The disadvantage of teaching people the alphabet and nothing more is that you have to somehow put up with a bunch of retards that can now express themselves in writing.

dub: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/16/the-tea-party-as-a-religion/
ozbot: The Tea Party As A Religion « The Dish
dub: good read. helps us non'merifags undertand teh insanity
mircea_popescu: dub oh gtfo. "sanity is a religion" bs, basically the internet has devolved to a sort of cracked-clone. "i'm an underpaid 'creative' with no ideas required to churn out oodles of 'work', here's my recipe : take random things to make random claims about. can be used to create an infinity of articles that are mildly entertaining for the midly stupid relatively illiterate net dorks."

That's pretty much the story : if you proceed on the ancientⁱ approach that "a thing is what most examples of it seem to me", you necessarily end up with this impression that the Internet is all about and all for adolescents with nary a clue of anything and a rather tenuous grasp of the few teapots they know about. It then becomes politically expedient to manipulate the userbase : if your definition of a thing depends on the averages rather than the peaks you will be sorely tempted to keep the average down by including more and more at the bottom (and, perhaps, excluding just a couple itemsⁱⁱ from the top). This is how you end up with a large bulk of useless people : by imagining it's all about the average man, rather than realising it's all about the best man.

So now let's consider the very valuable non-contributions to the history of human thought made by yet another Cracked.com clone.

Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.

By now it's quite the symptom of the stupidity to be calling your readership by some sort of moniker of the sort. Goons, redditards, disheads or more generally fuckwits, a "cutesy" approach to pre-European tribalism. Here's a clue, dishdork : a triple helping of "nomina sunt omina" is perhaps weak apparatus to proceed on the field of intellectual inquiry past about 1200 or so. The year hasn't been 1013 for a long while now, have you noticed ?

The "dizzying onset of modernity" is something that happened in the '60s alright. Except they were the 1860s. That guy on the right there, who you've likely read but don't recognise, came up with the term, to describe the fleeting quality of life in an urban settingⁱⁱⁱ, and even wrote an essay on the topic. You spend all your time on retardpedia anyway, but you've not yet read La Modernite, have you. This would be a chief reason of why it's the retardpedia in the first place, by the way : your failure to have read La Modernite. And other things. And your inability to speak languages. As in plural. As in having learned to fluency at least a couple on top of whatever your stupid mother passed on to you by virtue of automatic functioning.

And finally, none of the items in the dizzying array of bullshit impresses anyone. Conservatives don't give a shit about the fascination the retarded left feels on contact with faggots, yo! It's entirely your thing this, go get fucked already so you may put it behind you and forget about it. Nobody cares, seriously, fucking dudes in the ass is not particularly different from fucking women in the ass, and god knows we all do that one. Conservatives don't give a shit about "a majority-minority future", whatever that's supposed to mean. As long as this world has existed there were majorities and minorities in it, and we've lived just fine. Sometimes the minority gets shafted. Less frequently, the majority gets shafted. The history of ethnic gauls in Roman times started with genocide at the hands of Caesar and ended up with a gallic Emperor, all the while gallus denoting an eunuch.^iv Is this the fucking dizzying modernity, a rehash of thousand year old events ? Spare me.

What conservatives care about is first and foremost the patent, marauding stupidity, ignorance and cluelessness displayed by these victims of the Dunner-Krugman^v effect. Small potatoes like trying to pass off two hundred year old French ordures^vi as contemporary Liberty Fries might just be taken as comedy. It is, after all, everyone's business what he puts on his own table.

Nevertheless, the 21st century has not "brought Islamist war to America". The 21st century has brought bitchslapping to the United States (a fraction of one half of the Americas, by the way), as a quite natural last ditch method to show ignorant fuckwits that the world is indeed a large place, which is to say much larger than their native Idaho or whatever other state of birth they never left, and more importantly that the world is powerful. Much, much more powerful than the US ever was or ever will be. When compared to the rest of the world, the US is an afterthought, and not particularly noteworthy an afterthought at that, and consequently shall the point not be comprehended out of one slap, there will be more, larger and harder. As the old saying goes, the beatings will continue until literacy improves. And for that matter, conservatism is not partaking in the jingo delusions of self importance that the author apparently shares. Conservatism is comprehending the danger of delusion.

The 21st century has also not brought "a debt ridden federal government". The US has been debt ridden throughout its history, and for instance the Van Buren crisis was the direct result of a Bank of England tightening of credit, which sent the periphery into a tailspin as such tightenings always do. This, again, is the 1800s we're discussing here, and once the Bank of China decides to tighten its credit you'll have the Panic of 2017 or whatever the hell it will be. I suppose this will also count as a new "dizzying array of modernity features" in half a decade, when the new generation of libertards will be re-re-rediscovering the banal as if fresh out of the cunt of god. Shame on me for ruining the future dorkheads' fun eh.

Fast-miscegenating ? Seriously ? Cultural panic ? Fo realz ?! Fast-miscegenate a book sometime, why don't you. There's absolutely no need to and no benefit from further dirtying the white spaces of the webs with insecure blockprint. Read some more first, and preferably read something other than cracked.com. That site is obviously making you stupid.

1. It's nothing new! It's ancient, certainly old enough to have been made fun of by the classic authors (whom obviously you have not read, or we wouldn't be here). It's also immensely stupid! - a point of the deepest shade of trite banality, which nevertheless has to be rediscovered de novo for each new generation, because somehow it's very counter-intuitive to the infant mentality.

   And so about seventy thousand times to date we've gone through this entire "what are ideas and how do they relate to items" gauntlet course. Some generations are born healthier and have the mettle to make it through and discover that heroes are the real people, while the huddled masses matter about as much as the garbage rotting behind restaurants and produce markets matters in a discussion of food. Some generations are born weak and then get sick and end up crippled. They never make it through, and end up anchored in any one of the few blind tunnels available.

   Either way is no matter : the next generation starts over, and over, and over. Every year the world gets older, but the sixteen year olds are staying sixteen forever. [↩]

2. Zipf distributions implicitly guarantee that most people will never matter. Good luck throwing that curve. [↩]
3. Which, at the time, was about as novel and unsettling a concept for the French as it seems to be today for the US folk. Because you're retarded, that's why, and in no small part you're retarded because in your boundless ignorance you imagine that 1) you've invented anything and 2) century old French frayed lace can pass for the height of fashionable literacy. It's remarkable how little has changed in our colonies on this score during their short existence to date : Tom Sawyer's aunt and Mark Twain's great-grandmother held the same notions of this world. [↩]
4. Review Martial, seriously, you should be fluent in Latin if you're going to be using their alphabet. [↩]
5. So re-named in recognition of the excerptional merits of Paul Krugman in the twin fields of Herp and Derp. [↩]
6. Check the fucking definitions of words you don't well know. Half of the fucking reason you're so indescribably stupid is the criminal habit of contemporary US "teachers" to encourage children to "guess" what words mean "in context". The correct approach is to beat children as young as six within an inch of their life every time they encounter an unknown word and fail to immediately and exhaustively look it up in the dictionary. [↩]