Kablammo!

Re: Bush lashes out at ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Islamo-fascism, eh? Looks like nothing has changed in the past 61 years: “…as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” I guess convenient bugaboos, bogeymen, and catchphrases never really go out of style. And since they’re meaningless to begin with, you can combine them however you want! Like calling religious fanatics both “Fascists” and “Communists”, both of which terms generally apply to political and economic systems — and dissimilar ones at that.

I guess it’s refreshing, though, to see “Communist” as a slur come back into vogue.

Onward:

The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.

Whereas the President seems to believe that forcing one country into “democratic” hands will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all clerical governments in the region and establish a hotbed of democracy that spans etc. Go go gadget domino theory, let’s keep those pinkos out of Cambodia Syria! Does everything have to be so goddamn black and white? Do we really assume that a change in government in one country in a region must necessarily lead to the same change occurring in every adjacent country?

We are facing a radical ideology with immeasurable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

How do you go from calling some objectives immeasurable to describing how they can be measured later in the same sentence? (Hint: measure their objectives by counting “Islamo-commie-fascistically-enslaved” countries, why don’t you.) Don’t words have meanings anymore?

…self-defeating pessimism…

I guess not. Mr Bush: You meant to say “self-fulfilling”. Self-fulfilling. Self-defeating pessimism would be pessimism that leads to the defeat of pessimism, which I don’t think is what you had in mind.

…I’m going to stop here. Sorry for the rant. But it’s not like anybody read it anyway.

In other news, I remain irked by Ubuntu’s decision against mp3, decss, etc; it’s hard to jump through the hoops to get all that stuff installed on a system when you don’t have any internet connectivity to speak of on it. manpages are certainly helpful for some things (like your fstabs and whatnot), but not only are they hilariously dense, they’re no help at all for Ubuntu-specific things (all but the barest-bones of documentation for which are online) or GNOME (ditto). All I wanted to do was watch my Futurama DVDs and listen to my vast collection of legally-obtained mp3s under linux, but without the interweb on that computer it’ll prove quite difficult.

However, I haven’t gotten ANY sound playback to work on that system yet so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Song of the Moment: «Lupita» — Panico

1 Comment

• Laurel says:

  October 7, 2005 at 13:09

  Well, I can see why he would prefer the term “Islamo-fascism” to “authoritarian theocracy”:
  1. Easier words to say, also with nifty hyphen
  2. Wouldn’t want to piss off the Saudis
  3. Hey, we have no problem with authoritarian theocracy

  Also, it seems like we’re getting an awful lot of “X but not Y” rhetoric this week. “A set of beliefs that are evil but not insane,” “a threat that was specific but not credible,” etc. Do they have some sort of Pocket Field Guide to Terrorism checklists they’re working from?

  Reply