Sabo

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The very awesome Sabo is interviewed in the very pathetic Guardian. Bravo to him for going into the den of the enemy. They did not land a glove on him, though they tried in their feeble whining way.  

Sabo has a punk rock sensibility, which the above image from him demonstrates. Those of us of a certain age and youthful inclination will recognize it right away.

Sabo is responsible for many images that attack the left with a scurrilousness and force that is wholly appropriate to the scale and malice of the provocation. Sabo is famous for putting up posters all over Los Angeles which affront the lefty sensibilities of the inhabitants — Like this one:

His website, Unsavory Agents, is here. He does good, and funny, work. You may want to buy some of his stuff.

As an aside, I note Sabo is quoted as prefacing some of his statement with “I think”.  

Never do this.

It literally invites a contradiction, and suggests that some other — wrong — view is possible.   It is a verbal defensive crouch.    

Sabo has abundantly proven that he is better than that.

We should be too.

Sabo says this:

“I think leftism is a mental disorder,” Sabo, 49, said in an interview at his home. “I truly believe I’m fighting the good fight.”

He should say this:

“Leftism is a mental disorder,” Sabo, 49, said in an interview at his home. “I am fighting the good fight.”

See?  

George Orwell wrote that the “not un-” construction is almost always a bad way to write, e.g. “It is not unheard of” or “it is not unlikely”.   He wrote:  “One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field”.

Similary, to purge yourself of this “I think the sky is blue, I think the grass is green, I think the right to keep and bear arms is awesome, I think the leftists are imbeciles.”

Once you start to notice it you will stop doing it.  

Assert important things as bluntly, simply and as forcefully as possible. Make your statements on contentious issues into hooks and jabs that are meant to hurt if that is what is necessary, to wake up the lazy, punish the evil, and give aid to your embattled fellow right-thinkers. Give offense. Compel responses on your terms, on your ground.   Say what you say because you know it, you believe it, you stand up for it.   Your hard hitting assertions must implicitly say:  “If you disagree with my mighty truth you can suck on being wrong, and I won’t help you even consider disagreeing, or thinking you can disagree, or verbalizing your pathetic disagreement.   You want to take the — wrong — other side, you will have to work for it.”  At all times forcefully assert the facts, the truth, reality.   The various wrong-thinkers who feel the sting of your words will have to scrabble and claw to get purchase on the smooth granite surface of your mighty truth.   And mostly they will fall screaming onto the jagged rocks below.  

Yeah, it is a pet peeve.  

Polish up the rough edges.

This all too common “I think” phrasing is one of them.

We all do it.

We must all stop.

We will make Chicago Boyz readers the tiniest increment MORE AWESOME by trampling out one bad habit at a time.

Now go out and have a rock-hard ZFG attitude, like Sabo.

10 thoughts on “Sabo”

  1. O…M…G… the Hillary poster has to be seen to be … er, whatever.
    As an underground artist, Sabo seems to have balls of pure titanium.

  3. “the “not un-” construction is almost always a bad way to write”: I use it only as sarcasm. Or, if not exactly sarcasm, not unadjacent to sarcasm.

  5. LOL. Punk rock appeared because some people wanted to be rock stars, without learning to play an instrument.

    This is very similar. ;)

  8. “It is not unheard of” reminds me of a frequent literary technique used by Damon Runyon where he used the phrase, “more than somewhat” along with an absolute prohibition on the use of contractions

    He is sored up more than somewhat when he finds Miss Harriet Mackyle does not give much of a tumble, because he figures she will be calling him on top the minute he blows in, but Miss Harriet Mackyle is too busy with Basil Valentine finding out from Basil how he knocks off six of Al Capone’s mob out in Chicago one time when he is out there on a pleasure trip

    For Runyon it was a way of “putting on the airs” so to speak, to restrain in order to keep your cards close to your vest. It should be done either to conceal your center of mass from a position of strength – as with a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or it’s used to feign a conventional center stroke to conceal an unorthodox peripheral stroke – as with a Cheng/ch’i maneuver. We can see how bad of a position it puts us in when using it for just waltzing straight into the lions den, all cards laid on the table.

  9. the very awesome Sabo is interviewed in the very pathetic Guardian.

    Rory Carroll does the interviewing. He also wrote a good book on Venezuela:Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. The Guardian’s reporting on Venezuela is rather good. I am not going to defend all of what appears on The Guardian. For example, the following is rather lame: George Orwell’s Spanish civil war memoir is a classic, but is it bad history?

    His ignorance of the wider picture while in Spain was forgivable. The problem is rather that his judgments facilitated the book’s subsequent use as part of a cold war narrative. Instructions left before his death for a later edition ignored his acceptance of the need for a unified war effort in Spain. It is as if the Orwell of Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and the lister of suspect fellow-travellers for the Foreign Office thought that he should let it stand as another nail in the communist coffin, despite its distortion of the Spanish situation.

    Yes, there is a basic lack of integrity turning the fact of the Russians dictating the terms of the Spanish Civil War into a “cold war narrative.” Yes, indeed. :)
    Yes, Orwell’s showing the Commies-led by Stalin’s NKVD- killing Anarchists, while being ignorant of the atrocities the Anarchists committed such as killing priests, gave an incomplete picture. What the author of this article ignores is that while including atrocities the Anarchists had committed might support the Communist crackdown on the Anarchists, that inclusion would merely support the conclusion that the “Loyalists” had blood on their hands. Which I suspect is the main objection the article’s author has to Homage to Catalonia. Many who read Homage to Catalonia concluded it was a war where both sides deserved to lose. Or at least that the Loyalists/Republicans, which previously they had considered so virtuous compared to the evil Fascists, were not the saints they had previously believed.

    The problem the author has is that while he correctly points out that Orwell’s knowledge of the Spanish Civil War had a lot of gaps, more knowledge of the war does not necessarily make the Loyalists look any better than Orwell painted them.

  10. Orwell described what he personally saw and knew to be true. He didn’t claim to do more than that. His leftist friends turned against him for doing that. They demanded henlie, by omission and commission, to serve what they saw as a righteous cause. Orwell insisted that telling the truth is the first and essential righteous cause. To this day the leftists have not forgiven him.

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