I hereby dub the practice of sharing a single MacBook power cord between two or more users the "Scuba"
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Neologism
01 May 2008 03:48 pm
Comments (19)
Mr. Hoffer,
The effective answer to smears is very unlikely to involve smears of your own. If you dislike--as I gather you do--
1. the baseless imputation of evil motives to others,
2. attacks on character as a substitute for attacks on substance, or
3. the airing of accusations and rumors without evidence,
read your post again, and consider how far you may have strayed from the principles you seek to uphold among those you criticize.
The Revolution is real.
Mr. Schmitt,
N.B. the words that I quoted, above, are those of Justin Raimondo, see: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/Raimondo/ ,and above links.
No doubt, I freely second them.
This: "read your post again, and consider how far you may have strayed from the principles you seek to uphold among those you criticize." though, I'm not sure I fully understand. If you could clarify, I'd appreciate it. Examples from the text, to help illuminate, would, also, be a + .
Mark, and this relates to buddy breathing how exactly?
My wife and I scuba'd twice last night. It was great.
Here are some examples.
Lack of evidence:
Lew Rockwell, by the way, is not the author of those newsletters—trust me...
Rumor-mongering:
...I’m told because of the influence of big contributors.
Ad hominem:
...while the Beltway’s tame “libertarians” are in bed with them, often literally...
Imputation of motives without evidence:
The Reason/Cato lynch mob is really threatened by the existence of a mass libertarian movement—because it’s a movement over which they have no control.
I'm not a journalist, and I won't contest whether it's truth or falsehood you copy here. Nonetheless, there is such a thing as discourse that does credit to what you support instead of antagonizing others with unconvincing rhetoric.
The sad irony for me is that the sorts of mistakes which I argue you made were exactly the same I saw made by those criticizing the newletters, which in turn were precisely the same made by the writers of the newsletters themselves.
I don't use a MacBook... am I still allowed to use this term?
It's frequently done in many office environments, where employees tend to have the same brand of (Windows-based) laptop.
My wife and I scuba'd twice last night. It was great.
No details, please.
Yes! Spread it far and wide.
My wife and I scuba'd twice last night. It was great.
No details, please.
What? I mean we both have powerbooks and we had only one working power cord. Don't know what you're thinking of.
Someone should do some research to see if there is a positive correlation between Apple love and Obama love.
Mr. Schmitt,
I hear you points, and, in many cases, would agree. These two posts, below:
> Hey Reason: NO ONE CARES.
Well, not quite. If no one cared, or if Reason were really so irrelevant, Justin (and Lew and Tom D.) wouldn’t have bothered responding (which, btw, would have been my preferred response).
That’s really been my problem with the paleo crew. I agree that such efforts by the Reason gang are ridiculous, I really do. But why dignify (or legitimize) them with a response? Take the high road and let them fade into obscurity.
Posted by AND on May 01, 2008.
AND - there is a problem with that, in this mass-media driven world. You cannot take a high road any longer; you ignore repeated falsehoods at your own peril - cf what happened to Ron over those stupid (and hardly “racist") newsletters. All you have to do is watch how some jerk posts up some inane garbage and it gets repeated across 11M websites in 30 minutes… and drug up again like clockwork every month until it becomes the gospel-goddamn-truth.
The internet is the spice of our little Dune, both a great thing and a very bad thing (I guess like all really useful tools). But the time for appearing above it all is long gone. The masses do not have the attention span for it. So, either strike when the iron is hot, or suffer the consequences later (over and over).
Posted by Bret on May 01, 2008.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/attack_of_the_reasonoids/
seem to point to the dilemma involved in responding to 'negative' coverage..It's certainly one I'm not sure how to answer.
Maybe our gracious Hostess, who was one of the first re-posters of Kurchick's TNR smear, could give us her answer??
MEH-
Dude!
What made you think this post was an appropriate place to spew your "Paul-bot" rant about "Reason" magazine?
(People like MEH are why I'm actually ashamed to admit that I voted for Ron Paul in Ohio's Repub Primary...)
you'll have to ask our Hostess, when I posted, the first time, she had a pic of Scuba divers and a caption "Share Air", "Neologism" was a separate post...
Don't scuba enthusiasts have a term for sharing air. A poster above used "buddy breathing". Shouldn't that be the term used? "Scuba" doesn't make sense.
I keep hearing Lloyd Bridges voice in my head now, "...by then, my notebook was aching for charge..."
"Buddy breathing" is the standard term with divers. In the tradional sense two divers alternately breathe of a single regulator. (That's how we did it in Navy school.)
Now, as both a safety measure in the event of a primary regulator malfunction, and to also expedite buddy breathing, most modern civilian scuba rigs have an additional regulator on a separate hose.
It's called an octopus rig.
Marcus
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| 
Ron Paul’s recently published book, The Revolution, is number one on Amazon and will debut on the New York Times bestseller list at number seven—good news, eh? Not to the fake “libertarians” over at Reason magazine, no sirreee!
David Weigel posts this snarky little rant, digging up the Ron Paul newsletter scandal—which I debunked here—but Weigel doesn’t have to answer any arguments, or even make any of his own. All he has to do is borrow a smear from another neocon-run sliming operation, and, Voila!:
“Back in January there was a split, among friends of Ron Paul, about how to respond to criticisms of weird and bigoted passages in old issues of his (now defunct) newsletter. Some in his circle, like his congressional Chief of Staff Tom Lizardo, wanted Paul to cut bait and name the paleos (including Lew Rockwell) who’d ghostwritten the most offensive and non-Paul sounding sections of the letters.(Yes, I’m aware of the argument that there was nothing controversial in the newsletters unless you’re a namby-pamby cosmotarian. If the people making that argument are interested, I hear Jeremiah Wright is hiring in his PR shop.) Paul never did, and the controversy faded.”
There was no “split among friends of Ron Paul”—his enemies, including those at the helm of Reason magazine, pounced on the newsletters. His friends saw nothing “weird” or “bigoted” about articles denouncing affirmative action, the welfare state, and the Rodney King rioters of the 1980s. Lew Rockwell, by the way, is not the author of those newsletters—trust me—and Weigel has never come up with any convincing evidence that he is: that doesn’t stop him, however, from using this as another opportunity to go after Lew. Whatever. It’s interesting, however, that Weigel invokes the Wright “controversy”—yet another instance in which the only (relatively) antiwar candidate left standing is being slimed by the War Party.
Speaking of needing a PR shop: Reason is fast losing subscribers and readers over this. Take a look at the comments attached to Weigel’s post: they sure have Weigel’s number. Almost to a man (and woman) they are wondering: whose side is Reason on? Why are they bringing up this tired old “controversy”? Who benefits—the friends or the enemies of liberty?
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/attack_of_the_reasonoids/
“If a person cared about liberty,” asks the blogger who calls himself “a former beltway wonk,” “why would they be eager to mindlessly repeat smears about the most popular libertarian candidate in decades on the very day of the most crucial ‘king-making’ primary in the United States?”
It’s no mystery, really: Ron Paul is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Beltway fake-“libertarians.” He’s a populist: they suck up to power, he challenges the powers-that-be; they go along to get along – he has never gone along with the conventional wisdom as defined by the arbiters of political correctness, Left and Right. And most of all, he’s an avowed enemy of the neoconservatives, whom he constantly names as the main danger to peace and liberty – while the Beltway’s tame “libertarians” are in bed with them, often literally as well as figuratively.
In short, the Beltway fake-libs are in bed with the State, and all its works, while contenting themselves with the role of court jester and would-be “reformer” of the system. As long as they don’t challenge anything too fundamental to the continuation of the Welfare-Warfare State, the pet libertines of the neocon-led GOP “coalition” are deemed “urbane” and “cosmopolitan,” the highest compliment the Georgetown party circuit can bestow. Once they begin rocking the boat, as Paul insists on doing, they become fair game for the Smearbund.
Another major reason for the antipathy to Paul coming from these quarters is his uncompromising opposition to U.S. foreign policy. A good half of the Reason crowd were pro-war, some ambivalent, and a powerful minority within the Cato Institute rallied to the cause of “liberating” Iraq, or was at least sympathetic to the idea of “exporting” free market liberalism at gunpoint, once the war was a fait accompli. Reason itself took no position on the most important question of the day, I’m told because of the influence of big contributors. And now I learn, from inside sources, that Reason senior editor Brian Doherty, author of the monumental Radicals for Capitalism, a “freewheeling” history of the American libertarian movement, is in danger of being fired because he’s too pro-Paul.
The most shameful aspect of this episode is the active role played by the Orange Line Mafia in the smearing of Paul. The Reason/Cato lynch mob is really threatened by the existence of a mass libertarian movement—because it’s a movement over which they have no control. They no longer get to define libertarianism to the general public, and most importantly, the media: who needs them, when we have a much more appealing and successful salesman for liberty?
Besides, it’s embarrassing for them: while they’re begging our rulers to allow us just a little freedom, and timidly seek to trim the empire around its rougher edges, Paul and the movement he’s spawned seek a much more radical application of libertarian principles: a consistent anti-statism on the home front, and a call to dismantle the empire before it dismantles the last vestiges of our old republic...
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/why_the_beltway_libertarians_are_trying_to_smear_ron_paul/
Posted by Mark E Hoffer | May 1, 2008 3:54 PM