Guns and the Right to Bear Arms at Saberpoint

My friend Stogie at Saberpoint has been posting some excellent material on the gun debate.

See: "The NRA: Target and Scapegoat for the Hyper-Angry Left," and "'An Opinion on Gun Control" Article Goes Viral'." (And more here and here.)

PHOTO: Women with Guns on Tumblr.

Foaming Rabid Union Thug Captures and Exemplifies Today's Progressive Politics

I'm very thankful for some of the praise of my readers, for example, Stogie at Saberpoint and my friend and occasional contributor Norman Gersman from New York. I have other readers as well who correspond by e-mail but would prefer to stay out of the scrum of the left's demonic totalitarianism. I've called out REPSAC = CASPER recently, and I've been requesting that he retire his stalking blog American Nihilist. REPSAC = CASPER is perfectly representative of the demonic progressive left, and I wouldn't be surprised if he logged in anonymously and left this comment at my blog last night:

Anonymous said...

Actually, all Republicans are Satanic Nazi rapist terroristic treasonous child-molesting scumbags, who would rape my two year old niece to death happily, and sell the video on www.gop=666.cum.

Anyone who doesn't agree with this truth, as priven by Scott WalKKKer, Satanic Nazi rapist pig whore governor of WisKKKonsin, let them rape, torture, and brutally murder me - I would rather die than support all of you Satanic Nazi rapist terroristic treasonous child-molesting scumbags.

February 26, 2011 9:27 PM

Hey, words fail, but how about this, from Rebel Pundit, "Exclusive: Rabid Union Thug Foams at the Mouth $1Mil bet GOP Hearts KKK.. “Wussy MotherFxxkers, I’ll make you pay, Tea Baggers”" (via Lonely Conservative and Memeorandum):

Behold today's Democrat Party progressive left. When conservatives stand up for values, they're standing up for right and goodness in the world. The opposite of right is found in the left's relentless campaigns against truth, decency, and the individual in society. The hatred at websites such as REPSAC = CASPER's --- and in the comments cited here, and in endless attacks by union thugs --- are perfect examples of the new neo-communist totalitarianism. What's sad is that the lamestream press is totally in the tank, so again that's all the more reason for folks of God and decency to stand up.

Hmm ... The Civil War Was Never Really About Slavery?

A very interesting piece at NYT, "Celebrating Secession Without the Slaves."

Immediately upon seeing this I figured I'd clicked over to Little Green Footballs, and what do you know?

"For Civil War 150th, Neo-Confederates Consign Slavery to the Memory Hole."

I don't really see a passage worth quoting at the Times, although one paragraph comes awfully close to merging the Sons of Confederate Veterans with the tea parties. And then of course there's the obligatory quotation from Mark Potok, who's cited as "the director of intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center." I used to trust the SPLC, mainly because I don't discount the lingering existence Jim Crow racism, however residual. But whatever amount of that there is in fact, it's been superceded by the more problematic race-baiting industry that's killing free speech in America. William Jacobson's written on this quite a bit recently. See, "Southern Poverty Law Center Completes Its Descent Into Madness," and "SPLC Demonizes Supporters of Traditional Marriage." Moreover, my knowledge of the South is based on textbook learning, which is fairly deep as far as 20th century civil rights goes. Less so on the Civil War however. But Robert Stacy McCain and Stogie at Saberpoint are very good friends of mine, and both had ancesters who fought for the Confedracy. You learn a lot from people with direct experience, and these interactions blow away the rank stereotypes that are used to brand and destroy people. This is Charles Johnson's stock-in-trade nowadays, and look how that's turned out.

In any case, I skimmed over Jefferson Davis' Wikipedia entry as I was looking around for a picture to go with this post. He doesn't seem that impressive of a guy, but his reputation after the war was rehabilitated, and today he represents some of the more noble sentiments of the Old South. I know lots of folks on the left will reject the possibility of anything noble about that Anti-Bellum society, but I'd suggest that people keep an open mind on these things, lest they be poisoned by the likes of SPLC and their race-baiting brethren.

What if the South Had Won the Civil War?

I'm sure Stogie at Saberpoint would have been stoked, lol.

From Allen C. Guelzo, at USA Today, "What if the South had won the Civil War? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO's ‘Confederate’":

The new project from the 'Game of Thrones' creators could shock us by exposing how little of the Confederate future we avoided.

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections.

The wild popularity of Game of Thrones has already set the anxiety bells of progressives jangling over how much a game of Confederate thrones might look like a fantasy of the alt-right. Still, if Benioff and Weiss really want to give audiences the heebie-jeebies about a Confederate victory, they ought to pay front-and-center attention to how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left, and what the Confederacy’s leaders frankly proposed as their idea of the future.

The general image of the Confederacy in most textbooks is a backwards, agricultural South that really didn’t stand a chance against the industrialized North. But it simply isn’t true that the Confederate South was merely a carpet of cotton plantations, and the North a smoke-blackened vista of factories. Both North and South in 1861 were largely agricultural regions (72% of the congressional districts in the Northern states on the eve of the Civil War were farm-dominated); the real difference was between the Southern plantation and the Northern family farm. Nor did the South lag all that seriously behind the North in industrial capacity. And far from being a Lost Cause, the Confederacy frequently came within an ace of winning its war.

So, if Benioff and Weiss want to steer their fantasy as close as they can to probable realities, they should consider a few of these scenarios as the possible worlds of Confederate:

A successful Confederacy would be an imperial Confederacy. Aggressive Southerners before 1860 made no secret of their ambitions to spread a slave-labor cotton empire into Central and South America. These schemes would begin, as they had in 1854, with the annexation of Cuba and the acquisition of colonies in South America, where slave labor was also still legal. This would bring the Confederates into conflict with France and Great Britain, since France was also plotting to rebuild a French empire in Mexico in the 1860s, and the British had substantial investments around the Caribbean rim. The First World War might have been one between Europeans and Confederates over the future of Central and South America.

A successful Confederacy would have triggered further secessions. There were already fears in 1861 that the new Pacific Coast states of California and Oregon would secede to form their own Pacific republic. A Confederate victory probably would have pushed that threat into reality — thus anticipating today’s Calexit campaign by 150 years — and in turn triggered independence movements in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes. The North (or what was left of the United States) would bear approximately the same relation to these new republics as Scandinavia to modern-day Europe.

A successful Confederacy would have found ways for slavery to evolve, from cotton-picking to cotton-manufacturing, and beyond. The Gone With the Wind image of the South as agricultural has become so fixed that it’s easy to miss how steadily black slaves were being slipped into the South’s industrial workforce in the decade before the Civil War. More than half of the workers in the iron furnaces along the Cumberland River in Tennessee were slaves; most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. They are, argued one slave-owner, “cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places … which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.”

A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.

Still more.

Saberpoint on Gene Kizer's, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States — the Irrefutable Argument

Man, this book must be really bad.

See Stogie at Saberpoint, "Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States -- the Irrefutable Argument."

Kizer's book is here.

And here's my response to Stogie:

"The North's economy was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world."

Yes, and cotton was an extremely low-value added commodity, of which the U.S. economy would increasingly marginalize had not the South attempted to export its ideology of property in slaves into the territories, in essence attempting to nationalize the ideology of slaveholder's rights to own blacks.

The fact is, the South had a pre-industrial economy that failed to attract capital, and was already headed for a falling rate of productivity and further economic backwardness. Ironically, what investment that was sent to the South was overwhelming invested in planting, since that's all Southerners really knew how to do -- own black slaves, beat them into vicious submission, to eek out increasingly marginalized returns.

Moreover, insular agrarianism isolated the South, cutting it off from the influx of new people and ideas (people obviously hostile to chattel slavery and much more morally enlightened). Today, the Confederacy, if it had continued to exist, would be a poor primary exporter like the peripheral Latin American economies. Cutting edge industries, back then rail, steel, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and now high-technology information systems, robotics, and nano-technology, would be found nearly exclusively in the North. Folks might as well move to Mexico for all the Southern economy would be cracked up to be.

But again, Stogie, all this stuff you're spouting about the North being the aggressor against the South is more of the mythic national ideology of the South, the same ideology that claimed to favor liberty and states' rights, but in fact pursued tyrannical policies, nationalized economics, used murderous Gestapo-style police force to keep the system in place, and advanced racial ideologies to keep alive a social hierarchy of American apartheid.

Kizer's book is economically illiterate. Yes, the South dominated cotton exports, but economic history shows that "King Cotton" is no longer king. The South was bound to backwardness one way or the other. But by bringing on the Civil War, Southerners guaranteed their experiment from 1961-1865 would wind up on the scrapheap of history, not unlike the Soviet Union (or the Nazis, if you prefer), with which the South's methods of tyranny had so much in common.

As always, check back for future iterations on the discussion of the Confederacy.

Texas' Revised Social Science Curriculum Whitewashes Role of Slavery in Origins of Civil War

Maybe Stogie should move to Texas?

At the Washington Post, "How Texas is whitewashing Civil War history."

PREVIOUSLY: "Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism."

States Rush to Banish the Confederate Flag

This is going to be viewed as a huge victory for the radical left.

At WaPo, "Once politically sacrosanct, Confederate flag moves toward an end":

After the killings in Charleston, the rush is on to banish the Confederate flag http://t.co/eCS5fBewX5

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 24, 2015

After decades of bitter debate over whether the Confederate battle flag is a proud symbol of regional heritage or a shameful emblem of this nation’s most grievous sins, the argument may finally be moving toward an end.

South Carolina is leading the way for other states, as it considers removing the flag from its capitol grounds in the wake of a horrific racial hate crime.

The historical poignancy is heavy and resonant, given that the killings last week of nine African Americans took place in a church basement just a few miles from where the first shots of the Civil War were exchanged in 1861. Photos that have since surfaced of the accused killer, Dylann Roof, show him posing with the Confederate flag.

The banner was long considered politically sacrosanct in the South, at least among conservative whites. It now appears that a rush is on to banish it, along with other images that evoke the Confederacy and sow racial divisiveness.

“It’s a baby step of progress, but we had to step through the blood of nine dead people,” said former College of Charleston president Alex Sanders, a longtime critic of the flag.

On Tuesday, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) said his state will quit issuing license plates with the insignia and replace those already on the road. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, both Republicans, also said they want to get rid of such license plates in their states.

And in Mississippi, the top Republican in the state House of Representatives, Philip Gunn, has called for the Confederate battle cross to be removed from the upper left corner of his state’s flag. As recently as 2001, Mississippi voters weighed in by more than 2 to 1 to retain the rebel badge as the dominant feature of their flag.

Meanwhile, businesses are moving quickly to remove the symbol from their inventory. In the space of less than 24 hours, retailing giants Wal-Mart, Sears, eBay and Amazon.com all announced that they would no longer sell Confederate-themed merchandise. Valley Forge Flag, a leading flagmaker, said it will cease to make the banner...

Other flagmakers will step up to meet the demand, but now more than ever brandishing this flag is going to foment a harsh backlash. Folks like my old friend Stogie at Saberpoint are going to be digging in for their final stand.

Continue reading, in any case.

One is the Loneliest Number

From Carolyn Tackett, "Help a Friend."

And previously, "The Recession Hits Stogie at Saberpoint." Stogie's blog is here.

Dylann Roof Planned College Campus Shooting Instead of Church, Says Black Drinking Buddy Christon Scriven

At London's Daily Mail, "Charleston killer planned to shoot up college campus instead of a church, claims black drinking buddy who says they were 'homeboys'."

Yeah, his "drinking buddy" was a black kid, just like all the Southern homeboys hanging out with their black bros.

Stogie at Saberpoint has more, "Sick Freak Murders Nine in Black Charleston Church; Irrational Outpouring of Outrage Ensues."

PREVIOUSLY: "Leftist Flag-Burner Dylann Roof's 'Last Rhodesian' Manifesto Rooted in Democrat Party Ku Klux Klan Racism."

And, "Crazy Emo-Prog Dylann Roof Doesn't Fit the Left's 'Right-Wing Racist White Supremacist' Narrative," and "Dylann Roof, Southern Democrat Throwback, is Drug-Addled 'Wannabe Emo Anarchist' with Androgynous Haircut."

The Leftist Scum Betraying Our Country

It's still a great country. California is nearing lost-cause status, but nationally the political order remains vital in many respects. But as I've been saying, conservatives and patriots must keep pressing on toward reform. It's not just about better policies or higher standards of living. It's about the very survival of America as the beacon of freedom in the world. I've learned a lot from reading my good friend Stogie's blog Saberpoint, and I'm glad he's not beating around the bush regarding the nature of the enemy. See, "Communist Revolution: I Never Thought It Would Come to This":

The long march through the institutions was completed some time ago, and both academia and media have a near monopoly on the transmission of biased news, cultural demolition and the ability to affect public attitudes. The "closing of the American mind" is just about complete. Moonbattery blog has an article today called "Brainwashing Works." The author, Dave Blount, points to a sign in NYC's Penn Station where a graffiti artist has penned "Kill All Republicans!" This sentiment is not an isolated occurrence. Twitchy.com reports daily the most vile bile from the left, the unhinged hatred, the desire for violence against Republicans and conservatives. The Democrat Media Complex has created a vast swath of human botnets, which can be set off in mass to launch denial-of-liberty attacks on any and all who oppose the New Progressive Order. Like computer botnets, the human variety is programmed and programmable and act in concert, unhindered by scruples or actual thought.

Lately swarms of human maggots on Twitter have tweeted their joy at the death of General Norman Schwarzkopf yesterday, expressing hope that he died painfully and is now burning in Hell. They have said similar things about former President George H.W. Bush, who is in the hospital with a serious illness, hoping that he dies "in agony." I do not recognize this leftist human scum as fellow citizens, but as traitors, agents of hostile foreign powers and ideologies. With the election of one of their own to the presidency, they are now emboldened to finish off the Republic, and as Blount notes at Moonbattery, are now in a rush to disarm us.

Read the whole thing at the link.

It's not the death wish agitation that's evidence for the left's treason, but if that kind of pure hatred --- the overwhelming desire of progressives to literally kill their political enemies --- is a needed prompt for identifying the enemy for what it is, all the better. For me, I started blogging because I'd learned that the values that I'd once identified with as "liberal" and "progressive" were in fact the very opposite. At that time, in 2006, little did I know just how depraved was the radical left. But once you start to expose these douchebags you're placed in the cross-hairs yourself. There are no misunderstandings by that time. You know intimately that progressives will stop at nothing to destroy barriers to the ideological agenda. This next year will be a time of reorganizing and redoubling efforts among the forces of decency and traditionalism. But conservatives need to abandon the nice-guy mentality that makes them suckers over and over again for the machinations of the left. Don't be fooled by progressives who attempt to befriend you with idle chit-chat. They'll sell you out in the name of the totalitarian agenda faster than you can say Lev Trotsky. And be ready to fight fire with fire. See Nice Deb for more on that, and be sure to check the links: "Hoisting Them on their Own Petards."

PHOTO CREDIT: Moonbattery.

On Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs

You know, I've been thinking about Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.

When I go over there nowadays I get confused. Last year LGF was doing some of the best pushback-blogging against leftist crazies like Markos Moulitsas. But now it seems Johnson's done an about face against conservatives, especially people of faith. I'm not a "creationist," but I've noted that Stephen Jay Gould's "doctrine of nonoverlapping magisteria" suggests a compatibility between Christian beliefs and scientific evolutionary theory.

Well, it turns out that yesterday Johnson basically joined the likes of Glenn Greenwald in attacking Glenn Beck for SIMPLY HYPOTHESIZING the possibility of an American anarchy:

There's not going to be any mass anarchy, and there's not going to be any sedition. Glenn Beck isn't going to bring about the End Times, or a financial crash.

But what he IS doing is encouraging and inciting the real nutjobs out there to do violence. One on one violence, stoked by paranoid fantasies.

It's crazy, and it's wrong, and it's irresponsible.

It's crazy? I'm sure many said the same thing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, despite the warnings of the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center.

I have no personal quarrel with Johnson, although I'd just note here his tremendous inconsistency. On the one hand he attacks radical Islamists for practices such as child killing, and then on the other he attacks people like Geert Wilders for attacking, well, the exact same thing.

For some related matters, see Dr. Pat Santy's comments on the controversies Johnson's had with folks on questions of Islam and terror (see, "My Response to Blackmail Threats").

But also check out Stogie's post at Saberpoint for more on what folks are noticing about LGF:

I rarely read the blog "Little Green Footballs" any more. I have discovered that, as time goes by, I have less and less in common with its owner, Charles Johnson. Frankly, he acts like someone who is developing a brain chemistry imbalance. If so, he should consider a psychotropic medication like Prozac or Paxil. Personally I prefer Zoloft. Since I started taking it, I notice the ax murders are fewer and further between. Yes, we don't see that much of Mr. Hyde anymore.

Charley's latest gambit is to trash Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and to oppose Geert Wilders. Seems Charley is very adamant about the right of individuals to freedom of religion, apparently any religion, regardless of their practices, e.g. honor killings, genital mutilation, wife beating, polygamy, jihad, insistence on Sharia rather than democracy. No doubt Aztecs performing human sacrifices of virgins would be just fine with him. You can't oppose "freedom of religion" after all. Charley is so open-minded and tolerant that he would probably accept an invitation to dinner by a tribe of cannibals, and never notice when they shove an apple in his mouth and push him into a big pot of boiling water.

Another of Charley's annoying habits is that he has become a fanatical supporter of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. That's fine if that's your bag, but every other post is an ideological screed in support of this pseudo-science. Who cares?

Evolution, says Charley is absolutely true and beyond criticism. Today he was running an article entitled "Transitional Fossils Do Exist."

Charley should know. He's one of them.

My main interest here is as it relates to the broader internal debates I've been discussing on the freaky left-libertarian alliance of "liberaltarianism," as well as the continued and self-evident power of neoconservative clarity in combating the creeping totalitarianism of Islamic radicalization.

At lot of folks are focusing on electoral schisms within the GOP, but some of the more overarching issues of foreign affairs and moral authority are going to be increasingly important to the emergence of the next right-wing governing coalition.

More later ...

**********

UPDATE: Critical Thinker add this, from the comments:

Methinks ole Charlie might need to go back to playin' Jazz and leave the world of bloggin'. Seems he is turning into a control freak and might be the one going off of the deep end.

What Did Abraham Lincoln Really Think of Thomas Jefferson?

Allen Guelzo's a major scholar of the Civil War era, writing opus-style histories such as Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, and not to mention critical biographies such as Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

And here's Guelzo at today's New York Times, "What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?":

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”

Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.

“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”

True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”

Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.

Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote. He despised “the selfish spirit of commerce” for feeling “no passion or principle but that of gain.” And he regarded banks with special suspicion as the source of all commercial evil. “Banks may be considered as the primary source” of “paper speculation,” and only foster “the spirit of gambling in paper, in lands, in canal schemes, town lot schemes, manufacturing schemes and whatever could hit the madness of the day.”

Lincoln, who actually grew up on a backwoods farm, saw little there but drunkenness, rowdyism and endless, mind-numbing labor under the rule of his loutish and illiterate father. He made his escape from the farm as soon as he turned 21, opened a store (which failed) and finally went into law, that great enforcer of commercial contract. “I was once a slave,” he remarked, “but now I am so free that they let me practice law.”

As an Illinois state legislator, Lincoln promoted a state banking system and public funding for canals and bridges. As a lawyer, according to colleagues, Lincoln was never “unwilling to appear in behalf of a great soulless corporation” — especially railroads — and had no compunction about recommending the eviction of squatters who farmed railroad-owned land.

As president, he put into place a national banking system, protective tariffs for American manufacturing and government guarantees for building a transcontinental railroad. Lincoln was Jefferson’s nightmare.

But Jefferson also held out a second example to Lincoln, as the man who, for all his limitations and fixations, still managed to articulate certain universal truths about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s words — if not his practice — formed “the definitions and axioms of free society.” When he was urged during the Civil War to ignore the Constitution’s restraints on presidential power, he echoed Jefferson’s warning against taking “possession of a boundless field of power” by asking: “Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?”

And so, Lincoln concluded, “All honor to Jefferson,” who “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity” to fix in the Declaration of Independence the “abstract truth” that all men are created equal, so that it would “be a rebuke and a stumbling block” to anyone who planned to reintroduce “tyranny and oppression.”

Still more.

P.S. Stogie hates Lincoln, but he loves Jefferson the slave-holder, unsurprisingly. At Saberpoint, "Declaration of Independence -- Thomas Jefferson."

For Your Library, A Patriot's History of the United States

Following-up on my earlier entry, "Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism."

A must-have addition to your library, Larry Schweikart's, A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to America's Age of Entitlement.

James "Barebacker" Webb

You can't make this stuff up!

From "Brainrage," who thrives on informality in his insistence on calling me "Don." And then, in another example of his glorious hypocrisy, turns around and demands that folks use his full name:

... it's James B. Webb. Get it right, Don ...

Actually, I NEVER gave James B. Webb permission to call me by my first name, AND THEN TO SHORTEN IT INTO CRUDE MONIKER OF MAN-CRUSH AFFECTION!

Obviously, James B. Webb ignored my earlier memo:

I think all of my readers should call me Dr. Douglas. 'It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title.

Hey, man ... it's cool. If he insists, James "Barebacker" Webb it is!

And I mean, SERIOUSLY!! James's link to that OUT website is like a buffed-gay gold mine!

Here's another blog that came to my attention through James B. Webb's blogging: "Best Gay Bloggers." (BUT WAIT!! EDDIE BURKE TRUTHERISM CONTENT WARNING: DON'T GO THERE!!)

And don't forget what I said earlier, "I don't do the flip-floppy on the side!"

Photo Credit: "Best Gay Bloggers."

**********

UPDATE: My friend Stogie at Saberpoint has joined the debate, "Jimmy B. Webb: What's a Libertarian-Socialist?"

Light My Fire

At Saberpoint, from last week, featuring this clip of The Doors: "Jim Morrison: Dionysian Shaman or Acid-Addled Freak?" Stogie watched the Oliver Stone flick and did a write-up.

Man, Ayla Brown is Tall!

Via Saberpoint, I just happened to notice this R.S. McCain interview with Ayla Brown. That woman is tall. Whoo hoo!! Be sure to read Stogie's comments:

Last time I wrote about height issues I got in a little trouble, but this time I blame Stogie!

See, At 5' 6½", George Stephanopoulos Debuts at Good Morning America - UPDATED!!"

RELATED: Ayla Brown Acknowledges It: She Voted for Kerry (via Memeorandum).

Blog Headline of the Morning (Regarding Asshole Andres Serrano)

At Althouse, "Andres 'Piss Christ' Serrano as a guest judge on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." And click through to the original article. Some of the works include things like men performing sexual self-gratification. And you can see this stuff on TV? Seriously.

But it's Andres Serrano who's of interest to me (why is he considered a worthy judge for Bravo's program, for example?).

Check this interview with Anna Blume from 1993, regarding "Serrano’s recent photographs of [black] dead bodies":

AB Since color is an issue throughout the show, not just aesthetically, but also racially, and racial issues have shown up in your work before, was this in your mind when you edited for the show, thinking about which bodies to photograph?

AS In a manner of speaking. I photographed these people after the moment of death. I never knew them as human beings. I never knew what languages they spoke, what their religious or political beliefs were, how much money they had, or who they loved. All I know about them is the cause of death. And, as they say, you cannot judge a book by its cover. The woman you referred to as not knowing whether she was actually black, is a bleached blonde, brown-skinned woman. She’s a black woman. But she’s been in the morgue for over two months because she’s a Jane Doe, and as a result, she’s starting to decompose and if you look really closely, there are patches of white skin. I asked the doctor and he confirmed that there is white skin under black skin. A teacher of his once took a very thin slice of skin off a cadaver and showed it to his students and said, “This is the thickness of racism.”

And here's this, from an interview with Andres Serrano in 2002:

Being born, especially being born a person of color, is a political act in itself. Everything you do from that point on is political without having to be called political. My work has social implications, it functions in a social arena. In relation to the controversy over Piss Christ, I think the work was politicized by forces outside it, and as a result, some people expect to see something recognizably "political" in my work. I am still trying to do my work as I see fit, which I see as coming from a very personal point of view with broader implications.

Asshole.

UPDATE: Saberpoint provides some artwork, "Stogie Art: Piss Andres (Andres Serrano)."