I decided to look her up on Wikipedia, which has gotten better over the years, and I want to be fair to Ms. Wolf. It turns out she has been an anti-vax, conspiracy theorist dolt from the beginning of COVID, including claims of Dr. Fauci receiving payoffs. So at the very least, we know that she has long been an accessory to murder, and should be viewed as such.
To my knowledge, I only know two individuals who portray themselves as "intellectuals" and "anarchists," but when their bizarre and authoritarian tendencies emerged a few years ago, I blocked them and ceased all communications with them. A rabbit hole is a rabbit hole, and I don't care how smart they think they are, choosing to live in a subterranean jungle of falsehoods and weird conspiracy theories and then bludgeoning everyone with said idiocies makes them buffoons in my opinion.
in the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to calling myself an "anarchist" since I first read Kropotkin in college. after about twenty years, I changed to "sentimental anarchist but really just a Social Democrat." I do actually know one real anarchist, a doctor who's a pioneer in the harm reduction approach to substance abuse treatment. and he's a very smart guy and no kind of conspiracy theorist.
Most creative people to some degree are "anarchists" - you kind of have to be to come up with something that wasn't there before - though few of them would see a society organized thus.
you're doubtless right on that. and I also wanted to say that I've been a huge fan of the late (and very much lamented) David Graeber, who described himself (correctly) as an "Anarchist Anthropologist." seriously brilliant guy.
but that's pretty much my brief on Anarchism. I do have a couple of "Mutual Aid" and "IWW" t-shirts.
that was a half-joke. it's true, but obviously funny (at my own expense, of course).
the younger people who call themselves "anarchists" today are not my idea of anarchists. they simply embrace a very young person's idea of "anarchy" and run around saying "fuck you, I WON'T DO IT!" which is, as far as I can make out, more like the kind of nihilism you're supposed to laugh at in Coen Brothers' movies.
About Hunter Biden’s laptop ... he’s bringing suit against the owner of the repair shop and he will win that suit, making all their fairytales FALSE, which they always were. The owner had writ in small type that items left for 90 days became his property. Two problems with that. DE law says it takes a year to appropriate abandoned goods AND the “item” is all you can appropriate. The data is not “yours” and taking it and distributing it is theft.
it's funny, because I ALWAYS thought there was something profoundly fucked up about the whole laptop story because it seemed just WRONG that the guy had ANY right to the data.
Yeah, it had an “off” smell from the start... it seems there’s a laundry list of crimes connected to the mishandling of the data ... for sure the shop owner is on the hook but I wonder if they can go further? He handed it to Giuliani who, I doubt has the skills to pervert the data, but it seems someone did.
Tom, I love your “no holds barred” reporting, but I must apologize today for not being able to get all the way through this mess of ignorance and stupidity. I know you took the time to “educate” us to what we are fighting and I do appreciate it, but I just can’t deal with this level of what has to be genetic stupidity if the woman was able to blow her way to a d of phil.
Don't worry, you don't have to read it all. My doctor tells me I have an extremely high pain threshold, which always amazes me to hear, since I think it is subterranean. :-)
if you read about how profoundly flawed her dissertation research was (it's all there on Wikipedia), you'll be even more convinced that her "thinking vagina" may have done a lot to get her the degree. and btw, she got the doctorate (which might still be in a strange nether state) thirty years after she was in school.
I DID notice that she was married to David Shipley, for whom I have great respect. but it looks like they split up just about when she'd finally gotten completely off the rails.
but NOBODY would be capable of reading all those thousands of comments from the amazingly sick fucks out there.
When a flip flop magnet offers “an apology” to the mass of “iron filing for brains”, the multitude of “filings” feel the redemptive attraction as “the force” takes its course
...and as a graduate school dropout in English Lit, I'm not necessarily impressed that ANYBODY has earned a doctorate. I will say that NONE of the very distinguished faculty I encountered EVER referred to themselves as "Dr." anything. this is aside from the fact that of the four most "distinguished" faculty members I knew, two of them (Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin) never had earned a degree beyond their 'umble CCNY BAs
well, Tom...I sure do feel pretty fucking "supported." for which, thank you.
but I gotta say again that I don't think she was ever a Marxist of any sort. she was--and has always been--a Wolfist.
I remember her first book, which struck me as idiotic. a foxy jewish girl (much like the ones I went to HS with) writes about how beauty is a social construct. and the joint goes wild.
then she writes a bunch of other books (only two or three were ones I knew about, but I checked her Wikipedia page today), each one stupider and crazier (and, from a research point of view, insanely bad) than the one preceding. and each one is filled with more and more conspiracy theory bullshit. one of the books, about the treatment of gay people in 19th century England, misinterprets a phrase to mean its opposite, on which she bases the entire book. several of them get pulped by their publisher. in one of them, she talks about thinking with her vagina (which I doubt, as I respect vaginas a lot more than I could possibly respect HER). in another one, she compares her C-section to Jesus on the cross, sounding like a Jesus freak.
for some reason, ever since I read the post you're quoting here, I've been absolutely unable to let go of this extraordinary rage, which those comments you also quote (very selectively, as there are THOUSANDS) have only served to stoke.
I'd say that there was something sad about the decline of Ms. Wolf's thinking, but I was never impressed with it much to begin with.
then why am I so furious? I should be able to let this go.
but thanks soooo much for repeating and answering some of the "charges" she makes in that post, which (as you point out) consist of accusing most of us for saying things we never said.
and I've been struggling with some of these same issues around Marxism as an elegant theory for framing a critique of the worst aspects of capitalism (especially the monopoly capitalism HERE) and the governments which it always seems to bring about. shitty fruits from a flawed tree.
and yesterday ALREADY began as an unhappy one, March 18th being the day Rochelle passed, eight years ago. and it hasn't gotten significantly "better."
on the positive side, my songwriting partner just sent me his latest draft of a song we wrote over thirty years ago (about, of all things, an AIDS hospice I once worked at) and it's PERFECT, with a new gorgeous melody. if I think about how good it is, my rage at Naomi Wolf goes away, more or less.
so something in the universe seems to be going right.
in fact, in your honor, I'll change my photo to the only one I have readily available of my HS graduation, which is my "Senior Celebrity" page. the guy at the top right ("Class Musician") is Danny, who's currently napping on my couch, exhausted after doing a new orchestration of arguably the worst song ever written ("Don't Cry for Me, Argentina"), who gets mentioned here a LOT. the "Class Actress" was one of the two great loves of my life (I mean, like, LOOK at her), but it's good we never got married because she's a RABID Catholic. the "Class Non-Conformist" is the songwriting partner, but he's on the other page. and of course, there's Ronnie Chernow a few heads above mine.
but as you can see, I win the HS nerd competition hands down. at least graduation picture-wise. I could actually be a lot of fun...
I love it!! The Class Poet! It’s a great picture. You weren’t a nerd you were a thinker and a poet. And I’m glad you didn’t marry the rabid catholic for your sake. She was cute but not worth the angst it would have caused you. Take it from a Catholic dropout when I reached the age of reason…I think age 11. I changed my photo from my graduation picture. I guess I felt funny having my 17 year old self on my current profile after a few days. So I changed it to my cat, Turtle. She almost died several months ago and despite her worried look is doing great.
thank you Karen! I'm taking mine down in a day or two as well and will use Jubal and Daisy for awhile.
it turns out that Jubal has mildly elevated kidney enzymes, so I'm supposed to get a sample of his first day's urine for analysis. the thing that actually worries me the most is that he's gonna think I've suddenly gotten really weird.
he'll be 14 in July...no spring chicken by any means. and he's a decent-sized boy. he's 55 lbs. now, and needs to lose about seven pounds (while older dogs tend to gain weight--as we do--they should really be leaner than they were in their working prime, but I'm pretty sure you already know this). I'm pretty good at helping them lose weight because I weigh EVERYTHING. he's gotten pretty deaf, but hasn't had any real health issues (Daisy is two years younger but has terrible teeth and has lost most of them). still, he's slowing down. Daisy had major hip surgery five years ago, so she has some trouble standing up from lying down. they both have good digestive systems, but I've only ever fed them raw meat, occasional raw eggs, reconstituted doggie vegetables and coconut oil.
I suppose some people might consider me a freakish dog fancier, but I don't. I consider myself a pretty average dog person, but when I researched dog nutrition, the picture I got of most commercial dog foods is not a pretty one.
and if you thought we took time to write back then...the first demo of this one really DID get done in '91 and Forman's been making me crazy for like, months.
then yesterday it all fell together (on HIS end, not mine)...I'd forgotten what it felt like.
I'm just a lyrics guy, but Tony Soll (just above) could probably give you an answer...
in the song in question, the emotions are tamped down really hard enough to break hearts and the new melody sounds gorgeous, but I had nothing to do with that aspect.
Good one. It's useful to be reminded of the criminality and abject ignorance of some of those on the left who have pretended to "leadership," Naomi Wolf among them.
Not only is she a moron, she’s a threat to our health and healthcare systems. I just read about some BS harassment going on against Sarasota Hospital by the “Moms for America”, who also like to ban books by the way. Apparently it has to do with them not treating Covid with Ivermectin. Never mind they had a better Covid survival rate than other hospitals in the area. But the “Moms” and other conspiracy theory nuts are still harassing hospital staff and making their lives miserable. Several conspiracy nuts are now on the hospital board. Possibly Mike Q Flynn helped with that just like he did the school boards there. 🤬
RFK Jr is a total whack job, now touring with the "Save America Tour" alongside Mike Flynn and Donald Trump Jr. Pathetic! He's been de-platformed everywhere for his bullshit.
actually, for me that goes well beyond "sad." Don Jr. (who "made his bones" by pissing in other people's beds) is quite beyond the pale...a human only in the most basic biological sense.
I don't think I'd let my mind go that far as to how sad it is until I read your comment, but I hear what you're saying and I completely agree. It's really awful to think of RFK Jr. with those people, that he's just lost all perspective, and to think of how awful it must be for his siblings, who have gone through more than anyone should have to go through--the assassination, the deaths of, I think it's two of their siblings, and now this. AS sad as this is, somehow I think it's important for me to know, so thank you.
I had escaped Naomi Wolf, until I read some of the excerpts you quote above. I really couldn't stomach reading them all, because Aiyeee! As far as I'm concerned, the only Doctor of Philosophy that Wolf should have been awarded is a doctorate in Baffle Them With Bullshit. She has in common with Dumpster that she is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. That has to be the only reason she attracts any followers. True, she can push words around and construct elliptical, multi-clause sentences that observe the superficial grammar rules. Her remarks include enough Big Smart Person Words that if you don't actually try to decode them, they sound like they *might* mean something. But when you look closely, it's all blather. As the adage goes, "There's less here than meets the eye." Anyone who says they read and agree with Naomi Wolf just flunked the IQ test and the Two Heads test at the same time. RUN the other way.
I actually think that my social work degree was useful, based on my internship experiences, which were valuable when they weren't PAINFUL (longish story there).
the MA in Creative Writing well obviously...not so much. but I made more money going to school that year than I would have if I'd taken an entry-level job, so I can't say I entirely regret it.
in my case, the Piled Higher and Deeper would have been of not much consequence. I grew up in academic circles and I like being on a campus a lot more than any horrible office I've found myself working in, but the gamesmanship involved is something I truly suck at, to a degree that makes me more than suspect my neurodiversity comes into it; god knows it comes into just about everything else.
David, I wish I could take credit for that, but someone else said it first, about Trump. The whole thing goes something like “Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, a business failure’s idea of a business genius, and…” I can’t remember the forth one. I’ll try to find out who said it, and report back.
@David--Well, I am guilty of saying that TFF is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. To quote Jamie Lee Curtis's exasperated character in "A Fish Called Wanda", addressing her brother (Kevin Klein), "Calling you stupid is an insult to stupid people!!!"
In case you're interested, and get the three MGM channels on cable, "Fish" is in heavy rotation right now if you haven't seen it in awhile. It's still funny as hell.
Further proof there are two species of hairless biped on the planet. Homo Sapiens (us) and Homo Sap (them), the biped lacking frontal lobes and opposable thumbs.
I got through three paragraphs and can't read this anymore. It's 11:55 PM here in Kaua'i, and it's time for bed. I'm feeling nauseated from what I read already. I rarely comment, but WTF? What planet are these humans (?), idiots, douche bags, pustulating pimples, cretins, brain sucking vampire mosquitoes from?
OMG, I’m struck dumb. Maybe I’ve been dumb all along to even consider one MAGAt relative to be human. These people are not ignorant, they are stupid but know exactly what they are doing. To give credence to chump and his army of low life’s (including Musk, Thiel, etc) is traitorous and makes a mockery of our “free press.” “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not a traitor—He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” Cicero, 42BC. Well, Cicero speaks for me, except that propaganda works as well as stealth in the night. Better it seems.
if you arrived at that point, you needn't feel compelled to return to it. it's just more of the same.
returning to Camille Paglia's take on it, Camille uses Naomi Wolf as a paradigmatic signifier (that was me, using some of the jargon I picked up in graduate school..."good example" says exactly the same thing, but doesn't sound as "smart" and certainly not as "French") of the uselessness of elite university "training" when she states that NW graduated from Yale with very high grades and won a Rhodes scholarship but is incapable both of writing an English sentence that means anything and of expressing a coherent thought ANYWHERE. when I read that the first time, I thought it was a little harsh; obviously, I now think it was softballing. but again, I stopped paying attention to NW before the turn of this century until this recent unpleasantness
just when I thought I was out of it, she's pulled me back in.
CP hasn't been remotely left-wing since the '60s. her take-down of anything resembling them has been her BRAND since I became aware of her in, say, 1978 through a good friend whose brother was her best friend in college (Harpur College...now SUNY Binghamton).
Oh, I know....somewhere In amongst all the Molly Ivins columns I've kept, I have a masterful take-down of Pagliia's word salad defense of sadism, the Marquis de Sade and the author who wrote the book. In it, Ivins made some points with her trademark humour but what struck me was the sharp analysis of the possible motivations behind Paglia's odd choices of hills to die on.
another interesting thing about a lot of these commenting morons is the extent to which they call certain events and quotations "lies" when we can "go to the videotape" and demonstrate that they're not lies at all.
I decided to look her up on Wikipedia, which has gotten better over the years, and I want to be fair to Ms. Wolf. It turns out she has been an anti-vax, conspiracy theorist dolt from the beginning of COVID, including claims of Dr. Fauci receiving payoffs. So at the very least, we know that she has long been an accessory to murder, and should be viewed as such.
To my knowledge, I only know two individuals who portray themselves as "intellectuals" and "anarchists," but when their bizarre and authoritarian tendencies emerged a few years ago, I blocked them and ceased all communications with them. A rabbit hole is a rabbit hole, and I don't care how smart they think they are, choosing to live in a subterranean jungle of falsehoods and weird conspiracy theories and then bludgeoning everyone with said idiocies makes them buffoons in my opinion.
Yes, Buffoon. That's the word I was looking for about the story of Commissar Klonsky and the Surf Bunny.
in the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to calling myself an "anarchist" since I first read Kropotkin in college. after about twenty years, I changed to "sentimental anarchist but really just a Social Democrat." I do actually know one real anarchist, a doctor who's a pioneer in the harm reduction approach to substance abuse treatment. and he's a very smart guy and no kind of conspiracy theorist.
Most creative people to some degree are "anarchists" - you kind of have to be to come up with something that wasn't there before - though few of them would see a society organized thus.
you're doubtless right on that. and I also wanted to say that I've been a huge fan of the late (and very much lamented) David Graeber, who described himself (correctly) as an "Anarchist Anthropologist." seriously brilliant guy.
but that's pretty much my brief on Anarchism. I do have a couple of "Mutual Aid" and "IWW" t-shirts.
that was a half-joke. it's true, but obviously funny (at my own expense, of course).
the younger people who call themselves "anarchists" today are not my idea of anarchists. they simply embrace a very young person's idea of "anarchy" and run around saying "fuck you, I WON'T DO IT!" which is, as far as I can make out, more like the kind of nihilism you're supposed to laugh at in Coen Brothers' movies.
About Hunter Biden’s laptop ... he’s bringing suit against the owner of the repair shop and he will win that suit, making all their fairytales FALSE, which they always were. The owner had writ in small type that items left for 90 days became his property. Two problems with that. DE law says it takes a year to appropriate abandoned goods AND the “item” is all you can appropriate. The data is not “yours” and taking it and distributing it is theft.
it's funny, because I ALWAYS thought there was something profoundly fucked up about the whole laptop story because it seemed just WRONG that the guy had ANY right to the data.
Yeah, it had an “off” smell from the start... it seems there’s a laundry list of crimes connected to the mishandling of the data ... for sure the shop owner is on the hook but I wonder if they can go further? He handed it to Giuliani who, I doubt has the skills to pervert the data, but it seems someone did.
Tom, I love your “no holds barred” reporting, but I must apologize today for not being able to get all the way through this mess of ignorance and stupidity. I know you took the time to “educate” us to what we are fighting and I do appreciate it, but I just can’t deal with this level of what has to be genetic stupidity if the woman was able to blow her way to a d of phil.
Don't worry, you don't have to read it all. My doctor tells me I have an extremely high pain threshold, which always amazes me to hear, since I think it is subterranean. :-)
actually, mine really IS subterranean.
to quote Dylan yet again, "I used to care but things have changed."
LOL!
if you read about how profoundly flawed her dissertation research was (it's all there on Wikipedia), you'll be even more convinced that her "thinking vagina" may have done a lot to get her the degree. and btw, she got the doctorate (which might still be in a strange nether state) thirty years after she was in school.
I DID notice that she was married to David Shipley, for whom I have great respect. but it looks like they split up just about when she'd finally gotten completely off the rails.
but NOBODY would be capable of reading all those thousands of comments from the amazingly sick fucks out there.
When a flip flop magnet offers “an apology” to the mass of “iron filing for brains”, the multitude of “filings” feel the redemptive attraction as “the force” takes its course
Good one.
...and as a graduate school dropout in English Lit, I'm not necessarily impressed that ANYBODY has earned a doctorate. I will say that NONE of the very distinguished faculty I encountered EVER referred to themselves as "Dr." anything. this is aside from the fact that of the four most "distinguished" faculty members I knew, two of them (Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin) never had earned a degree beyond their 'umble CCNY BAs
well, Tom...I sure do feel pretty fucking "supported." for which, thank you.
but I gotta say again that I don't think she was ever a Marxist of any sort. she was--and has always been--a Wolfist.
I remember her first book, which struck me as idiotic. a foxy jewish girl (much like the ones I went to HS with) writes about how beauty is a social construct. and the joint goes wild.
then she writes a bunch of other books (only two or three were ones I knew about, but I checked her Wikipedia page today), each one stupider and crazier (and, from a research point of view, insanely bad) than the one preceding. and each one is filled with more and more conspiracy theory bullshit. one of the books, about the treatment of gay people in 19th century England, misinterprets a phrase to mean its opposite, on which she bases the entire book. several of them get pulped by their publisher. in one of them, she talks about thinking with her vagina (which I doubt, as I respect vaginas a lot more than I could possibly respect HER). in another one, she compares her C-section to Jesus on the cross, sounding like a Jesus freak.
for some reason, ever since I read the post you're quoting here, I've been absolutely unable to let go of this extraordinary rage, which those comments you also quote (very selectively, as there are THOUSANDS) have only served to stoke.
I'd say that there was something sad about the decline of Ms. Wolf's thinking, but I was never impressed with it much to begin with.
then why am I so furious? I should be able to let this go.
but thanks soooo much for repeating and answering some of the "charges" she makes in that post, which (as you point out) consist of accusing most of us for saying things we never said.
and I've been struggling with some of these same issues around Marxism as an elegant theory for framing a critique of the worst aspects of capitalism (especially the monopoly capitalism HERE) and the governments which it always seems to bring about. shitty fruits from a flawed tree.
and yesterday ALREADY began as an unhappy one, March 18th being the day Rochelle passed, eight years ago. and it hasn't gotten significantly "better."
on the positive side, my songwriting partner just sent me his latest draft of a song we wrote over thirty years ago (about, of all things, an AIDS hospice I once worked at) and it's PERFECT, with a new gorgeous melody. if I think about how good it is, my rage at Naomi Wolf goes away, more or less.
so something in the universe seems to be going right.
think about and pay attention to creativity.
a reminder I need more often than I like to think.
We are here for you David. Sending a virtual hug to you❤️
...and it feels GOOD, Karen.
in fact, in your honor, I'll change my photo to the only one I have readily available of my HS graduation, which is my "Senior Celebrity" page. the guy at the top right ("Class Musician") is Danny, who's currently napping on my couch, exhausted after doing a new orchestration of arguably the worst song ever written ("Don't Cry for Me, Argentina"), who gets mentioned here a LOT. the "Class Actress" was one of the two great loves of my life (I mean, like, LOOK at her), but it's good we never got married because she's a RABID Catholic. the "Class Non-Conformist" is the songwriting partner, but he's on the other page. and of course, there's Ronnie Chernow a few heads above mine.
but as you can see, I win the HS nerd competition hands down. at least graduation picture-wise. I could actually be a lot of fun...
I love it!! The Class Poet! It’s a great picture. You weren’t a nerd you were a thinker and a poet. And I’m glad you didn’t marry the rabid catholic for your sake. She was cute but not worth the angst it would have caused you. Take it from a Catholic dropout when I reached the age of reason…I think age 11. I changed my photo from my graduation picture. I guess I felt funny having my 17 year old self on my current profile after a few days. So I changed it to my cat, Turtle. She almost died several months ago and despite her worried look is doing great.
thank you Karen! I'm taking mine down in a day or two as well and will use Jubal and Daisy for awhile.
it turns out that Jubal has mildly elevated kidney enzymes, so I'm supposed to get a sample of his first day's urine for analysis. the thing that actually worries me the most is that he's gonna think I've suddenly gotten really weird.
How old is Jubal?
he'll be 14 in July...no spring chicken by any means. and he's a decent-sized boy. he's 55 lbs. now, and needs to lose about seven pounds (while older dogs tend to gain weight--as we do--they should really be leaner than they were in their working prime, but I'm pretty sure you already know this). I'm pretty good at helping them lose weight because I weigh EVERYTHING. he's gotten pretty deaf, but hasn't had any real health issues (Daisy is two years younger but has terrible teeth and has lost most of them). still, he's slowing down. Daisy had major hip surgery five years ago, so she has some trouble standing up from lying down. they both have good digestive systems, but I've only ever fed them raw meat, occasional raw eggs, reconstituted doggie vegetables and coconut oil.
I suppose some people might consider me a freakish dog fancier, but I don't. I consider myself a pretty average dog person, but when I researched dog nutrition, the picture I got of most commercial dog foods is not a pretty one.
Yes a wolfist!
Hiya David. Woof, woof
I figured you'd woof me sooner or later, Tone.
and if you thought we took time to write back then...the first demo of this one really DID get done in '91 and Forman's been making me crazy for like, months.
then yesterday it all fell together (on HIS end, not mine)...I'd forgotten what it felt like.
which is to say that it feels GOOD.
A songwriter huh? Brotha!!!
Are you a Major 7th kinda guy or an A5 proponent? Its all about “ release” of the emotion, right?
I'm just a lyrics guy, but Tony Soll (just above) could probably give you an answer...
in the song in question, the emotions are tamped down really hard enough to break hearts and the new melody sounds gorgeous, but I had nothing to do with that aspect.
Good one. It's useful to be reminded of the criminality and abject ignorance of some of those on the left who have pretended to "leadership," Naomi Wolf among them.
Not only is she a moron, she’s a threat to our health and healthcare systems. I just read about some BS harassment going on against Sarasota Hospital by the “Moms for America”, who also like to ban books by the way. Apparently it has to do with them not treating Covid with Ivermectin. Never mind they had a better Covid survival rate than other hospitals in the area. But the “Moms” and other conspiracy theory nuts are still harassing hospital staff and making their lives miserable. Several conspiracy nuts are now on the hospital board. Possibly Mike Q Flynn helped with that just like he did the school boards there. 🤬
This is the first I've ever heard of Naomi Wolf. She sounds as nutty as RFK Jr. and I'm betting she did not lose a parent to assassination.
RFK Jr is a total whack job, now touring with the "Save America Tour" alongside Mike Flynn and Donald Trump Jr. Pathetic! He's been de-platformed everywhere for his bullshit.
it's really, really sad what happened to him.
It is incredibly sad, the more so that he's touring with Trump Jr.
actually, for me that goes well beyond "sad." Don Jr. (who "made his bones" by pissing in other people's beds) is quite beyond the pale...a human only in the most basic biological sense.
I don't think I'd let my mind go that far as to how sad it is until I read your comment, but I hear what you're saying and I completely agree. It's really awful to think of RFK Jr. with those people, that he's just lost all perspective, and to think of how awful it must be for his siblings, who have gone through more than anyone should have to go through--the assassination, the deaths of, I think it's two of their siblings, and now this. AS sad as this is, somehow I think it's important for me to know, so thank you.
well then David, you need to check the Wikipedia article, because she's much crazier than you can possibly imagine.
I followed her career from its shady beginnings, but she fell off my radar about twenty years back.
I'll check wikipedia
I had escaped Naomi Wolf, until I read some of the excerpts you quote above. I really couldn't stomach reading them all, because Aiyeee! As far as I'm concerned, the only Doctor of Philosophy that Wolf should have been awarded is a doctorate in Baffle Them With Bullshit. She has in common with Dumpster that she is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. That has to be the only reason she attracts any followers. True, she can push words around and construct elliptical, multi-clause sentences that observe the superficial grammar rules. Her remarks include enough Big Smart Person Words that if you don't actually try to decode them, they sound like they *might* mean something. But when you look closely, it's all blather. As the adage goes, "There's less here than meets the eye." Anyone who says they read and agree with Naomi Wolf just flunked the IQ test and the Two Heads test at the same time. RUN the other way.
A friend who owns one told me that Ph.D. actually stands for "Piled higher and deeper."
the joke is "Bullshit, More shit, Piled Higher and Deeper." I never met a PhD student who couldn't rattle that off in his or her sleep.
yes indeed. Only got to "more shit"
me too. and TWICE.
I actually think that my social work degree was useful, based on my internship experiences, which were valuable when they weren't PAINFUL (longish story there).
the MA in Creative Writing well obviously...not so much. but I made more money going to school that year than I would have if I'd taken an entry-level job, so I can't say I entirely regret it.
in my case, the Piled Higher and Deeper would have been of not much consequence. I grew up in academic circles and I like being on a campus a lot more than any horrible office I've found myself working in, but the gamesmanship involved is something I truly suck at, to a degree that makes me more than suspect my neurodiversity comes into it; god knows it comes into just about everything else.
Your neurodiversity probably makes you able to see bullshit situations clearly enough to not step into (most of) them.
Hahaha!
beautiful, Elizabeth! EXACTLY!! I wish I'd said it. "a stupid person's idea of a smart person." seriously brilliant.
brava.
David, I wish I could take credit for that, but someone else said it first, about Trump. The whole thing goes something like “Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, a stupid person’s idea of a smart person, a business failure’s idea of a business genius, and…” I can’t remember the forth one. I’ll try to find out who said it, and report back.
David, there has apparently been quite a bit of discussion about who originated that phrase, or its first variant. Here’s an instructive and amusing article in The Atlantic on the question, from 2011: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/a-dumb-persons-idea-of-a-smart-person-whose-line-is-it/249932/
thank you, Elizabeth.
but did anyone actually say that TFF is ANYBODY's idea of a smart person?
if so (and it's probably so), that really IS scary.
@David--Well, I am guilty of saying that TFF is a stupid person's idea of a smart person. To quote Jamie Lee Curtis's exasperated character in "A Fish Called Wanda", addressing her brother (Kevin Klein), "Calling you stupid is an insult to stupid people!!!"
In case you're interested, and get the three MGM channels on cable, "Fish" is in heavy rotation right now if you haven't seen it in awhile. It's still funny as hell.
I cannot even go there with these people. What on earth do they use for brains?
Further proof there are two species of hairless biped on the planet. Homo Sapiens (us) and Homo Sap (them), the biped lacking frontal lobes and opposable thumbs.
Used cat litter.
you're being unfair to cat litter, even if it's used. I deal with dogshit every day, and "dogshit" comes a lot closer.
I got through three paragraphs and can't read this anymore. It's 11:55 PM here in Kaua'i, and it's time for bed. I'm feeling nauseated from what I read already. I rarely comment, but WTF? What planet are these humans (?), idiots, douche bags, pustulating pimples, cretins, brain sucking vampire mosquitoes from?
Same one we are - there's our problem. Congratulate yourself that that was as far as you could get.
OMG, I’m struck dumb. Maybe I’ve been dumb all along to even consider one MAGAt relative to be human. These people are not ignorant, they are stupid but know exactly what they are doing. To give credence to chump and his army of low life’s (including Musk, Thiel, etc) is traitorous and makes a mockery of our “free press.” “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. For the traitor appears not a traitor—He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation—he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city—he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” Cicero, 42BC. Well, Cicero speaks for me, except that propaganda works as well as stealth in the night. Better it seems.
Just cant deal with these " filthy fecal putrid bottom-dwellers"! Perfect description tho isnt it?
Of them.
Yup - absolutely!! Fits like a glove. Guess thats more projection, right?
I was so overwhelmingly disgusted I had to stop reading. I'll get back to it later when my head is back on straight.
A sane response.
if you arrived at that point, you needn't feel compelled to return to it. it's just more of the same.
returning to Camille Paglia's take on it, Camille uses Naomi Wolf as a paradigmatic signifier (that was me, using some of the jargon I picked up in graduate school..."good example" says exactly the same thing, but doesn't sound as "smart" and certainly not as "French") of the uselessness of elite university "training" when she states that NW graduated from Yale with very high grades and won a Rhodes scholarship but is incapable both of writing an English sentence that means anything and of expressing a coherent thought ANYWHERE. when I read that the first time, I thought it was a little harsh; obviously, I now think it was softballing. but again, I stopped paying attention to NW before the turn of this century until this recent unpleasantness
just when I thought I was out of it, she's pulled me back in.
Dear goddess, and I thought Camille Paglia was an over-the-top version of an incomprehensible "so-far-leftist she turned into a rightist".
It wasn't so much Wolf's nonsense that was as disturbing as the swarms of incredibly dense morons who agreed with her and commented. Yikes.
CP hasn't been remotely left-wing since the '60s. her take-down of anything resembling them has been her BRAND since I became aware of her in, say, 1978 through a good friend whose brother was her best friend in college (Harpur College...now SUNY Binghamton).
Oh, I know....somewhere In amongst all the Molly Ivins columns I've kept, I have a masterful take-down of Pagliia's word salad defense of sadism, the Marquis de Sade and the author who wrote the book. In it, Ivins made some points with her trademark humour but what struck me was the sharp analysis of the possible motivations behind Paglia's odd choices of hills to die on.
another interesting thing about a lot of these commenting morons is the extent to which they call certain events and quotations "lies" when we can "go to the videotape" and demonstrate that they're not lies at all.
One thought. Sleeper Cell
The money to hide in plain sight coming from those known Dark Money sources is available
The plan has been 40 years in the making
Yeah, I know, its just conjecture
Follow the money
Honest people don’t use lies to promote lies
Disgusting. Thank You.