Ben Carson may be mocked for losing his luggage, but if he really meant to say we would all be better off shedding some of our mental baggage, then that is true and worth saying.
I may have said with my words that the poor are a bunch of whiny inferiors for whom machine-gunning is too good. But what I meant in my heart is that we are all of us imperfect vessels who can only strive with our faith and works to be worthy of God's love in the hereafter.
Ben Carson may be mocked for his descriptions, (he says pyramids were grain stores), but if he really meant:
Seven years of bumper crops are on their way
Years of plenty, endless wheat and tons of hay
Your farms will boom, there won't be room
To store the surplus food you grow
After that, the future doesn't look so bright
Egypt's luck will change completely overnight
And famine's hand will stalk the land
With food an all-time low
Noble king, there is no doubt
What your dreams are all about
All these things you saw in your pajamas
Are a long-range forecast for your farmers
And I'm sure it's crossed your mind
What it is you have to find
Find a man to lead you through the famine
With a flair for economic planning;
then clearly he was forecasting Trump's victory.
People keep using the term slavery, which biases the conversation toward thinking that American history has had racially-motivated bad things happening to non-white people. It would be better if we used the term "intergenerational unpaid labor contracting."
Ben Carson may be mocked for his descriptions, (he says of handling an active shooter, "I would say, 'Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can't get us all'" ), but if he really meant: "Active shooters represent a classic collective action problem, where the first mover risks failure without the help of others; and, although active shooters are in fact vanishingly rare, they may serve as valuable teachable moments for more pressing collective action problems such as climate change or global financial regulation", then that would be both true and laudable.
Ben Carson may be mocked for his descriptions (he claims to be a gifted surgeon), but if he really meant to say "I keep stabbing people and they hardly ever die! In fact many of them get better!" that would explain a lot.
As one of our own noted over there, NPR's headline for Ryancare is "Keeps the popular stuff, cuts the unpopular stuff." Aside from being factually inaccurate* and basically verbatim GOP spin, it's also laughably out of touch with the actual effects of the plan, which will be to destroy the individual insurance market for all Americans.
Fuck NPR.
*taxing rich people to pay for poor people's health insurance is very popular
If, when he said "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius," Amalric was really trying to say that freedom of conscience is a basic human right, he was centuries ahead of his time.
If, when he said, "As you wish," Ben Carson was really saying, "I love you," then he's Wesley from The Princess Bride.
7: Especially because it sounds like they intend to convey sneeringly "which is of course impossible and unserious" without actually clearly getting that message across.
If, when she said, "I love you," Princess Leia was really saying "Please show me how smug you can be before you die," then Han Solo was being an attentive romantic partner.
Is NPR getting worse? It seemed like right after inauguration, it was listenable, if not as hard-hitting as I would have preferred. Now I'm yelling at my radio again. Was the bit where I didn't yell just my wishful thinking?
11 made me laugh out loud in an undignified, moany register.
I mean to say, "These are probably the droids we are looking for. Move along and detain them."
So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.
12 I'd say yes. It's getting worse. I find it downright infuriating.
If, when he wrote "They fuck you up, your mum and dad," he meant "fuck up" as a synonym for "whip up" or "create," Philip Larkin was undeniably speaking factually.
"The human brain has billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than two million bits of information per second and can remember everything you have ever seen or heard."
It's hard to even know where to begin with how wrong this is.
They interrupted him before he finished speaking. He was going to say, "...is what someone DUMB would say."
I took this as a threat: "I could drill a hole in your head, stick electrodes in your hippocampus & have you recite verbatim a book you read 60 years ago."
12, 16: I think what happened is the Mara Liassons and Cokie Robertses of the organization convinced everyone that actually things are normal, and they can respond to events in the news the way they always have.
I think this actually shows the benefits of the "This is not normal" rhetoric, even when you are talking about things that weren't really acceptable when they were normal.
I do most of my NPR listening now on the NPR One app, which has been trained to give me more of the good stuff, like the Code Switch podcast.
I wrote an actual, honest to god letter to my NPR affiliate a few months ago, after the umpteenth funding plea right after the election (I had already given my yearly contribution in May, btw), where they had written some pablum about their "holding the new administration accountable", and I just...went off. and I wrote about the myriad disappointments I had in their coverage. And then at the end of it, I realized that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE I cited was specifically about Inskeep.
So I told them that they wouldn't see another penny of mine until he was off the air. I even pointed out that I know it's not really fair to withhold funds from my local affiliate for staffing decisions at national NPR, but that's how their funding model works - if they could figure out a way for me to fund local shows and promise that none of the $$ would go to Morning Edition, I'd restart.
I can't remember if I quit listening to NPR when they were normalizing GWB or if it as when they were normalizing the people trying to impeach Bill Clinton. Haven't missed it at all.
Laptop has stated andomly skipping ltters. I guess that's it, then.
I basically stopped listening when I stopped driving, even before that I would have to frantically change the station when Juan Williams' redolent burblings would start. No surprise to see he is on Fox now.
I can listen to radio preachers or Rush Limbaugh, and do every once in a while, but somehow I'm bothered more when a source I basically respect runs bad material. Not delighted with Judith Miller either.
Charlie, consider prying up the "r" key and cleaning the peg underneath with a q-tip.
Or is it a mac? I'm grumpy with my kid for eating over over the keybaord.
HP. From 201. Or 2011. The V has been a mess for months, which is especially annoying when I'm writing stuff for my USVI case. The keys dn't seem to pry up. Hw much force should I b applying?
like so. they snap on, you do have to pull a little-- experiment with the useless scroll lock key, or use the magic of youtube instructional aides?
There was a non-malicious way for Carson to compare the descendants of slavery to immigrants -- it would have involved starting the story with the Great Migration or the Exodusters and not the fucking slave ships -- but there are no Benjamins, so to speak, in saying sane things to the kind of people he's set on bilking.
I had to look up "Exodusters" - interesting.
I suppose the Underground Railroad could have worked as well as a starting point?
"The Exodusters" was the best never aired episode of Firefly.
Carson should have started with the enterprising citizens of places like São Jorge da Mina who got to work selling off their neighbors instead of just sitting around in plantations complaining for 300 years.
So...I may have started an honest-to-god twitter fight with Inskeep last night over this. He literally said that because I could tell the difference between what he said and what Carson said, he didn't understand why there was a problem.
I may have said a few more things after that.
(my twitter handle is in the url for this particular post, FYI)
34: That one came to my Other Place feed via a well-respected former colleague (respected both by me and the world at large) who fucking "liked" it. In my civilian guise I am obliged to observe a certain decorum, so I sent this along to heebie in the interest of entertaining the Unfoggetariat and keeping my head from exploding.
Mission accomplished! My head remains intact and Inskeep received the mocking that the situation called for. I knew I could count on y'all.
My Twitter presence is minimal, but I'll have to track down that Twitter fight.
34: Awesome. Finish him! (Like on Mortal Kombat.)
34 is truly great. You're doing the Lord's work.
34 is great, the Lord's work indeed.
34: Oh gosh, I'm ill-informed enough about Twitter that it took me awhile to appreciate that you explained how to fetch that exchange. Wonderful! Well done!
thanks guys :)
His continued deflection kept gnawing at me, but then I realized that I must have struck a nerve, because he KEPT RESPONDING, which is not something you typically see from well known media personalities.
I'm going to have to start outing social media assholes on Unfogged, so folks like sam can beat 'em up for me. We could use orange post titles.
41 - this was a special case. Inskeep has been a bugaboo of mine for a while. as I noted up at 23, he was the cause of my first (and only) actual complaint letter to my NPR affiliate after the combination of repeated invitations to Tucker Carlson during election season as election commentator (only to be "balanced" by Cokie Roberts, who was IN NO WAY equivalently liberal - on her GOOD days, she's a decent, relatively impartial journalist, and her good days are few and far between), and followed up by that travesty of an interview he did with a representative from Breitbart who proceeded to call Inskeep's colleagues from Code Switch a bunch of racists, because they talk about race - and Inskeep just sat there and offered zero pushback on this - which he should have both because it was a flat-out lie and because they were his colleagues - it's one thing to not have been familiar with some random personality in the course of a live interview, but he should have been aware of THEIR work in particular to be able to defend it in the moment. That was my last straw with him.
He's so fucking obsessed with bending over backwards to NOT appear liberal because of all of the bias accusations that get tossed NPR's way that he ends pandering and kowtowing to the right on a regular basis. It's embarrassing.
