietary program is a program that is not free. [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
Specifically, this refers to four essential freedoms, which are the definition of Free Software.
Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program, as you wish, for any purpose.
Freedom one is the freedom to study the [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Ian Urbina’s “High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places” (The New York Times: 3 November 2008):
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Jill Lepore’s “Bound for Glory” (The New Yorker: 20 October 2008):
The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
