Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/01/01/scott-walkers-wisconsin-cont.html
…
7 Likes
Maybe Wisconsin is embarrassed by how farting from eating alot of cheese could contribute to global warming?
11 Likes
So if we scrub any mention of Walker himself,I assume he will cease to exist as well? Hmmm…
18 Likes
Back in the 1980s I frequently had to take a flight that went right over Wisconsin. I now understand rather better why it’s one of the “flyover states”.
1 Like
Reality is anti-capitalist.
17 Likes
By condensing the text to such an extent it will take less resources to print - that’s thinking green and thinking green is thinking smart.
9 Likes
What torques me as a person with roots in the state is that there really is a grand tradition of Progressive lefty blue-collar union good times there. Bob LaFollette is awesome. Russ Feingold is a cool dude, too.
But then every once in a while the state will go all “I think this McCarthy guy talks a lot of sense.” and subject the nation to what your paranoid hillbilly uncle thinks is a good idea. Walker and Paul Ryan and fekkin’ Reince Preibus all fall into that camp these days.
WI is swingy and tends to like big, dramatic ideas. Which is, BTW, why I imagine Sanders or someone following in those progressive footsteps could do quite well there. Right now the only big dramatic idea out there for Wisconsinites to vote on is Paul Ryan’s immoral and ineffective Randian budgetary shenanigans (and his peers in the Republican party). And that sounds better than “you know, pretty much the same stuff, little bit better.”
And then you get President Trump.
12 Likes
It’s incredible how much of what George Orwell predicted is coming true.
16 Likes
My vote as to how to explain this goes to a new form of cheese mold. It wasn’t a significant issue prior to climate change, but now things are warming up, and this particular mold is an opportunistic sort of a-hole with a penchant for getting into your brain, releasing its spores, and making you stupid once you’ve eaten the cheese host it came in on.
Perhaps unsurprising to some, my early reasearch into this new kind of mold indicates that it’s orange, and has a vague odor of cheetos. So far, research into finding a cure for this incipidly disgusting mental fungus has been unsuccessful… I shudder to think what will be required in order to get rid of it.
3 Likes
1984 wasn’t a prediction; it was satire. Orwell worked for the BBC in 1948, as I recall, and the book is about how the BBC had already been manipulating news to suit the government’s agenda for many years. Post WW2, Britain was still trying to throw its weight around as an imperial power (really until Suez, 1956) and was reversing its policy towards the Soviet Union.
To add to the UK reference, Orwell as an Old Etonian was well aware of who really ran the country. Ingsoc shouldn’t be taken too seriously; the Party is the Old Etonians in power, and the Proles are everybody else. Although in theory there was a Labour government, the Etonians still ran things behind the scenes using their extremely powerful tribal loyalties (look at how even today Johnson and Cameron won’t publicly criticise one another because they are both OEs, and how Jacob Rees-Mogg has risen without trace.) The internal spying by MI5 was extraordinary - Labour politicians were all being spied on along with union leaders and left wing lawyers, while they failed to notice actual spies from their own social group, like Philby, Blunt and Burgess.
1984 isn’t a forecast; it’s an exaggeration of how Britain actually was in the late 1940s. That other states have become equally dysfunctional in the same ways should not be surprising.
15 Likes
11 Likes
Whatever it is, it’s frightening to see the scrubbing of science sliding noiseless (with the lubricant of stupidity) into previously free societies.
13 Likes
How? Our government has been all about going there for many decades.
The Kock bros. love little Scotty walker.
5 Likes
So? Each new incident just illuminates how much worse it’s gotten, by orders of magnitude, since the book was written.
3 Likes
Since it hasn’t yet been said about Walker, but but is very relevant here: Christ, what an asshole.
12 Likes
I presume you know what portion of anatomy is actually euphemised as a Berkshire?
Time to go up the apples to lemon me Margates.
2 Likes
Even if you mean actual astronomical orders of magnitude (= 5th root of 100) I’m not sure you are right. The difference nowadays is that thanks to the Internet we actually know about all this stuff going on. Before, we simply wouldn’t have known. Though I grant you that, if the Stasi had known about Facebook they’d be wondering why they bothered, when people could be easily persuaded to spy on their friends and even themselves, in exchange for cat gifs.
Admittedly, we are less able to do anything about it.
3 Likes
I was thinking much larger than that. The internet not only lets people in government change stuff a lot more easily, there are more people able to read them, and thus believing the bad information. They then exchange bad information with each other. It doesn’t just come from the government (or corporations, or the media), but from each other. So there’s some sort of geometric or exponential multiplying factor here (that can’t be quantified).
I agree we haven’t figured out what to do about it.
1 Like
Those “happy” Wisconsin cows are responsible for a lot of methane being released into the environment.
Side note, cheddar should be white, not artificial yellow like most of their poor quality output.
3 Likes
