Fables of the reconstruction

Where Are All The Funny Conservative Bloggers?

I am not usually a funny writer.  Bitter and cranky, yes; funny, sometimes.  But I do like to read funny, smart bloggers, if for no other reason than it relieves the feelings of depression one experiences being a passenger on the USS America with a crew of drunks and fools steering us at the rocks, at full speed.  But during my recent researches into the squalid waterfront bars and seaman's whorehouses known as the right side of the blog world, the question hit me:  Why is it there are so few funny conservative bloggers? 

On the left side, there are probably a half-dozen top bloggers who are consistently funny and provide excellent commentary and criticism.  In no particular order, and just off the top of my head, we have Fafblog!, The Rude Pundit, World O' Crap, Alicublog, Fanatical Apathy, Sadly, No!, Tbogg, The Poor Man, and James Wolcott.  All consistently funny - often brilliantly so - without devolving completely into the silly. (Occasional diversions into the silly are fine.)

In addition, many top bloggers who don't write humorously all the time often display brilliant flashes of it - just for example, the farmer at Corrente with The Devil is Dead. Me and Pete Killed the Devil, Belle Waring's If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride ... A Pony!, and Michael Berube starring in Blogging From The Republican National Convention.

I  am sure there are others that I am missing, but that's the point.  It's a pretty substantial bunch. 

On the right, though, there is a noticeable absence.  There are IMAO, Scrappleface and, I suppose, Lileks.  Outside of them, it's all self-righteousness and persecution complex, all the time.  And outside of the three listed above, when a conservative blogger does employ humor, I find that usually it's in retelling a joke they read somewhere else.

Is there a genetic link between humor and political outlook?  Is there just some birth defect that prevents right-wingers from being funny? In my apology yesterday, I sarcastically asserted there was such a connection, but now I think I may have been right at that.  Perhaps people who are born with a natural disposition to see the humor in life, and to be able to laugh at themselves, may develop a sense of empathy and compassion that leads them to liberalism.  The key to successful humor, after all, is to be able to see things from other people's perspectives - a liberal trait that conservatives deride variously as "relativism" or "objectively pro-terrorist".  So conservatives may have a genetic makeup that makes them less able to appreciate what's funny, and consequently take themselves very seriously and see the world as a dour, threatening place, with all these other people having a good time and laughing - sometimes at them.  This explains a lot, I think, and deserves further research.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come At Last, Slouches Toward the Faculty Lounge?

This snippet from a long Michael Bérubé post is funny and interesting:

In the early 1990s, the profession witnessed for the first time the phenomenon of theory-celebrity, and it was weird and often odious.  Some theorists hated it, and some reveled in it.  It was actually weirder than Bauerlein lets on, too: for one thing, the machinery of theory-celebrity was put together, in part, by the workings of the P.C. scaremongering itself, as more and more academics came forward to explain just what it was that they were doing.  That machinery put Henry Louis Gates on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and it produced Hurricane Camille Paglia at the same time.  It was kind of indiscriminate that way.

That neatly pulls together a couple of things I had thought about over the years.  Cool.

Blown Up

Typepad updated their software tonight, with the result, inter alia, that this site's "design" is looking rather fucked up. 

Oh well.  Too tired to deal with it now.

Time Magazine Caves

The AP is reporting that Time magazine will turn over Matthew Cooper's notes on the Plame case.

Editing My Reading List

I have no time lately and way too many blogs to read, so I am culling my subscriptions on Bloglines.  First to go: anyone who doesn't syndicate the whole post.  I am sorry if your revenue model depends on clicks or if you're so inept you can't figure out how to change your RSS settings.  I gotta move on.

Usage Note

When someone refers to "the turn of the century", how do you know what time period they mean?

Suburban Guerilla Maneuvers

Susan Madrak has moved.

Usage Note

N.b.:  Using "humble" to describe yourself in a non-ironic way is instantly and completely self-refuting, similar to calling yourself "classy."

Programming Notes

1. You Will Continue to Have Me to Kick Around: I gave serious thought to shutting down Fables.  Blogging has been a great outlet for my desires to write and rant, but it takes up a lot of my energy.  And all those friends who say I'm like an addict, reading 300+ feeds on Bloglines, getting news via SMS, spending hours and hours on line - well, who needs them! Right, gang? 
2. Porn, It's What Made the Internet: It has come to my attention that some people aren't aware I have a lengthy blogroll of sex links down the right-hand side of the page.  Either they're just reading the feed or they're losing interest before they scroll down that far - hmmm, I wonder which it is?  Anyway, scroll down.  You're just one or two clicks away from quality jerk-off material.  It can't be all mental masturbation around here!
3. Pay Me.  No, Stop Laughing: I added a Paypal contribution button on the right.  Why?  Why not!  Everyone else has one, and who knows?  Someone might actually want to express their appreciation in pecuniary terms, someday.  And while there might be worthier causes, there are none that provide so many free porn links.
   
   As an aside, what I like to do to conservatives with Paypal links is to send them invoices with descriptions like "For mental anguish" or "Because I will never get those 2 minutes back again."
   
   No, don't do that to me.

rANsoM noTe

               
           

Here. Via here.

Military Bikini Recruiting

I saw this NYTimes.com headline and my brain inserted an apostrophe before the s in Marines: Marines Miss January Goal for Recruits.  Then I read the article and realized my mistake, but thought it might be a good idea given that they're having some trouble recruiting more cannon fodder. 

Tool Guesses What Language Text Is

Ever been in the position of trying to figure out what language something is written in? I have. Here's a tool I just found that will tell you: Languid, a statistical language identifier. By Maciej Ceglowski of Idle Words.

I Believe This About Myself, Too

Atrios:

I'd say one of my better blogging qualities is that my bullshit detector and my "too good (or too bad) to be true" detector work pretty well. I've linked uncritically to a few stupid things over the years, but on the whole my record's pretty good.

I think I do pretty well with this, too.  My powers of analysis may be average (I thought Dean would be the Dem nominee; I thought  Kerry might crush Bush) but with individual events I usually can tell a hawk from a handsaw.  The only time I can remember tripping up was when I credited a story Dave Neiwert put up about  a gay-bashing.  Usually the stories I call bullshit on are slanted toward the right, but not exclusively so, such as the one about American soldiers bulldozing Iraqi farmers' trees while playing jazz music over loudspeakers.  I don't know if blogs will actually ever play a positive role in analyzing news, but if there is anything to the "wisdom of crowds"-type argument, then distributed reaction to individual events in which we each decide whether a story sounds plausible or not and then pool the results is where you'd see the benefit.

Programming Notes

I added categories to the template:

• Chemicals (i.e. drugs and alcohol)
• Food and Drink (no posts yet)
• Fucking and related
• Law-talking guy (no posts yet)
• Music
• Piteous
• Political
• Republican reprehensibilities
• Stupid people
• Travel
• War
• Web/Tech
• Whatever
• Words, words, words

So I went back and classified a few posts so something would show up in the category archive (over on the left).  But there are 1,070 posts total - no fucking way am I going all the way back through them, unless I get laid up in the hospital, with ugly nurses, with broken televisions, in a country where I don't speak the language.  You get the drift.

My Darling Whore

WORD HISTORY:

Derivatives of Indo-European roots have often acquired starkly contrasting meanings. A prime example is the case of the root *k–, “to like, desire.” From it was derived a stem *kro–, from which came the prehistoric Common Germanic word *hraz with the underlying meaning “one who desires” and the effective meaning “adulterer.” The feminine of this, *hrn–, became hre in Old English, the ancestor of Modern English whore. In another branch of the Indo-European family, the same stem *kro– produced the Latin word crus, “dear.” This word has several derivatives borrowed into English, including caress, cherish, and charity, in Christian doctrine the highest form of love and the greatest of the theological virtues. •Another derivative of the root *k– in Indo-European was *kmo–, a descendant of which is the Sanskrit word for “love,” kma, appearing in the name of the most famous treatise on love and lovemaking, the Kamasutra.

(From Viewing the local antiquities.)

We're All Voyeurs Now

The Poetry Society of America:

Blogging is the Reality TV of writing.

You know what would sell a lot of ads? A blog by a serial killer.  With pictures.

Santa's Lil' Gimp

(Via Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing.)

Tentacle-Rape Rodeo

Ghastly's Ghastly Comic, every bit as offensive, fun and not-work-safe as you might imagine:

(Via Fuck Everything.)