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Juliette a fait une chanson (excellente, comme d'hab) sur les jeux vidéo (rpg).

Des fois, on a vraiment l'impression que tout ce bordel se met en ordre, beauté, luxe calme et gnagnagna.

Friedman's a dork

Phersu reads friedman so i don't have to. Let's make it shorter :

"
People, as long as i don't feel wrong about irak, it means that i wasn't really wrong.

Too, i can't understand why the frogs don't emulate the u.s. way to promote the moderate muslims' cause.

I met very, very, bad people in france, though, which may explain, but please consider this as mere subtext.

I'm in france btw. Hi! :)
"

The left as bonsaï

From the wikipedia :

Bonsai (盆栽, literally tray gardening) is the art of growing trees and plants, kept small by being grown in a pot and by the use of skilled pruning, formed to create an aesthetic shape [...].

I should go there, and mention the u.s. left, and its incredible self pruning abilities, as per drum, quoted on crooked timber :

In the end, then, even though I agree with Nathan that some of the fringe issues being litigated today are probably counterproductive for liberals

I just don't get it. Counterproductive how? We want to avoid liberals to be unpopular with bible nuts?

It admittedly comes from a very foreign point of view, but i have the impression that the u.s. left doesn't get that the right is here to simply push, push push, on every issue around, everytime, because they think it's the Right Thing to do.

Push long and hard enough on enough subjects and you have a world with - say - ten commmandments totems everywhere, and a friendlier environment for the next one on the TODO list.

I must be missing something.

added :

No but really. Is there anything in the drum statement other than "i think christians totems everywhere is a legit concern, but let's nevertheless create such conditions as to make these concerns a fringe-left-only topic" ?

0_°

Turd world

Delong (may all your ph'nglui are belong to him), goes fishing for mudcrabs, and, gloves on, exhibits something gross :

My son was right about the 'turd' world.

Now quick : is the piece of shit who writes that a republican or a democrat?

Tough one no? No? Republican you say? 100% sure?

Just what i thought, and of course. Of course too the last one you saw on usenet advocating genocide was republican. Of course the last one you saw finding all kinds of qualities to death squads is a republican. Of course the last one you saw saying torture is painless (brings on many changes, though) is a republican. And the last government heard of for having paid pundits is republican.

Pretty obvious, i agree. Basically, lots of republican are racists bigots. Or, to stretch the limits of kindness beyond reason : the republican party is the place where racist bigots go, and everybody knows it. I mean that in a "everybody knows it, but everbody's become to pc to say it" way.

So when some leftie answers to some racist republican jerk about his attempt to free irak, the leftie has already lost. Both know perfectly well that the republican's motive has never been freedom in irak, at most a justification after the wmd/obl fiasco. Joe Republican has never been worried about the well being of iraki people. C'mon. Not one bit. Neither have you. No one gave a shit before the war propaganda kicked in.

The freedom in irak has never been a reason for the republican's war, because - let me say it once more - everybody know they don't care about no frigging turd worlders. They're lying when they mention freedom as their motive to go to irak. Everytime.

The magic of it, is that Joe Leftie feels, eveytime, the need to answer as if. You can nearly hear the cogs whirring frantically :"of course he's lying i know republicans but i must answer the freedom war hypothesis nevertheless because it may be justified from my point of view etc etc".

So republicans can have their cake and eat it too : be their same old, same old, racists bigots, and have their political opposition fight them as if they were angels, knowing perfectly (it's magic, really) that they are not.

I matters because in the end, some work has to be done by some people. Remember how staff in irak there was chosen from rightists think tanks? It's "mr turd world" who's administrating irak. You can count on him to publicly state his firm will to help the iraki people on the path to freedom and democracy ('em fucking ragheads).

Now i can redeem myself.

Last year or something, a couple charming old merkin tourists had apparently decided the second class junk of chocolate sold at the local bakery was delicious. Bought lot of the stuff, all the time.

I never could resolve myself to tell the poor souls that no, this isn't good, and drop that junk, and come with me to hévin. I just suffered silently waiting for my baguette.

Then again, i'm not sure the advice of an unsetlingly intense young man popping out of nowhere and ordering you to go to rue st honoré _right now_ would have been welcomed. They'd just would have tried they best french to appease the weirdo and make me go away. "Don't worry martha, he doesn't look violent". The horror.

Oh unknown nuyorican, oh minessotan, oh somethingelseagainan, you never knew of far you strayed from the path of real chocolate, and now you're gone, and i didn't help!

Besides, my baker would have hated me, he made heaps of money with them. Damn him.

Now i can redeem myself, thanks to the magic of blogs, and to eszter at crooked timber.

People! Don't go to the local bakery to buy chocolate! Go buy the orange confite slice dipped into dark chocolate at hévin instead! And ye who enter there, abandon, by the way, all hope of moderate prices! Hear my words, for they are the truth!

A day in the life of a blogger.

- Darling, lokee, i'm plugged on the big boys blog!

(Darling's head appears above the half folded paper she was reading)
- Mfglwha?

(exitedly)
- Crouquède Timbaire! Le Bois Tordu! Pluging me! For free!

(Eyebrow n°1)
- That one of your blog thingies on the internets, right?

(A bit wary now)
- Yeah. Ain't that cool?

(Eyebrow n°2)
- Honey, shouldn't you be doing some real work right now? The one with a dateline you told me was important?

- ...

Someday, someday...

Sending messages, my foot

CT's Kieran Healy, while sharing some good posner love, incidentally defines game theory thusly :

That is, you stop thinking of other agents as passive bits of the world and realize that they, like you, are searching for the smartest decision given what they anticipate their opponents will do.

And if you fail to do that, it's an iraqi occupation, yes. I just mention this embarrassingly obvious evidence so it's out of our faces.

What's interesting there is that game theory seems to have been a lost discipline not only to the planners of the iraq fuckup, but to an alarmingly large part of the u.s. public, at least during the critical period of the rush to the irak war.

Pity that no real lexis nexis dissection of the saber rattling leading to iraq 2 has been done already. There's a gem there, deserving for more attention that it gets : "let's send a message".

I suppose it started as a diplomatic euphemism, an usefully fuzzy rethorical tool. Soon, as the storm gathered and all that, it mutated into something like "you're under my dick and there's nothing you can do about it, sonny". Which is, if you take it from the game theory point of view, a rather poor realization of the ability of your ennemies to react strategically.

As the war propaganda progressed, the implied meaning lost its casual fuzzyness, soon to become a codeword for "bombs are going to fall if you don't". The use of the expression mutated parallely, to become a simple assertion of the u.s. power, and of iraq's impotence, at the same time reassuring and threatening.

In this poor man's nexis version, quite a few examples of message sending that go boom.

Power titillation? Check. Wishful ignorance of the ennemy? Check. You'd think that this expression was a trademark of the neocons. It was sadly used eveywhere, and did never raise an eyebrow.

I wonder if the breaking point had, at the vietnam time, the same career.