The left seems to think the right is going to be shocked by – what – music videos?
Beck unhinges pretty easily (and yes, for those of us whose family owe their lives to Indian doctors, some rants are offensive). But he’s a hell of a lot more shocked at Bill Ayers. His “unhingement” still retains more balance than the left’s. What’s creepier – posing nude at 22 or acting as Edwards has at. . . , starring in a video (admittedly a bit irritating in that boring 80’s way) in your youth or being Teddy Kennedy in your old age.
Whatever may or may not be true of the Palins and Browns, they appear to have engaged life with zest; one of the balancing acts of their youths – and probably of their lives – have been economic. Perhaps their fiscal care was learned balancing ambition and tuition. The left’s desire to make loans seductive & college a “right”, to featherbed administration and tenured jobs while increasing the load on grad students and adjuncts has had detrimental effects on cost as well substance. Many an academic is critical of Benjamin Franklin, perhaps because he understood debt undercuts integrity, that “it’s hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”
Perhaps such choices came because it’s a kick to pose nude, to see different colleges when a world tour is not easily financed. I like that – some risk taking reflects energy and engagement, they live with it and learn from it. But, most of all, I’d rather people made choices that resulted in videos than a mountain of debt. The left, of course, would rather put those students who don’t buy the books – or read them – at the back of my class, whining they can’t drop because they might lose their student loans. These are students often neither stupid nor consciously dishonest; they are, however, passive and misdirected. They do not value learning but rather the “college experience,” have no imagination to see another path, and, well, have no clue about themselves, education, debt, the world. As they wander through life, they may never get that clue. And this won’t help. Plus, don’t get me started on the theory that “at risk” kids in high school should start taking college-level classes in high school – subsidized by the government of course.
Excessive emphasis on “the college experience” leads to people who expect their *jobs* to be similar to college—especially, looking for very well-defined rules for what one has to do to succeed. I think this is one reason so many people go to law school: they want to continue the academic environment, and they think (accurately or not) that the law firm world has the same kind of well-defined progression.
Companies that make too much of their training programs and career development programs, when hiring entry-level employees, are at risk of attracting the wrong kind of people. Not that such things are valueless, but in business we should be looking for people who are comfortable with a certain level of wild & wooly enviroment.
What is this all about? What’s wrong with this video (I didn’t notice anybody ‘nude” in it)? And how is it connected to Beck, Or Brown, or Palin?
Or to Indian doctors?
Strange.
Mrs. Scott Brown appears in the video when she was very much younger – in college? Who in that time of their lives did things that in retrospect may not seem the wisest choices now? It is not lewd or crude or offensive and much nicer than many music videos done these days. Whoever posted it has probably done the Browns a favor.
The funniest part about the Cosmo shoot, and now the music-video-inna-bikini is the fact that apparently these people expected the rest of us to clutch our pearls, and fall onto the fainting couch – as if we were all a bunch of prudish Mrs. Grundys.
I think the fact that we’re all basically going … “Umm …’kay .. and the problem is?”
(OTO I’m glad that no one took a picture of me at a costume party in the late 80s dressed as a military dominatrix … but then, I’m not in politics.)
Pam and Sgt.Mom: thanks. Now I sorta get the reference.
Mrs. Brown was hot. Still is, actually.
The real shocker today is Ayla admitting she voted for Kerry. The left is straining at gnats more than usual. That is an attractive family. I wish McCain’s daughter Meghan had as much drive as those Brown girls seem to have.
The real shocker today is Ayla admitting she voted for Kerry.
She voted for John Kerry over Jeff Beatty. And that is a surprise why?
I think this silly little incident points to something larger & more important in the way many “progressives” think about the rest of us…
Many college professors, for example, seem to believe their incoming students come from families where Dad is a small businessman and a rock-ribbed Republican and Mom is a mother of four whose main interests are cooking, Church, and the PTA…and the professor, as he sees himself, is opening the student’s mind by introducing him to a broader world.
Actually, the student more likely comes from a family where Dad is a school administrator, Mom is a lawyer, they are both Democrats, and the “new” ideas that the professor is exposing the student to are precisely the same platitudes he has heard all his life.
A couple of months ago, I was talking to a woman who expressed amazement that I dissented from the “progressive” opinion suite. “And you have a COLLEGE DEGREE!” she said, “How can you POSSIBLY think this way?”
(I do have a degree, but it’s not in *education*, which is what hers was in….)
Even medical school faculties are infected. A couple of years ago, I commented that the greatest educational institution in American history was the American Army which, in World War II, taught 240,000 men, and a few hundred women, to fly. Another (female) faculty member nearly had a heart attack. I know how Larry Summers feels.
Michael K…what did she say? Or was it just pure emotion?
brown supported masscare– not fiscally responsible.
palin left a tiny town 20 million bucks in debt– also not fiscally responsible.
i always find it interesting how republicans get shoehorned into a pseudo-franklinian frugality that they rarely actually possess in office, or even in private life.
there is no shortage of republicans who want free college, but only for their children, or who went into massive debt for college or house-flipping.
i think this post is wishfully thinking some stuff that reality doesn’t really reflect.
but yes, the frothing about the brown family is amusing as there occurs a grasping for hypocrisy when GOP types do the sorts of things Dem types claim are signs of empowerment and individual AWESOME.
A long time ago, I came to understand that the whole point of “consciousness raising” was to generate agreement with the beliefs of whoever was in charge of the raising. Disagreement was, in and of itself, proof that one’s consciousness had failed to elevate.
The horrified woman mentioned above is of that very mindset. The concept of independent thought, and especially any thought contrary to the approved catechism, is simply beyond her grasp.
Lomborg deals with the issue, in environmental terms, very nicely when he describes “The Litany”—that set of must-have, must-profess environmental articles of faith from which no dissent or question can be permitted.
We’ve seen it in the climate change hullabaloo with a vengeance. (How much do you want to bet that, even after it was admitted by the promulgators to be false and unsupported by scientific evidence, the plaintive cry that “the glaciers in the Hymalayas are melting” will be raised repeatedly in the future as if none of the recent admissions had ever occurred?)
Part of the collectivist’s conceit is to define intelligient belief, as well as compassionate, and tolerant, etc., as “that which agrees with me”. It is very long past time that this utterly ridiculous inversion of reality be ridiculed, and denied any validity.
Anytime, anywhere, in any context, when some disciple of the collective starts sniffing about his rarified intelligience or compassionate nature or saintly tolerance, he should be rudely and firmly reminded that the end result of collectivist “thought” has been death, destruction, and impoverishment in every instance and every locality it has been put into practice.
The sooner the tenets of collectivist ideology have the same general reputation as the tenets of the flat earth society, the better off, and safer, the rest of us will be.
“Michael K…what did she say? Or was it just pure emotion?”
She snorted and rather ostentatiously flung herself in her chair. At least she didn’t threaten nausea. A loud “hmmpt !” was all.
The Palin stories accumulate. The “20 million bucks in debt–” was a bond issue, considerably less than that amount, for a community sports center. It was approved in an election. Wasilla is a prosperous suburb of Anchorage which has twice been the subject of a statewide initiative to move the capital there. In both instances, it was defeated by Fairbanks which is a jealous rival of Anchorage.