The Chaff

Wednesday, Jul 23rd - 2:51pm

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Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Un-gaming the system

From comments over at Pandagon regarding whether Hillary Clinton got a “fair shake” in the Democratic Primary:
The system was not gamed against her, since it had been gamed for her by general DNC bubble-headed consensus.
Actually, you need to distinguish between the DNC and the DLC: the hard-core establishment, “run to the center”, “don’t piss [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Oh, so THAT’S what journalism looks like!

It happened again: I saw a piece on TV last night that gave me hope for the Fourth Estate. Last time, it was an investigative report. This time, it was an interview. Both times, it was on The Daily Show.
Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith last night for over 20 minutes. I only saw the ten [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
Monday, March 31st, 2008

Why Wingnuts Write Wrong (It’s not the heat: it’s the stupidity)

Clif over at Sadly, No! thrashes a book review by Brent Bozell, in which Bozell graciously provides an example of How Not To Be Understood:
Alterman argues that conservatives loathe Hollywood because they, like the rich everywhere else, are expected to “embrace the right-wing politics that would benefit their economic self-interest and leave the opinion business [...]

3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
Friday, December 21st, 2007

Ah, Memories…

Over at Defective Yeti, there’s a post about things you hate to see in the movies. One person complained:
Certain actors use smoking as a way to eeeeeeeeee-mote and show that their character is either edgy or stressed out or both. But [...] you can tell they don’t know the first thing about smoking. They fling [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

When is discrimination OK?

My very, very long response to a comment over at Sadly, No!:
the appalling thing about what I wrote
the more i learn about these hideous people the more terrified i become. it’s not as if they’re centralized in one remote spot; they could be living next door or on the next block.
is that it matches what [...]

3 Comments » - Posted in In Dorothy's World by Dorothy
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

When is war justified?

From a comment on this post over at Pandagon
Suppose for a moment that the Bushites were right, that Hussein had WMD and the ability and the will to use them against Americans (preposterous but hang in there for a bit). Would you still oppose war, the killing of people bent on killing us, which would [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

God, Save Us from Merit Pay for Teachers!

Matt Yglesias has a post about presidential campaigns discussing merit pay for teachers. My response to a comment there got really, really long, so I’m pasting it over here:
The underlying logic of merit pay seems perfectly intuitive, of course, I’m just not sure it would work out.
It does seem intuitive until you consider that the [...]

4 Comments » - Posted in In Dorothy's World by Dorothy
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

Who Is the Target Audience?

So I’m cleaning out the spam trap, and I see a plug for “drunk teen exploited sex”.
Whaaa?
The “barely legal sex” ones are bad enough. The “hot teen virgins doing it with farm animals” are disgusting. But “drunk teen exploitation” porn? Is there really an audience for date rape videos?
Are there actually men out there thinking [...]

4 Comments » - Posted in Crimes Against Sanity by Dorothy
Saturday, May 5th, 2007

An Outrage

This is just infuriating.
German counter-terrorist agents kidnapped an American citizen and secretly sent him to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and tortured for four months. And the whole time his wife and children had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.
And why? Because a unit chief “had a hunch” [...]

No Comments » - Posted in Crimes Against Sanity by Dorothy
Saturday, May 5th, 2007

Spam, spam, spam, spam, bacon, and spam

The comment spam has been really, really bad. Too keep it from crashing the site (like it did before), we’ve set all comments to moderate. I do not reject any actual comments, but I think at least one got deleted by mistake (I’m sorry!). I’ve caught up on the comment queue, though, so if your [...]

1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by Dorothy
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