All Hat No Cattle: Midnight Cowboy, only, not as nice!  ¶ 9:20 PM (0) comments

  How did a male prostitute who sold his "8+ cut!" for $200/hour or $1200/weekend on his multiple, extremely graphic websites end up asking GOP talking-points "questions" to the president and his press secretary alongside the white house press corps without ever going through any security procedures even enough to reveal that he wasn't using his real name?

And why did a man who sold his sexual services to other men put his assumed name on homophobic "columns" (really white house press releases) on a homophobic website part and parcel of a homophobic political movement deeply in-bed (pun INTENDED) with the white house who'd given him his bizarre level of access?

Why were long-time presscorps veterans like Sara McClendon and Maureen Dowd kicked out and told that they'd have to re-apply for press access under "new post-911 stricter security procedures" which took months or years to traverse -- while an internet prostitute with no journalism credentials was being called on by his first, FAKE, name by the president of the united states himself?

CLICK HERE FOR COURT-TV TALKING ALL ABOUT IT

CLICK HERE TO SEE FEEDBACK FROM SOME OF JIMJEFF MCWHORESALOT'S SATISFIED CUSTOMERS

CLICK HERE (WARNING: PEEPEE SHOTS!) FOR JIMJEFF'S PHOTO GALLERY

And yes, these websites were still online when JimJeff was in the white house. They were found by internet sleuths only a few days ago.

This brings whole new meaning to the phrase, "MEDIA WHORE."  ¶ 8:54 PM (0) comments

  To the NYTimes:

Dear Editors,

How appropriate: the horror of Alberto Gonzales being allowed into the position of Attorney General occurs on the same day as a review of Harry G Frankfurt's ON BULL----.

"Why is lying regarded almost as a criminal act?" Frankfurt asks, while bull----, dishonesty performed by those who care nothing even for the existence of truth, is "outside the realm of serious moral criticism."

And there, as though to prove Mr Frankfurt correct, was a photograph of the man who bull----ed torture into an "acceptable" concept to our government, being sworn in as Attorney General by a member of the Supreme Court.

What sort of America can we expect when we have such people in power -- people who believe they are above the truth? The United States of B.S.? It is like living a nightmare to see such amorality accepted in the country I love.

Yours,

Amy Letter  ¶ 1:16 PM (0) comments

  The most intriguing philosophy book I've noticed in a while....

ON BULLSHIT, by Harry G Frankfurt, was recently published. It is based upon an essay Frankfurt wrote 20 years ago, which has been slowly making the rounds, apparently something of a philosophy "cult classic." I've ordered the book from Powells.com (a politically-sound bookshopping choice who will ship to you for a year for $20, the best deal in the biz!), and I understand it's a fairly slim volume, so expect a review here soon!

from the NYTimes review:

"I'd been concerned about the prevalence" of bullshit, he continued, "and the lack of concern for truth and respect for truth that it represented."

"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about bullshit without any bullshit, so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "

Research was a problem. The closest analogue came from Socrates.

"He called it rhetoric or sophistry," Mr. Frankfurt said, "and regarded philosophy as the great enemy of rhetoric and sophistry."

"These were opposite, incompatible ways of persuading people," he added. "You could persuade them with rhetoric" - or bullshit - "with sophistic arguments that weren't really sound but that you could put over on people, or you could persuade them by philosophical arguments which were dedicated to rigor and clarity of thought."

Mr. Frankfurt recalled that it took him about a month to write the essay, after which he delivered it to the humanities group. "I guess I should say it was received enthusiastically," he said, "but they didn't know whether to laugh or to take it seriously."

Some months after the reading, the essay, title intact, was published by The Raritan Review, a journal then edited by Richard Poirier, a distinguished literary critic. In 1988, Mr. Frankfurt included it in "The Importance of What We Care About," a collection of his essays.

The audience for academic journals and collections of philosophical essays is limited, however, and so the essay tended to be passed along, samizdat style, from one aficionado to another.

"In the 20 years since it was published," Mr. Frankfurt said, "I don't think a year has passed in which I haven't gotten one or two letters or e-mails from people about it."

One man from Wales set some of the text to music; another who worked in the financial industry wanted to create an annual award for the worst piece of analysis published in his field (an idea apparently rejected by his superiors). G. A. Cohen, the Chichele professor of social and political theory at All Souls College, Oxford University, has written two papers on the subject.

"Harry has a unique capacity to take a simple truth and draw from it very consequential implications," Mr. Cohen said. "He is very good at identifying the potent elementary fact."

It was Ian Malcolm, the Princeton University Press editor responsible for philosophy, who approached Mr. Frankfurt about publishing the essay as a stand-alone volume. "The only way the essay would get the audience it deserved was to publish it as a small book," he said. "I had a feeling it would sell, but we weren't quite prepared for the interest it got."

For Mr. Frankfurt, who says it has always been his ambition to move philosophy "back to what most people think of as philosophy, which is a concern with the problems of life and with understanding the world," the book might be considered a successful achievement. But he finds he is still trying to get to the bottom of things, and hasn't arrived.

"When I reread it recently," he said at home, "I was sort of disappointed. It wasn't as good as I'd thought it was. It was a fairly superficial and incomplete treatment of the subject."

"Why," he wondered, "do we respond to bullshit in such a different way than we respond to lies? When we find somebody lying, we get angry, we feel we've been betrayed or violated or insulted in some way, and the liar is regarded as deceptive, deficient, morally at fault."

Why we are more tolerant of bullshit than lying is something Mr. Frankfurt believes would be worth considering.

"Why is lying regarded almost as a criminal act?" he asked, while bull "is sort of cuddly and warm? It's outside the realm of serious moral criticism. Why is that?"


note: The NYTimes, in it's wisdom, decided to protect our innocent eyes from the word "bullshit" by replacing its every instance with "[bull]." I, in my wisdom, have undone their damage.  ¶ 12:36 PM (0) comments