The Bleat Goes On: Breed Matters; Gun Crazies; Tough Talk; Fighting Words

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Tough Talk: Sir Barry bluntly declared that the welbeing of the nation is not to be held hostage to partisan bickering. 
Yeah, right. 
That stern language is gonna stop the GOPhux from leveraging the financial well-being of the Nation for their partisan advantage.
He sher talks gud, tho, dunne?
Woody thinkz:
We'll see, won't we?
Lotta brave talk.
Heard it ALL before.
I personally suspect he'll be "forced" by the debt-ceiling "crisis" to negotiate, while proclaiming loudly how he had no choice, while furiously extolling the virtues of joint sacrifice.

Fighting Words: A smart correspondent just wrote on a posting of mine:

You know why the battles in academia are so vicious? It's because the stakes are so low.

Attributed to Henry Kissinger, I believe; but which is just so much arrant nonsense and patent bullshit in any case.
Battles in academia are not irrelevant or trivial, and the stakes couldn't be higher!
Academia is STILL where the underlying assumptions of culture and society are developed and tested.
The battles among scholars over fine, seemingly trivial points are about the fundamental meanings of the lexicons, and the discourses, and the data, and the books we use to describe and understand the world, and keep creating it.
That "irrelevance" meme is a bullshit, anti-intellectual, rightard/fucktard fiction meant to discredit critical thought and the importance of educated discourse.


 Name Calling:

 Related term: Christard, a person whose devotion and dedication to religious faith completely interferes with their ability to engage in any kind of rational discourse, with the same disclaimer.


 Gun Crazies: Mental health is kind of a cop-out in the debate over firearms, because it's a continuum, not a categorical phenomenon. There is no way of EVER knowing in advance who is gonna go off the rails, or when, or to what effect.
And one must submit oneself to it. It's not part of the normal array of diagnoses.
So if a crazy person doesn't admit to being crazy, there's pretty much no way to get 'em in 'treatment.' 
Or am I missing something?

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Breed Laws:  The degree to which certain breeds of dogs are demonized and marginalized is directly and positively correlated with the number of demonized or marginalized people or identifiable groups who have them as pets.