For the New Media class I dropped yesterday.

I DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ ME THE SPEECH OBAMA IS GOING TO GIVE IN AN HOUR.

There is a reason I’m watching the Convention on television. TO WATCH OBAMA GIVE HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH — not hear it from you before he’s even walked onto the stage.

You bastards are like a guy in line at the theater who loudly proclaims the ending of the movie.

Off to C-SPAN for me.

An aside: Can anyone confirm that all those little flags the delegates are waving are union-made? Can’t be shipping our flag-making to China any more!

Look . . .

BAM!

You just saved the world from another idiot motorcycler.

Thank you.

From the bottom of my heart.

Team:

See note below from our communications director, thanks for what you have done in last 24 hours, let’s keep it going.

From: Kevin McLaughlin
Sent: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:40 PM
To: Rob Jesmer
Subject: Nutroots

Rob-

2 things;

1) Our guys at the convention told us Noreiga and his out-of-state buddies spent the morning attacking Senator Cornyn

2) according to finance team, the fact that Dean and Pelosi came in to shill for Noreiga really fired up our supporters the last 24 hours. We have raised well over 10K and I think we could another 10k if we send out the email below again.

Talk soon,

Kevin

You know, it might be a good idea to hire someone (or two someone’s, since Rob Jessmer, Cornyn’s campaign manager didn’t even correct the misspelling in the e-mail) who can actually spell your opponent’s name. Especially your communications director.

As for the message . . . Noriega and the rest of the Netroots and Dem leadership who showed up bashed Cornyn!? STOP THE PRESSES! SOUND THE ALARM! TIP THE COW!

Anyway, I guess “Buck Smith”/David Beckwith must be earning his keep (and some Democratic schwag) by attending Netroots Nation.

Nonetheless, Kevin, you really need to learn how to (a) spell and (b) not make yourself look like an ass in the press (yes, I’m talking about that asinine comment about “Buck Smith” speaking for himself and all that other BS you pulled from somewhere near your nose that resembles an asshole when BOR outed Beckwith).

By the way, Kev: Since “Buck Smith” speaks for himself, why isn’t he posting on BOR any more?

In one post (referring to the “Big John” video), he commented:

“I personally believe Beckwith deserves a raise and/or a promotion for whatever role he had in that video . . .”

I want to see if recommending yourself for a raise on a blog works. So here goes:

Hey, TFN, I think I deserve a raise. How ’bout it?

Joe, same for you.

Pate got to get paid, son.

Boy, I hope it pans out well — or at least that I’m not forced to resign my positions in a few weeks when the media/blog heat has subsided.

(If this doesn’t work, I’ll try posting the request on a conservative Web site under a nom de plume.)

I keep telling myself I need to blog more — stretch my legs (or fingers) again after such a long hiatus from truly active blogging (a few times a week or month not counting). If we remember, I started blogging back in 1998 or earlier (this is before the term “blogging” was in use). But what’s the use in reminiscing? There’s too much to do now.

I need to start blogging again because I need to soon start blogging daily on the TFN blog (which is not open to the public yet).

Anyway, I’m doing my best, I guess. Just not forcing myself to pour out nonsense here every day of the week.

——-

So, as I was writing the last four paragraphs, the people I wanted to talk about first left Dolce Vita. They’d been sitting just next my friend Claire and me. They were discussing how Whole Foods gobbles up Mom ‘n Pop groceries (earlier they’d been talking about how we live under a fascist system and something about grammar). While I’m no great fan of Whole Paycheck, this seems to me to be a late-in-the-game argument: Mom and Pop were in serious trouble — if not already driven out of business — by larger grocery conglomerates far before Whole Foods became any sort of player. You’re about ten years too late, hippies. (Also, how can hippies afford to live in Hyde Park?)

—–

By the way, I’m apparently getting married.

—–

I’ve only been engaged since Saturday and I already hate wedding planning.

—–

Is it normal for one who becomes familiar with the intricacies of Texas politics to start voting against people just because they don’t like who works for them?

—–

Joaquin is eight to ten days away from graduating from Basic Combat Training for the Army. Then he heads to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for AIT for his MOS (88M, Motor Transport Operator).

—–

I suppose that is all for now. It’s starting to rain a little here at Dolce.

Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat from an old issue of the New York Press.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit.

And this:

On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

Also by Taibbi: “Jesus Made Me Puke,” Rolling Stone, May 1, 2008.

Lt. Col. Edith A Disler, an associate professor of English and deputy head of the Department of English at the Air Force Academy, argues that the Air Force is attempting to reassert its masculinity through language.

Essentially, she argues that two prominent, rather recent linguistic changes or additions have intentionally excluded women serving in the Air Force.

After deeming the Air Force a support service (rather than a mainly combat service; which I would argue is correct in our current conflicts aside from the Close Air Support they provide allied ground troops), she writes:

Women have long and proudly served in almost any support function one can name — the types of functions dominant in the Air Force today. In the face of this reality, its feminine implications, and leadership’s sense that “Congress doesn’t see what the Air Force is bringing to the fight,” inhabitants of the E-ring have engaged a stealthy and powerful weapon of choice — language — to consciously instantiate reification of the male elite. Such language cloaks women in the Air Force as assuredly as our enemies and potential enemies cloak their women in conservative Islamic dress. Sadly, the use of the term “wingman” is just the start.

I’m not certain that it’s a conscious decision on the part of the Air Force leadership to exclude women through the use of language. I do think they should have taken into consideration the diversity of the force, though. There’s no excuse for the Air Force leadership to have missed the implications of such uses of language. But I don’t think it was malicious.

She does make a good point when she says this, though:

Were you to attempt to attract my attention by calling out, “Hey there, airman,” I would assume that a young enlisted member was nearby and I would neither lift my head nor break my stride. Further, as a lieutenant colonel, I consider myself an airman neither by rank nor by sex.

I don’t want to quote too much more because I want those of you who, like me, enjoy the study of language to read the article yourselves, but I did want to add this:

Lt. Col. Disler recounts watching a video that encouraged airmen to turn in other airmen they witnessed perpetrating a rape:

The video implores its viewers to “take care of your wingman.” Apparently the leadership didn’t know that they’d perpetrated a double entendre of the grandest proportion. In the parlance of today’s 20-somethings, a man who knows that another male is a sexual predator and facilitates that predatory nature is known as a “wingman.” Enter the term into your search engine of choice and you will learn that a “wingman” is a man who occupies the attentions of less attractive women so that his “pilot” can target, as it were, the attractive ones. In the Air Force video, the airman rapist, a man, is known by a friend, a man, to be a sexual predator — the enabler is thus the “wingman” of popular American culture.

. . .

At best, the leadership is out of touch with the societal surround of the demographic at which the film was targeted: 19-25 year olds. At worst, the leadership has created a nefarious subtext. Overtly, the leadership is sending a message of teamwork; covertly, however, the Air Force video invokes a term — “wingman” — peculiar to the overwhelmingly male-dominated fighter aircraft community, thereby reinforcing predatory “work hard, play hard” behaviors consistent with the “flyboy” myth of the fighter pilot. In lieu of the term “wingman,” the leadership could easily have invoked a plethora of more widely known, or at least non-gendered, terms that denote teamwork and mutual concern. Instead, the leadership chose a term from the Air Force community statistically least populated by women, nepotistically retaining delusions of self-made grandeur in hopes of fending off threats to the service’s masculinity.

I agree, I agree. I do think the Air Force leadership is out of touch with the civilian world, and especially the age group she mentions — just like the civilian world is almost completely out of touch with the military subculture. I also think that this argument (that the Air Force used a loaded word in the video that will/would likely result in ridicule rather than instruction) is stronger than her first (that the Air Force is consciously making malicious decisions in their use of language).

I will agree that, on some level, these are conscious decisions, especially in the case of the rape video. “Wingman” is probably used more by civilian college-age males than Air Force personnel (given that pilots are a fairly small percentage of the force). However, again, I don’t believe it is malicious.

And I love her closing:

Words create our worlds — hostile worlds, gentle worlds, artistic worlds and militaristic worlds. The words “duty, honor, country,” “integrity, service, excellence,” “selflessness,” and “sacrifice” invoke worlds that demand devotion enough, without ranking maleness above femaleness or killing above reluctance to kill.

Read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

Give it a shot.

I got 44 out of 50 correct. Post your score below.

Also, to my surprise, one of my friends, Krissi Trumeter, criticized my old college friend, Sofia Resnick’s, recent article in the Austin Chronicle. What’s surprising is that they don’t know one another. Austin is a small town.

To see Krissi’s critique of the article, click here and scroll down to “Only State Facts . . . Not Romantic Illusions.”

[musings: test]