What makes politicians likable?

An old balding man running for leadership of a First World country would normally have no chance, unless he is running against a black guy. Another whose ideas require a certain amount of common sense, and which would be drastically different from what is currently espoused has no shot.

Normally you have to look at politics, the media, and anything that requires popularity this way: if I were an idiot, who would I like? To a certain extent Barack Obama and his election-machine both used and circumvented this principle, but it still remains.

You would like good-looking people
Barack Obama was both younger and in better shape than John McCain, and he did not possess an air of grayness and decrepitude. For the simple-minded good looks are a sign of inner superiority, it means you are confident and probably smart. The truth is almost always the opposite, but nobody cares. Fortunately for Mr Obama, he is only good-looking compared to John McCain. Scarlett Johansson is thought be intelligent and charming even if she is bland and ordinary in interviews.

You like people who are like you
The people you who remind you of yourself will make good leaders even if your crowning achievement is to have been employee of the month at Burger King and that was only because you got shot in a hold-up. Barack Obama circumvented this by convincing everybody that only the smart would vote for him, and since most morons consider themselves smart, they had no choice. Again, this is not to say that all people who voted for Obama were morons, but many had to be, since you can’t get a landslide without them.

You would like funny people
For some reason Americans expect their politicians to be funny and likable. Hollywood has people mixed up re: the importance of having a sense of humor. Anyway, while John McCain is a little bit better in the comic-timing department but Obama was taken more seriously, and as a result everything he said that was not in a serious vein came across as being more funny than it really was.

On a slightly different note, Mike Huckabee is funny, to a large extent because of his strabismus. People with wandering eyes are often hilarious.

The perception of Islam

Unlike what most people call Christianity, some forms of this religion allow for active, unprovoked violence against non-combatants. In places where the conventional interpretation of Christianity is common this can only be seen as savage and threatening.

If you look different, speak a different language and dress differently then people are going to be threatened by you and/or hold you in contempt. That is how people view the different, the unfamiliar. You either kill it and/or you shit on it. Example: black people are either dangerous mad-dogs or comical buffoons, white people are either bland weaklings or malevolent exploiters, gay men are either hyper-feminine anus-lickers or violent pederasts.

The cultural expression of anger. In the middle east it’s ok to shout and gesture and burn in effigy. Everything is vocalized, almost nothing, it seems, is internalized. To people who internalize a lot this kind of external expression is seen as hysterical and out-of-control, like tantrumming children. The wild display of emotion feels like haywire unpredictability. In other words, dangerous and uncontrollable, like a forest fire that must be put out before it gets to where people have built houses.

Suicidal. the whole notion of people who are willing to kill themselves to prove a point is unsettling and unnatural to people who have been raised in a culture heavily influenced by conventional Christianity. The willingness to kill oneself (not merely to die in battle) will always be a trump-card that is outside the reach of people in the west and that means there will always a certain amount of fear that comes with knowing that many of their fighters are willing to go that one step further than all of ours.

You, weakling

Does your powerlessness not bother you? With the suits who run your life with their rules and uniformed enforcers? It seems to me that the willingness to submit, to not defy, is a symptom of something far more important than any contemporary issue that is widely discussed. You are weak, and you need to be told how to live your life. You need to be provided with the illusion of a safety net, of your world being managed. All the little clues, the masses of homeless people, the forbidden things that you did not decide were wrong, other people spending money that you worked for. The repackaging and sale of things that you have the right to freely enjoy as much as anybody else. None of that means anything to you.

You are a passive, docile lot, welcoming your slavery, welcoming your masters, accepting the reign of stronger wills than your own. You see nothing wrong with any of this.

Maybe you deserve the whips and the shackles that comprise your life. Maybe the “rights” that they dole out to you and take back at their whim, should be always outside your control. There is nothing wrong with treating a bitch like a bitch.

Conservative style spin and excuses

If Rush Limbaugh were found with kiddie porn and/or dismembered tranny hookers in his trunk
Excuses:
Liberals framed him! Obama framed him!
He was collecting evidence to hunt down and capture pedophiles in his free time.
He had a moment of weakness but God has forgiven him so we should too.

If Sean Hannity was videoed in a Klan robe masturbating to a picture of a Jim Crow era lynching
Excuses:
The Klan robe was a costume for Halloween next year, he was inspecting his penis for cancer, while studying  history.
He had a moment of weakness but God has forgiven him so we should too.

If Ann Coulter was caught (literally) in bed with John McCain and Sarah Palin
Excuses:
They were up late working out a plan for the for the future of the GOP and for America, and when they were done they decided to pray by the bed, being exhausted they just climbed in together. The thermostat was too high so in their sleep they removed their clothing. The 18-inch strap-on must have been left in the hotel-room by a previous guest.
They had a moment of weakness but God has forgiven them so we should too.

Michael Savage videoed giving glory-hole blow-jobs to homeless black and Mexican men at a gay adult book-store
He was doing research. Really in-depth research.
The sodomites have infected his mind with some kind of gay-virus. But he is cured now
They had a moment of weakness but God has forgiven them so we should too.

The unreasonableness of public protests

I am not quite sure what protests are for. I mean, you inconvenience some people, you show the people you are protesting against that there are a relative handful of loud youngsters willing to get some signs together and mobilize to yell at you, but none of that is particularly impressive since the amount of people who make up your typical march-and-yell mob are hardly intimidating on election day.

Protests, at least the ones I have seen, are usually about female attention-whores and the men who want to have sex with them. Occasionally there are the ones with male attention whores and the men who want to have sex with them.

The whole look-at-me idea is what is important. These are people who want more than anything to be noticed. They rationalize it by attaching a cause to the endeavor, but mostly it’s about being seen as the radical, the cool dissenter.

If you want to be effective in a democracy you need to mobilize underground, you need to spread your message virally, respond to counter-arguments, make the issues and ideas important, sell them. All of this is more or less anonymous and therefore not appealing to the dreadlocked and validation-needy. If you don’t live in an open democracy then you need to be even more underground, spread your word to the students first, to veterans, to retired politicians. Again, none of this is going to be attractive to loudmouths who would be better off in Hollywood than trying to deal with serious matters.

The real problems with pedophiles

Obviously molesting a child is wrong. To harm a harmless person, to inflict psychological and emotional damage that will be with them for the rest of their lives in order to live out your fantasies is a crime that should be punished with the harshest penalties a society has to offer. That said, that’s not why pedophilia has a stigma at all. In fact, it’s not even close.

Hypocrisy
Ostensibly everybody loves kids and hates anybody who harms them. Ostensibly. That is the way it is supposed to be, but whenever you set something up as the correct attitude, all the people who don’t really agree are going to pretend to in order to fit in. This pretend righteousness is what we usually term “hypocrisy” and you find it everywhere. The fact is that most human beings care pretty much only about their own lives and their own happiness. Actual genuine interest in somebody else’s welfare is so rare that if you meet one single self-less person in your life it is likely to make a life-changing impression.

Sanctimony
Another problem you have is the tendency of people to be self-righteous around a group with a predisposition that they don’t share. If you happen to smoke and I don’t then that gives me an edge over you and your kind, I get to whine about your secondhand smoke, you get to call me a fascist asshole trying to restrict your freedoms. With pedophilia, most of us have exactly zero sexual interest in children, this makes it easy to feel superior. This is like Muslims who feel superior to pork-eaters and vegans who feel superior to everybody else not willing to commit slow suicide by malnutrition.

Sex
Sexuality. Anything even remotely touching on sexuality is automatically in bad taste for many people. All things sexual are “sick” and “disgusting” and “perverted”. This extends to acts with consenting adults as well. Try to bring up fisting over Christmas dinner this year if you don’t believe me. All things sexual are forbidden for discussion around the family table, at work, with people on the bus, because sex itself is wrong and any interest in it marks you out as a dangerous freak.

Batgirl

FBI Used Mafia Enforcer to find Bodies in Civil Rights Murder Case

FBI ‘used Mafia enforcer’ to find bodies in Mississippi Burning case
His lawyers have appealed against his life sentence for triple manslaughter, citing new evidence that the FBI used Gregory Scarpa – known as The Grim Reaper – to put pressure on Klan members to reveal where the bodies had been hidden.

I think this is awesome, personally. It’s like something straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Unlike most people on the left I have no trouble with torture if it is certain that the person being tortured really does have a connection with the matter at hand. The problem is being certain that they do in fact know what you want to find out, which kind of eliminates most of it. There is no question that governments have to be held accountable for torturing innocents.

In this case there is a certain sweet justice for once. Backwoods redneck meets somebody more badass than himself. I wish it worked out this way more often. I would love to have been a fly on the wall.

Argentine fossil sentenced to life

Life for Argentine ex-army chief

An Argentine ex-army officer has been sentenced to life in prison for the 1977 kidnapping, torture and killing of four left-wing activists.

So 31 years later, just before he is scheduled to die of natural causes anyway, “justice” is served. You might as well just wait him out and then shit on his grave.

George Michael announces his location

George Michael: I Never Thought I Was Attractive

George Michael is in love. So in love, in fact, that he’s been willing to relocate, part-time, to Texas.

Michael and his boyfriend, Texan Kenny Goss, split their time between London and Dallas, where the pop star often goes unrecognized.
The British pop star discusses his career and his life.

“One day last year I was sitting in a McDonald’s in the middle of the Dallas airport. It was incredible, I was standing there, absolutely no one was hassling me,” he told “Good Morning America’s” Chris Cuomo in an exclusive interview.

So now that you and your gay lover have found privacy in the Bible Belt you do an interview with a major network telling the paparazzi and every whackjob stalker where to find you. This is the kind of thing that puts the lie to the idea that celebrities only want peace and quiet and would happily live in obscurity were it not for the persecution of tabloid photographers.

The fact is that celebrities tend to be attention-whores. They were attention whores back when they were unknown and that was what motivated them to get into an industry where people would recognize them and worship them. You don’t decide to get up on a stage without consciously wanting to be looked at.