Today's Rude-ness

The Rude Pundit starts it all off:

7/31/2014
In Brief: Quotes That Mean as Much Now as When They Were First Said (With a Photo for Context)

The quote is from a just-released recording of former President Bill Clinton speaking to a group of business people in Melbourne, Australia, on September 10, 2001 (or "One day before everything changed forever and we lost our country"). Clinton was talking about how he might have been able to get to Osama bin Laden: "I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it."

You can tease that out and say that killing those 300 people would have created even more terrorists. Or you can say that those people were accessories to bin Laden by their proximity and that Clinton was a hypocrite because of other missile strikes he ordered or that Bill Clinton was a pussy whose inaction helped cause 9/11 (and then you can merrily go fuck yourself).

The photo is from the Gaza Strip in the last few days. The context is how intractably screwed people are when they don't give a shit about those innocent men, women, and children:

And I'll just add this - I don't pretend to know what exactly we should do, or even how we're supposed to figure out what "the right thing" is, but I think I know this much: The process for making the decision on "doing the right thing" never starts with "Step 1 - Fuck those kids - they don't matter as much as this other thing".

Some Toons

Meet Ryan Anderson

Ryan Anderson is the young gun occupying the William E Simon chair at The Rich Boy Vanity Project Heritage Foundation - the guy's a piece of work.

Quick Recap: The point here is supposed to be about pushing the Phobes at Heritage to defend their stoopid - ie: Marriage Inequality within the IRS Code.  So the questioner asks why he shouldn't be allowed to file a joint tax return with his husband just like all the straight couples get to do - and behold the awesomeness beginning at about 1:00:



Anderson uses Slippery Slope to build a Straw Man made of Special Pleading, and finishes it off with a near-brilliant Tu Quoque flourish, just before he deploys Begging The Question as a lead-up to blaming the victim (it's your own fault because you wanna marry the wrong person).

Once you know what you're looking for, it gets easier to find.

hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

Irony-Challenged

Whenever I hear "Frivolous Lawsuit" or "Litigation Crazy" or "Litigious", it's pretty automatic that I'm going to think "GOP" because they're the ones who're always carping about how everybody just wants to sue everybody whenever they don't get their way, or they're just looking for a nice fat payday for doin' nuthin' blah blah blah.

Is there anything more frivolous than the crazily litigious House Republicans voting to sue Obama - at the end of the least productive legislative session since Hammurabi and right before these douche nozzles leave town for 5 weeks of vacation?

Don't Believe

"What's it like to lie to children for a living?"

Logical Fallacy #20 - Begging The Question

Begging the question means "assuming the conclusion (of an argument)", a type of circular reasoning. This is an informal fallacy where the conclusion that one is attempting to prove is included in the initial premises of an argument, often in an indirect way that conceals this fact.[1]

The term "begging the question" originated in the 16th century as a mistranslation of Latin petitio principii "assuming the initial point".[2] In modern vernacular usage, "to beg the question" is sometimes used to mean "to raise the question" (as in "This begs the question of whether...") or "to dodge the question".[2]

Today's Rational Thinking

Some of the discussions in the comments sections are trying to address the "economics" of this thing, and it occurs to me that we'll need somebody to look into the potential economic ripple effect of people feeling less comfortable in public places, and so deciding to stay home rather than accept the increased risk (real or imagined) that they'll be the victims of random gunfire while simply attempting to order out at the local deli.

PQED.org

hat tip = Crooks and Liars

About That Flag

Some knuckleheads down in Richmond decided a while back to put up the CSA Battle Flag because they tho't it was a good way to show their...uhm...American Pride(?)  Yeah, that one still eludes most of us graced with the sense the good lord gave the average okra pod.

Anyway, they've put up another one, but there seems to be some real push-back goin' on (or at least a little wishful Photoshoppin'):

And BTW:

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Pix

Modern GOP Arithmetic

Teacher: Johnny, if you have 12 cupcakes and you give 3 to Jamal, how many cupcakes do you have left?

Johnny: I have 12 cuz I ain't givin' nuthin' to nobody.

Teacher: Well, if you have 12 cupcakes and I take 3 from you and give them to Jamal, then how many do you have?

Johnny:  Then I have 12 cupcakes and 2 dead bodies to dispose of.


(Ed Note: I'm not clever enough to have come up with it on my own - I saw this not too long ago on the discussion thread of a "conservative" website.)