“…just as I am in favor of mandatory abortions (and, of course, recreational abortions), I am in favor of mandatory embryo harvesting. Actually, that doesn’t go far enough I want to create embryos, develop them in a lab, wait until they become fully-formed 14-year-olds (which they absolutely, positively will do in the lab), then steal their organs to give to gay people as wedding presents.”
—SeesThroughIt, commenter on Balloon Juice
Category: wordplay
Stuff about words or phrases
A series of tubes
Ted Stevens gives us his “wisdom” on the issue of network neutrality:
“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material…
Ten movies streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet? I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
—Senator Ted Stevens (R. AK) describing the internet in support of ISP content segmentation
The middle
“When the President wants to dismantle our Constitutional system of checks and balances, what’s the moderate position? To dismantle HALF the system?”
—pericles, a comment on ”The Radical Middle”
…it is not that the “middle” has been forsaken. It is that the vast majority of the American public has been forsaken, left, right and middle…We are all held hostage to system institutionalized bribery of the worst sort…”
—MSheppard, a comment on ”The Radical Middle”
Criticism and debate
“The test of democracy is freedom of criticism.”
—David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Founder of Israel
From “A Beautiful Friendship?: In search of the turth about the Israel lobby’s influence on Washington, The Washington Post.
Continue reading
Liebermann
“Evidently low approval ratings can be contracted by saliva.”
—Steven Colbert on Joe Lieberman’s primary challenge
A typical response
“Five ropes, five robes, five trees.
Some assembly required.”
—Mischa, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, on what to do about half of the Supreme Court ruling
Democratization and Imperialism
“The democratization claims were a lie, an attempt to paint naked imperialism with an idealistic face.”
—emptywheel, “Weakness and Lies”
Lieberman’s problem
“Lieberman’s ultimate problem isn’t fanatical bloggers, any more than Lyndon Johnson’s was crazy, antiwar Democrats. His problem is that Bush, and the war that both he and Bush have championed, is speeding the ongoing realignment of the Northeast. His problem, dear colleagues, is Connecticut.”
—Harold Meyerson, “Lieberman’s Real Problem”
Copying vs. stealing
Another person copies Caitlin.
It hurts me too.
She and I spent days creating a set of core values which drive the copy that she puts on her website. There are many compromises and issues that come with creating your own company, and without a moral compass, it becomes easy to make bad decisions that might not be evident why they are wrong until it is too late.
Believe it or not, those three paragraphs the person copied have all four of her core values in it.Continue reading
An instrument to see
“You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
—Dorothea Lange, from J. Star’s Flickr profile