February 16, 2005

• Can someone tell me, once and for all, the origin and meaning behind the term "moonbat?" I saw it first on the Site That Shall Not Be Named, and I still don't get it. I don't like being called things that make absolutely no sense. It makes me want to poke the offender in the eye.
• Dude? It's like a bat, from the moon. Jeez.
• So they really are exhuming McCarthy. This is utter bollocks. The left probably hasn't been so cowed and in disarray for generations. Organising for meaningful change is an almost total non-starter. I blame it largely on the disorientation following the downfall and demonisation of organised labour and the fact that historically we've achieved redress of some of the worst abuses, in the developed world at least. What passes for a left seems to have deteriorated into a mish-mash of disconnected campaigns. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, and he said 'Face it, you're fucked'.
• Looking at the website of their parent organisation it looks like they're in no position to call anyone else 'moonbats'. Cast out the fruitloop in thine own eye first gentlemen.
• no. fucking. way. i can't even be angry about this, it's so totally hideous. great link steveno, but i wish it had never happened.
• Go easy on Horowitz, those ex-Trotskyists and Stalinists find it hard to get out of their old bad habits of drawing lists up of people to put up against the wall.
• Ooooh - am I on there? I wanna be a pinko too! Actually, I think I'm much too contrary to be included in this vast leftist conspiracy. While I may agree ideologically, most of the politics just annoys me. Especially leftist academics - academics is about learning and understanding, not about advocating. I know the tempation is there, especially for the people working on contemporary issues, and I'm not saying they shouldn't - when you have done a lot of research on something and you know that X is wrong, you want to tell the whole world. But the intellectual process should always go: research -> greater understanding -> sharing that understanding. You shouldn't set out to do activist research, as too many seem to be. And don't even get me started on people still using Marx (whom I think is fascinating, but woefully outdated and to be used as a starting point, not as an authority of any kind except on what certain 19th century thinkers thought about their world). That said, I'm airing the dirty laundry, as I never would around Horowitz or his ilk. Related discussion at mefi.
• I read a few of the comments on groups that I knew well (or, in one case, worked for) and was amazed at how many factual mistakes were there. I'm not sure whether they were intentional mistakes or not, either. Anyway, lot of information, most of it wrong, and all of it presented amateurishly.
• Yawn- partisan internet crap. I feel as threatened by this as Bush does by the Flash cartoons and picture captions.
• The great irony here is that Horowitz, a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy (yes it does exist), is calling out the not-yet-but-hopefully-one-day-as-vast left-wing conspiracy.
• I like the entry on the IWW. # Marxist organization founded in 1905 # Espouses the philosophy of syndicalism, a violent form of anarchism They obviously need to re-read their politics 101 if they think that Marxist = anarchist and syndicalist = anarchist.
• Not to mention the entry on the Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists that repeatedly mentions 'Communist' and 'Communism' as if to suggest that organisation is keen to see the United Socialist Republics of America come into being.
• Wow. They just can't let go of Pete Seeger, can they?
• Will the last one leaving for Canada please turn out the lights?
• It would be one thing if these paranoid diagrams were being drawn up during the Clinton years. But the Dems have lost everywhere. Shouldn't they be giving it a rest? And still the rhetoric is ratched up -- as if it wasn't enough that the Left was out of power, they have to be eliminated.
• So... The answer is to flood them with requests from all sorts of fake email addresses for names that are either so obscure as to waste their time (William Churchill), names that are probably made-up (Hawthorne Wingo), or already conservative (Michael Savage, David Horowitz). C'mon, let's overwork their interns!
• I tried to submit J.D. Gurckert, that gay hooker spy who snuck into the White House at the behest of the Liberal Conspiracy, but their script's all busted.
• This is all just silliness. Positions of the left are, generally speaking, things that hopefully benefit society as a whole. Often they are things that benefit people who are poor or do not have a voice. Calling out supporters of the left is like calling out people who give to charity -- they are contributing money with no expectation of a larger return. Conservative positions are generally the exact opposite (abortion being an obvious exception). Conservative contributors are giving large sums of money with the hope that they will receive an even larger sum of money back from the government.
• I just tried submitting Tommy Douglas, but the form isn't working.

  Tommy Douglas is a self-proclaimed socialist who destroyed the sanctity of the Canadian health system by making it free and available to all, thus preventing the rightful disablement and/or premature death of many poor people.

  I hate those leftists.
• the "stay connected" button is broken. pffft!
• The site has some awful graphic design.
• He's so beyond the bend he's pretty much back again, isn't he? This site reads like a freeze-dried cold war fantasy. Can he be tweaking the constituency he supposedly speaks for/to? He reminds me of Andy Kaufman somehow: I'm serious! No, I'm just messing with you. But I'm serious! No, really. Look! No. Reeeeeally!
• "The Mike Farrell Menace." I like the sound of that.
• Never mind the religious zealots listed who actually spend quite a lot of their time oppressing anyone who dares thinking of joining a trade union.
• The Demons of David Horowitz
• The snippet at the end is a gem. What a dreadful speaker. Is the incoherence of his ideas coming out in physical form? And what did that poor microphone do to him?