This Bad Commie stabisode brings you some entertaining foreign lies!

Why Americans love George W Bush
By Spengler

George W Bush almost certainly will win another term as president of the United States, as I have predicted all along (Careful what you Bush for, August 3). That surprises outside observers of US politics, who can see that the Democrats are cleverer, better dressed and better looking. It is just the sort of Americans who know they are neither clever nor good-looking who will vote for Bush.
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Bush voters really do look worse (obesity is an inland disease in the US), dress worse, and are less likely to have attended a university than Kerry voters. But Bush voters are the sort of people who believe in their heart of hearts that America was founded to protect the likes of them - unlike the clever and attractive people who can fend quite well for themselves. That is the source of their patriotism.
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To Europeans, patriotism implies a near-racialist nationalism of the sort that sent hordes of soldiers to butcher their fellows during the two World Wars of the last century. American patriotism belongs to a different species. Governments, in the experience of most of the peoples of the world, exist to help the rich and powerful oppress the weak and helpless. Whenever the representatives of the weak have taken power, they turned into oppressors. Europeans never have loved their governments; love of country means love of one's race and culture, the narcissistic self-worship of tribalism.
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Among such people, the president's simple message resonates mightily. Two World Wars taught Europeans that there is no good or evil, only the insidious jealousies of contending peoples. God therefore is on no one's side, and the alternative to mutual butchery is negotiated compromise. Senator Kerry and the US coastal elite believe the same thing, namely that enlightened specialists can interrupt the tragic destiny of peoples and save the world from itself.
That is an alien intrusion upon the American world view, which began, almost biblically, by separating good and evil. The oppressive English monarchy was evil, while the self-governing English colonies were good; slavery was evil, while the system of free labor was good; what immigrants left behind in the old country was evil, and what they found on American shores was good. Nazism was evil, democracy was good; the Soviet Union was evil, while America was good.
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Once attacked, Americans want to fight back. George W Bush may have attacked the wrong country (which I do not believe), and he may have mistaken the US mission after the initial fighting was over (which I do believe), but Americans are quite willing to forgive him. They understand that it is hard to track down and destroy a shadowy enemy, and do not mind much if the United States has to trounce a few countries before finding the right ones.

The attractive, witty and affluent elite who support John Kerry cannot bear the idea that the overweight, dull and impecunious commoners of Middle America will give Bush a second term. I am reminded of the fictional Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks' 1968 movie The Producers. Brooks' slapstick Nazi complains, "Hitler was a better dancer than Churchill; Hitler was a better dresser than Churchill; Hitler was a better painter than Churchill: he could paint a whole apartment in one afternoon, two coats."

As for the other countries of the world, it is an inconvenience that George W Bush will pursue the "war on terror" to its bitter end, namely civilization war. It doesn't matter. They don't vote. My advice: suck it up and prepare for the second Bush administration.

Now that them there is sum smart cookie forener. I sur dont wanna wrasle with him.
This article terrifies communist republicans and capitalist democrats alike! It's a Bad Commie article! Fair and balanced with extra stabbings for BOTH sides.

Here is a summary of Ra^thergate as seen from under the pyjama kilt of a scotchman:

Unfortunately, for CBS and Bush's opponents, it seems all but certain that these memos were crude forgeries, written on a modern computer using Microsoft Word while purporting to be memos written on a typewriter more than 30 years ago. The fonts, justification and kerning on the memos are precisely consistent with identical replica documents composed using a word processor - which was not, of course, available in the early 1970s.

Despite this, and despite the network's inability to find a single expert to back their story up, CBS continues to insist the memos are genuine. By doing so, they have tarnished whatever trust the mainstream, established media still retains in the United States.
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According to Rather: "Today, on the internet and elsewhere, some people - including many who are partisan political operatives - concentrated not on the key questions the overall story raised, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."

In other words, he implied, even if the documents were false, the larger story on Bush’s service in the National Guard was true.

THIS, YOU WILL RECALL, was the same defence offered by the BBC in its defence of journalist Andrew Gilligan's infamous report that Downing Street had "sexed-up" details of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes in the dossier presented to parliament.

Both stories fall into the classic "too good to check" category, familiar to journalists worldwide. In both cases, too, the stories neatly confirmed pre-existing assumptions held by the bien-pensant liberal media. Saddam was not a threat to anyone, ergo the Prime Minister lied his way into war; Bush shirked his duty, ergo these documents had to be genuine.
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But CBS's dismissive response to the bloggers was revealing in another way. It was clear that the network resented being held accountable by, gasp, amateurs, who were not trained journalists and part of the media elite. One CBS executive dismissed bloggers as "guys who write in their pyjamas". How dare they criticise the mighty CBS!

This time, the pyjama- wearers have bitten back and they may, in the process, have dealt a grievous blow to America's smug and self-satisfied media aristocracy.
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AS GLENN Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee and host of www.instapundit.com, puts it, in the old days, the network could have got away with it.

"CBS would have flashed the documents on TV for a few seconds and no-one would have seen them again," he says. "Even the people with doubts would have assumed that CBS had done its leg-work, as we did for years. Now we can see that such assumptions are unjustified, and indeed may always have been unjustified."

The lesson of this week has been that, in America at least, the media has been democratised. In a dizzying, energising and raucous return to the pamphleteering days of the 18th and 19th centuries, the people have, through the worldwide web and easy-to-use publishing software, been given a voice. They will not easily be silenced.

Has the pathetic communist Dan Ra^ther been stabbed yet? That communist islamofascist Dan Ra^ther has a long history of crap like this.

Here is some pathetic propaganda by science fiction writers (I always knew all science was fiction):

Cory Doctorow is thinking about control of information and technology as the deciding factor - leading to a new colonialism: "As you'd expect, I think the social future is tied up intimately with copyright, since copyright is the body of law that most closely regulates technology (copying, distributing, and producing are all inherently technological in nature and change dramatically when new tech comes along). Copyright also has the distinction of being the area of law/policy that deals most copiously in crazy-ass metaphors, such as the comparison of copying to theft" - even though the former leaves a perfectly good original behind, while the latter deprives the owner of her property. Finally, copyright is the area of law most bound up with free expression, which makes it a hotbed of socio-technical storylines.

"Property law deals with instances of ideas - a physical chair - while "Intellectual Property" law deals with the ideas themselves - a plan for a chair. Increasingly, though, the instantiation of an idea and the idea itself: a electronic text, an MP3, a fabrication CAD/CAM file.

"Traditionally, new nations have exempted themselves from IP regulation (as the US did for its first century, enthusiastically pirating the IP of the world's great powers). When you're a net importer of IP, there's no good economic reason to treat foreign ideas as sacrosanct property. Indeed, piracy and successful industrialization go hand in hand.

"Today, though, the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas, usually by tying IP enforcement to other trade elements ("If you give us fifty more years of copyright, we'll double our soybean quota!"), which is working out to be a disaster. No one in Brazil or South Africa can pay American street-prices for pharmaceuticals - or CDs, or DVDs, or books, or software. A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison.”

But Bruce Sterling's thinking that the leading trends are coming from outside North America: "I used to think that the USA, being an innovative, high-tech polity, would be inventing and promulgating a lot of tomorrow's social change. I don't believe that any more. These days I spend a lot of time looking at Brazil, China, India, and Europe. Japan and Russia, interestingly, are even more moribund than the USA."

Hmmm, maybe we should be talking about property creation rights and property destruction rights instead of the misnamed "copy"rights and property ownership rights. Anyone who can't create property isn't fit to own it anyway.

Some more pravda:

Cory Doctorow doubts the efficacy of big control and again sees information as the key: "The Stasi - the East German version of the KGB - had detailed files on virtually every resident of East Germany, yet somehow managed to miss the fact that the Berlin Wall was about to come down until it was already in rubble. Tell me again how a centralized government makes us more secure? September 11th wasn't a failure to gather enough intelligence: it was a failure to correctly interpret the intelligence in hand. There was too much irrelevant data, too much noise. Gathering orders of magnitude MORE noise just puts that needle into a much bigger haystack, while imposing high social costs. Fingerprinting visitors to the US and jailing foreign journalists for not understanding the impossibly baroque new visa regs makes America less secure (by encouraging people to lie about the purposes of their visit and by chasing honest people out of the country), not more."

and a smelly hippy has his say:

Taking that concern to the next level, Cory Doctorow: "I think the Ashcroftian terrorist witchhunts, coupled with the fiscal irresponsibility of massive tax-cuts and out-of-control cronyist military adventurism will be regarded as the world mistake in this part of the American century by debtor generations to come who find themselves socially and economically isolated from the rest of the world. When the US dollar starts to drop against the laser-printed post-Saddam occupation Dinar, an unbacked currency, you know that your economy is in the deepest of shit."

What would a smelly hippy know about money? He'd have to learn what work was first. Someone should cook and eat him.

more democra-lies:

8) Will the gap between the haves and the have-nots widen even more dramatically? If it does, what'll happen?

Bruce Sterling's response is as trenchant as it is insightful: "Feudal societies go broke. These top-heavy crony capitalists of the Enron ilk are nowhere near so good at business as they think they are."

And now, to the main course:

Only half the writers chose to guess about the outcome of the coming Presidential election, and only Robinson was definite: "Kerry."

Bruce Sterling said, chillingly: "Osama will get to decide it."

And Ken Wharton sums up the situation: "It'll be decided by a million Red Queens: swing-voters who are so overburdened with busy lives that they're running just as fast as they can to stay in the same place. It's a big decision, with big implications, so you'd hope that these people will take at least a few hours to find relevant information that isn't spoon-fed from the campaigns. But with no time to weigh how hundreds of complex issues are going to affect their families, a big part of the final vote will come down to gut instinct. Instincts that may have served us well on the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago, but are now all-too-helpless in the face of well-financed Hari Seldons. And unlike Asimov's legendary character, I'm not convinced that these guys have our best interests at heart."

Couldn't they find any republicoon sci-fi writers? Or are all republicoons fantasy writers?

STAB ALL COMMIES
-posted by Bad Commie @ 11:44 AM