Meme Watch

Faith, Hope and Charity

67
7 months ago
by Monotreme in

Faith, Hope and Charity

When this elec­tion sea­son started, I fig­ured I’d be writ­ing lots of blog posts hand­i­cap­ping the can­di­dates and remark­ing on the ups and downs of a rough-​​and-​​tumble campaign.

I didn’t think I’d be writ­ing an infor­mal series on the Repub­li­can War on Women.

It all started back in Feb­ru­ary, when I wrote “Incon­ceiv­able”. When the House lead­er­ship came to power in the 2010 Repub­li­can land­slide, they promised to focus on job cre­ation. Who knows why they aban­doned this approach, or whether they even intended to imple­ment it in the first place. For rea­sons that pas­seth all under­stand­ing, they decided they were elected on a socially con­ser­v­a­tive agenda and began to cham­pion a set of regres­sive and destruc­tive social policies.

No longer was 9.4% unem­ploy­ment, with many run­ning out of time in their ben­e­fits, any prob­lem. Those peo­ple turned out to be moochers, not mak­ers, in David Brooks’ famous phras­ing. They were the 47 per­cent who were going to vote for Obama any­way. Noth­ing we can do to get their votes, Repub­li­cans appar­ently figured.

(more…)

Meme Watch: G*d’s Wrath

28
8 months ago
by Logarchism.com in ,

Pauly the Platy­pus has not posted an arti­cle on Log­a­rchism in a long, long time. It hasn’t been a platypus’s age, but close. This week, Log­a­rchism’s mod­er­a­tors sent Pauly down to Tampa to take in the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion, and maybe take in a strip club or two. (Repub­li­cans spend three times as much as Democ­rats at strip clubs, but Pauly has ten sex chro­mo­somes — XYXYXYXYXY — and is there­fore five times as randy as any human Republican.)

Tampa is a con­ge­nial place for a platy­pus. Platy­puses (never “platypi”, as Kory Stam­per, whom Pauly calls “Merriam-​​Webster Babe” will explain) love water. Pauly planned to do lots of swim­ming in the nearby wet­lands and unwind from gru­el­ing con­ven­tion days.

Michael asked Pauly to write the open­ing Mon­day con­ven­tion arti­cle, then dis­as­ter struck. Lit­er­ally. Pauly is trapped here, with plenty of wind and lots of water, and the con­ven­tion has been post­poned a day.

What’s a platy­pus to do? Write a Meme Watch, that’s what.

Pauly hasn’t been post­ing, but he reads Log­a­rchism reli­giously. He loves Meme Watch and always dreamed of writ­ing one — and now he gets his chance. His sub­mis­sion fol­lows the jump: (more…)

Meme Watch: Agenda 21

33
10 months ago
by Monotreme in ,

The all-​​seeing eye is more malev­o­lent than we thought. Still from the video “Agenda 21 for Dummies”.

Belief in a shad­owy con­spir­acy of pow­er­ful men and women who are try­ing to take over the world is a meme that won’t die. My first expe­ri­ence with this brand of polit­i­cal belief was in a men’s bath­room stall in the Nor­lin Library at the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado, Boul­der. There, I first learned of the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion’s plan to vapor­ize my cher­ished Amer­i­can freedoms.

Fear of the Tri­lat­eral Com­mis­sion peaked 30 years ago, and now it’s mostly a quasi-​​historical odd­ity, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up try­ing to con­trol you.

The lat­est ver­sion of this ever­green meme is the cur­rent brouhaha over Agenda 21 which has inflamed the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee and sev­eral state par­ties, includ­ing Georgia’s.

Agenda 21 is a non-​​binding tooth­less state­ment of fairly gen­eral prin­ci­ples for sus­tain­able devel­op­ment adopted by the United Nations in 1992. The “21” in the title refers to the 21st century.

The peo­ple who wrote Agenda 21 are tricky. This may sound like the usual admin­is­tra­tive pablum to you, but buddy, it’s packed with all sorts of action items:

Sci­en­tific knowl­edge should be applied to artic­u­late and sup­port the goals of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, through sci­en­tific assess­ments of cur­rent con­di­tions and future prospects for the Earth sys­tem. Such assess­ments, based on exist­ing and emerg­ing inno­va­tions within the sci­ences, should be used in the decision-​​making process and in the inter­ac­tive processes between the sci­ences and policy-​​making. There needs to be an increased out­put from the sci­ences in order to enhance under­stand­ing and facil­i­tate inter­ac­tion between sci­ence and society.

A stir­ring call to arms, rem­i­nis­cent of Shake­speare chan­nel­ing Henry V’s St. Crispin’s day speech to the troops at Agin­court. “Should be! Needs to be!” Makes the pulse race, doesn’t it? (more…)

Meme Watch: The Half Who Don’t Pay Taxes

90
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Last fall, we began to hear the drum­beat of “half of all Amer­i­cans pay no taxes”. Specif­i­cally, it was that they pay no fed­eral income taxes, though that detail was often lost in the rhetoric. The topic became a hot one among the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates start­ing in mid-​​August, 2011.

With Tax Day nearly upon us, it seems worth­while to inves­ti­gate this topic in more depth.

Since this is a meme watch arti­cle, let’s start by look­ing at what was going on at that time that would trig­ger the meme’s for­ma­tion. (more…)

Meme Watch: The Republican War on Women

23
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

RNC Chair Reince Priebus: Big gavel, big mouth? Source: Esquire.

It was an inept turn of phrase.

Dur­ing an inter­view on Al Hunt’s Polit­i­cal Cap­i­tal on Bloomberg TV, Hunt asked Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee chair Reince Priebus:

The Democ­rats of course say you are wag­ing, the GOP is wag­ing a war on women. I know you don’t agree with that, but look­ing at the polls, you have a gen­der gap prob­lem. Recent polls show a huge, huge mar­gin for Democ­rats among women vot­ers. How big a prob­lem is it? How do you close it?

Priebus responded:

Well, for one thing, if the Democ­rats said we had a war on cater­pil­lars, and every main­stream media out­let talked about the fact that Repub­li­cans have a war on cater­pil­lars, then we have prob­lems with cater­pil­lars. The fact of the mat­ter is it’s a fic­tion and this started a war against the Vat­i­can that this pres­i­dent pur­sued. He still hasn’t answered Arch­bishop Dolan’s issues with Obama world and Oba­macare, so I think that’s the first issue.

Is the Repub­li­can War on Women a fic­tional meme, as Priebus argues, or is it sup­ported by the evi­dence? (more…)

Meme Watch: FNMA, FHLMC, and CRA Caused the Great Recession

347
1 year ago
by dcpetterson in

What caused the eco­nomic melt­down of 2008? One meme holds that Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac, plus the Com­mu­nity Rein­vest­ment Act (CRA), “forced” banks to offer mort­gages to peo­ple who had nether the abil­ity to pay back those loans, nor the inten­tion of doing so. Unsur­pris­ingly, the loans went bad when the hous­ing bub­ble burst, and the banks were left hold­ing the bag.

How true is this meme? Let’s exam­ine it together, shall we?

I’m not going to describe what led to the 2008 world finan­cial col­lapse. I am, how­ever, going to explore the meme that the col­lapse was caused by the CRA, Fan­nie, and/​or Fred­die. (more…)

Go to Top