Derp Roundup: Your Weekly Dose of Dumbth
Hi, Wonkaloonies! Yr Doktor Zoom really enjoyed "sleeping in" this week! But we are back from vacation now, and ready for another Derp Roundup, our weekly Sloppy Joe of news trimmings that were too stoopid to ignore altogether but not quite enough to make a full post out of. We have to use 'em before they start to turn. Verily, this is the Arby-Q of Wonket posts.
We'll start off with the tale of Petr Pavlensky, a Russian "conceptual artist" who won't be conceiving anything for a little while now, since he went and nailed his nutsackto the cobbles of Red Square to protest...um... well, we thought it was to protest the imprisonment of Pussy Riot, but no, for that, he sewed his mouth shut. This time he sat down in front of Lenin's Mausoleum and pounded a large nail through his scrotum into the pavement. Pavlensky explained in a post-arrest statement that the nut-nailing
"can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society."
It's nice when you're able to combine your hobbies with your activism.
Gawker notes that police used "a claw hammer" to bring the protest to an abrupt end (yes, we just felt several hundred of you wince). Efficient, but wouldn't poetic justice have been better served with a ball peen hammer?
Some portion -- all of them, Katie -- of Greater Wingnuttia was OUTRAGED when a University of Maryland professor, Kevin Blackistone, said mean things about sportsball and the National Anthem the week before Armistice Day. For context, he was on an ESPN panel, talking about Northwestern U's "patriotic" bloody-flag uniforms designed to somehow commemorate "wounded warriors" -- a whopping 10% of sales from the knockoffs will go to help vets.
In addition to dissing the beautiful fake-blood uniforms, Blackistone committed treason by calling The Scar Strangled Badger a bad name, calling for an end tothe rest of the military symbolism embrace of sports: whether it’s the singing of a war anthem to open every game, whether it’s going to get a hotdog and being able to sign up for the Army at the same time ... And when you have military flyovers and all the other military symbolism that goes on in sports, I think you’ve got a problem.”
Breitbart's Supreme Director Of Butthurt Ben Shapiro helpfully points out that Blackistone is employed at a publicly-funded university, which means both that he must be fired and that higher education is bad for America. And for the sake of synergy, Shapiro has also started a petition on his other dumb website (the conservative equivalent of Media Matters, don't ya know) demanding that ESPN apologize for Blackistone's "Anti-American" comments. That's awfully nice of Ben Shapiro to do that for America, isn't it?
Our only real quibble is that the Star Spangled Banner isn't a "war anthem." It's "a lot of questions written during a fire":
Ben "Science Leads To Auschwitz" Stein is pretty sure that Barack Obama is going to justbumble into some Holocausting by thinking that Iran can be negotiated with instead of just bombed. But don't worry, it's not that Obama hates the Jews; it's just that he's "deeply naïve" and thinks that those devious Persians can be trusted.
"For Mr. Obama to trust these people — the same ones who killed 300 Marines in a terror attack in Beirut 30 years ago last month — to actually change their stripes and suddenly become trustworthy is deeply naive or worse," he said. "If that trust turns out to be mistaken, it’s a bad day for Mr. Obama. It’s death for Israel."
Ben Stein once wrote speeches for Richard Nixon, so presumably he knows a thing or two about duplicity. He is srs man with srs thoughts. Also, he had a game show. Why won't America listen to him? Anyone? Anyone?
About 40 patriotic supporters of the Second Amendment in Dallas, Texas, made it clear that they would not stand for a group of four women having lunch and talking about gun control, because Freedom. So they showed up with their guns and hung around the parking lot of the restaurant where the four traitorous gun-grabbers from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America were having their monthly meeting. For some reason, the four ladies thought that this entirely legitimate act of heavily armed protest was meant to intimidate them somehow, which just goes to show how silly some people are about guns. The forty armed citizens were just there to show that they won't be intimidated by liberal gun-control activists, after all. And since their group is called "Open Carry Texas," it would be pretty ridiculous of them to show up without their loaded guns at the ready, now wouldn't it?
The Lamestream Media made things worse by publishing this completely unfair picture of the gun fondlers fondling their guns:
See, what's unfair and outrageous about this photo is that it seems to show the gun fondlers crouching as if preparing to start a shooting rampage, when in fact it is merely a side view of the gun fondlers posing for a photograph to commemorate their flawless victory over the forces of tyranny, who stayed holed up in the restaurant for two hours, until the gun guys wandered off to Hooters (true fact). See? Nothing scary at all:
Somehow, this frontmoob vs. sidemoob view has come to overshadow, for some folks at least, the question of whether 40 people walking around with loaded guns can ever be interpreted as "intimidating." Don't be silly! That's not an intimidating display of weapons, it's FREEDOM. Any fool knows what an act of intimidation looks like! It looks exactly like this:
The good people of Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, are voting today on a ballot initiative that would shift funding from the town's library system to the building of a brand new detention center. Now, before you damn liberals start complaining about these yahoos preferring to lock people up instead of letting little kids read books, let us just point out that the proposition wouldn't divert all the library funding into a jail -- just a bit over a quarter of it. And this way, the parish gets a new jail without raising taxes. Heck, most libraries can probably do just fine with a 25% funding cut, right? After all, reading just leads to people thinking that the national anthem is about war or something.
Worse, says Council Chairman Lindel Toups, a leader of the Jails Not Books drive, look at what them damn liberries are doing with people's hard-earned money already:
“They’re teaching Mexicans how to speak English,” the council chairman said in reference to Biblioteca Hispana, a Hispanic-language segment of the Golden Meadow library branch. “Let that son of a bitch go back to Mexico. There’s just so many things they’re doing that I don’t agree with … Them junkies and hippies and food stamps (recipients) and all, they use the library to look at drugs and food stamps (on the Internet). I see them do it.”
Fuckin' liberries. Did the Founders of our great nation read books from a liberry? Did Thomas Jefferson use a liberry computer to look at food stamps on the internet? He did not. Also, "Lindel Toups."
Also, another item to add to the Conservative Quirks list: Not only are they keenly interested in scrutinizing other people's grocery carts and payment methods, they also make a hobby of looking over other people's shoulders at the library.
Gosh, it's great to be back! Everything is terrible!
[ Gawker / DeadSpin / The Blaze / TruthRevolt / Newsmax / ThinkProgress / TPM / Tri-Parish Times ]
Don't beat yourself up; the various origins and meanings had long ago become obsolete or moot. "Yankee Doodle" now is simply a jaunty little tune that is associated with the founding of the country, nothing more. Nobody thinks about what the lyrics mean because they don't mean anything anymore, and they haven't for a very long time now.
How did the song "Yankee Doodle" enter the discussion? What's the relevance?
Not entirely apt. It was the elder Stein, Herbert, who was associated with the Nixon administration. His son Ben espouses a different strain of conservatism, one that has more in common with the G. W. Bush administration. The Nixon era Stein was much more moderate in his views. Which means that he was probably a bit to the left of our current President.