An equality of misery: the only equality government can guarantee
The downside of the new, expanded Moronosphere: I keep reading stuff I want to go back to and I can’t remember where I saw it. Here’s one I managed to find again, thanks to Andrew’s Dad.
You probably heard that Cuba is finally going to unban cellphones (legally, anyway — a lot of ordinary Cubans had cadged phones off tourists). Here’s the charming way the AP put it:
Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to cell phones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
Got that? To preserve relative economic equality, you must ban basic goods the rest of the world takes for granted. The equality of communism is an equal grinding poverty.
Why? Because you can’t make a poor man into a rich man by giving him money, but you can make a rich man poor by taking his stuff away and not letting him amass more. Rich and poor aren’t static qualities; they flow from attitudes and behaviors. The moment Cuba takes oppression away, some people — by fair means and foul — will manage to accumulate more than others.
You know the old saying: you could divide the world’s money equally among us and, five years later, we’d all be right back where we started. Me, I think there’d be some degree of permanent shift: good and bad luck are a factor in some fortunes. But the general principle holds.
You only have to look at the number of people whose lives are ruined by winning the lottery. Like these lumpen idiots who won £100,000 on a scratch ticket in 2006. They’ve pissed it all away, and now they’re back demanding government benefits.
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the reaction of posters on the site where I read about it: many said government benefits are a right and lottery winnings are a windfall that is supposed to be pissed away on luxuries.
An attitude of poverty.
April 16, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 37
Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Meh. Stupid weasel. I had something I wanted to post about, but I forgot to upload the picture that goes with.
So I’ll post this thing, which is a sort of Incredible Hulkweasel.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s NO WAY that’s a lady weasel. I was going to say it doesn’t make much difference with weasels, but the truth of the matter is, I just really hate drawing women.
Seriously. They’re all squishy and wobbly and boring.
April 14, 2008 — 11:22 am
Comments: 59
Y’arrrr! Get it offa me!
The Rules: 1. Write your own six word memoir. 2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want. 3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere. 4. Tag at least five more blogs with links. 5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play…
I was going to go with “This one time, at band camp…” which nicely captures my lifetime of lighthearted, cheerful inappropriateness. But I’ve never actually seen American Pie, I just know that one scene (and that other scene), so…probably not a safe pick.
Then I thought about, “Okay…one more won’t kill me,” but that’s really more the epitaph I’m hoping to have. Either that, or “oh, sure…it’ll hold my weight.”
“Screw it — I’ll do it tomorrow” is a pretty good pick. As is “living just enough for the city” and “any lazier and I’d stop breathing.”
But I think I’m going to go with “so much promise, so little accomplishment.”
And I’m not going to tag anyone, on account of it plinks my social
phobia something awful. I have this mental image of my taggee looking
down at my link in the dashboard and hissing, “you’re touching me!”
April 11, 2008 — 8:33 am
Comments: 3
Because I’m retentive, that’s why
Y’all know Brits called toilet paper “bog roll,” right? I’m as sure as can be that’s where the term “blogroll” comes from.
Anyhoo…updated mine. This is not as easy as it sounds. I don’t like the built-in WordPress blogroll manager, on account of it does stupid things like alphabetizes blogs that begin with “the” under “t”. But I didn’t want to drop it into my sidebar code because I shuffle the stuff in my sidebars so much. So I saved blogroll.php as a separate file and pull it into my side bar with an <include> tag.
Because I’m retentive, that’s why.
Now, I couldn’t just absorb the master list of moronblogs Conservative Belle assembled. Noooo. Some of the blogs were listed by owner name, and some by blog name. And some of them (Protein Wisdom comes to mind) have a relationship with AoSHQ, but I don’t really think of them as moronblogs proper. If you held a Zippo to my toes and made me cough up a definition — a thing I expect to happen any day now — I’d say a moronblog is a blog started by an Ace reader who woke up one morning and thought, “Waaaaaait a minute! I drink! I cuss! I have opinions! Why not me?”
So I’ll be tinkering with the thing for quite a bit until I have it just right. Because I’m…well, you know what I am. Only, I can’t edit my blogroll from work, because I can get to my WordPress dashboard, but not my BlueHost dashboard. Any editing of my blogroll happens in the narrow window between when I get home and when I am too snockered to shuffle around in the guts of my own blog.
The moronosphere links are a departure. Up until now, my blogroll was my daily reading list. I liked them all. I know there are some excellent blogs in the moronosphere (many of you should’ve been on my blogroll ages ago; I apologize), but I know there are some I won’t much like (not naming names, rhymes with “Mabriel Galor”) and I’m getting all wadded up figuring out who updates often and where I left comments. In short, I’m going nuts trying to absorb so many new links into my habits.
I don’t think you people appreciate how hard it is to be retentive.
Anyhow, for anyone who wants to pinch my work-in-progress version of the moronroll, you can look at in isolation at this link. If I remember correctly from my WordPress days, if you view source that page, copy the text and paste it into a text widget, you can drop it on your WP sidebar.
Squeak if you think an edit should be made. I want to keep this as accurate as possible. Re-ten-tive.
April 9, 2008 — 2:04 pm
Comments: 49
Yay! More suckage!
Ugh. Ceiling painting. I had the roof redone a few years ago, but not before I got some staining. Ceiling stains are not very attractive to buyers.
I was painting away one day this week with one of those extension things. I didn’t realize the handle of my roller was broken and I got a face full of wet, painty roller. And had to clean up my newly finished floors first.
I hate doing ceilings.
What’s that you say? I should have done the ceilings before the floors? Well, you can fuck right off.
April 5, 2008 — 10:24 am
Comments: 26
I’m no expert on this blogging thing
I’ve never declared an open thread before, because you know why? Because I’d feel like a real maroon if nobody posted on it, that’s why.
So please not to be making Weasel feel like a real maroon. I’m a motherless orphling, you know.
(d’oh!)
April 4, 2008 — 7:06 am
Comments: 31
Awwwww…
You know what the adorable kitten means, don’t you? That’s right — Stoaty let you down today. Between the deadline chasing and the fixer-upping of Casa del Weasel, I’m plumb weaseled out. It’s going to be a tight week.
Oh, adorable? Let me tell you something: Damien was born crazier’n a whole boxcar full of homicidal drifters. I guarantee you what he’s saying here is, “I’m going to CUT you, bitch. I’m going to cut you GOOD. You see these here pig-stickers? When I’m done, your own MOTHER won’t know you. Maybe tomorrow you’ll remember to clean my litterbox BEFORE my morning dump. Now git in that kitchen and pour me some FRISKIES.”
Isn’t he the sweetest?
March 31, 2008 — 6:25 pm
Comments: 12
Funny stuff…
I tried to make an early night of it, but people kept CALLING me. On the PHONE. Last one was the cut-rate electrician, who’s showing up in a couple of hours to re-wire my whole electrical box. With his two children in tow. Which means no electricity all day. Plus…children. Every time I hopped up for the phone, I took a generous hit off the industrial sized tub of Jack Daniels, sure an’ it’s a rocky, rocky morning chez Weasel.
So if I’m finding anything funny this morning, you can be sure it’s funny. Well, it is. No, shut up. It is. Tracey Ullman‘s back. She’s a naturalized American now, and she’s celebrating it with a sketch-comedy series on Showtime. I’m cracking up watching the clips. Yeah, okay, I suppose anybody can be funny in 20-second increments, but go watch for yourself and see if you don’t think it’s funny, Mister (or Missus) Smarty Pants.
Okay, I’m off. See you later, with my shiny new electrical box.
March 29, 2008 — 9:42 am
Comments: 66
Finally, a brand that has meaning
So Ace finally notices my pathetic link-whoring attempt fifteen months after I first touched lip to his backside, and where am I? Offline, that’s where. Stupid dead cablemodem.
Actually, I stopped using the moronblogger icon myself when I moved off of WordPress. I decided it was over the line. My understanding of ‘the line’ has always been hazy, but wherever it is I’m pretty sure it has my footprints all over it.
Billy had escaped into the wild by then, adopted by morons everywhere. God speed, little ‘tard!
Today, morons are busting out all over. Conservative Belle is putting together the official moronosphere blogroll (dang! I’ve got a lot of sidebar updating to do) and Sinistar of Double Plus Undead is doing regular moronosphere link roundups.
You know the neat thing about the moronosphere? It actually means something. If you like AoSHQ, you will probably like many of the spinoff blogs. They mainly share the same sense of bedrock conservative values wedded to crude arm-flailing pinwheeling utter drooling retardedness.
Y’all know ‘moron’ was a technical term with a specific meaning, right? Sez Wikipedia:
Moron was originally an English scientific term, coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard from the Greek word moros, which meant “dull” (as opposed to “sharp”), and used to describe a person with a mental age located between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale. It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51-70, being superior in one degree to “imbecile” (IQ of 26-50) and superior in two degrees to “idiot” (IQ of 0-25). The word moron, along with others including “retarded”, “idiotic”, “imbecilic”, “stupid”, and “feeble-minded”, was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, though these words have all now passed into common slang use, exclusively in a detrimental context.
Mental age: eight to twelve. ‘Bout right.
March 25, 2008 — 11:35 am
Comments: 37
Don’t break the internet while I’m gone
My machine with the weaselgraphics is disassembled in a heap somewhere in the kitchen. So is my phone and my cablemodem and my wireless router and all that other shit I need to get connected. So, it’s a weekend of…ummm…yeah. Working on it.
March 21, 2008 — 2:56 pm
Comments: 59