Just FYI, Tim Noah has the best mockery of Jonah Goldberg's subtitle switch available on the internet ("the totalitarian temptation" now runs "from Hegel to Whole Foods" instead of "from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton"). Talk of liberal fascism always puts me in the mind of this piece from National Review which observed that "Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to 'the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.'" Just to show that, yes, Goldberg really is worse than some of his colleagues.
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Cutting and Running
27 Jun 2007 09:09 pm
Comments (16)
Damn...taking it from Mussolini all the way back to Hegel. I'm thinking December 2011. Hegel's hard stuff.
"the totalitarian temptation" now runs "from Hegel to Whole Foods" instead of "from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton"
Hmm. How cowardly.
So the "Hitlary" card is off the table, but insinuating a link between an upscale supermarket and Auschwitz is somehow supposed to be more credible?
/The mock up for the cover on the Amazon link still has the old subtitle.
"One option might be for Goldberg to change the title to The Road to Serfdom, which is what F.A. Hayek called this book when he published it 50-odd years ago."
Oh, SNAP!
Come on, Trevor! You stopped your quote too soon.
"One option might be for Goldberg to change the title to The Road to Serfdom, which is what F.A. Hayek called this book when he published it 50-odd years ago. Goldberg should know, though, that a cartoon version of Hayek's most famous work is already in circulation."
Double SNAP!
If one could surgically remove all the big words from Goldberg's cerebrum, the resulting lump of grey matter would be indistinguishable from Larry King's. We would also discover that the book originally bore the title 'The Totalitarian Temptation: from Bagels to Bagels'.
Who on god's blue-green earth is going to buy this f***ing work of genius? I assume Frederick Kagan, Bradley Schlotzman, and Jonah's mom are already getting complementary copies; Dinesh von Souza will probably do his patriotic duty; which leaves - ? A mule train a half-mile long will have to be rounded up to ship the remainder of the edition to the respectively vice-presidential and presidential libraries of Dan Quayle and George W Bush, where they will serve to fill out the echoing bookshelves and glut the hungry silverfish.
So this is Jonah's big book, the one that will show the world that he's not an intellectual poseur and fraud, whose relative prominence is not merely inherited but deserved. Even though the book's changing title would be worth mocking regardless of the author, it loosely fits his pattern of argument: make an outlandish claim in vague terms, get called on it, then retreat by insisting that he's misunderstood, that he only meant something so bland it wouldn't have been worth saying aloud in the first place. See past debates with M. Yglesias for at least one or two examples. The twist he's added with the book title, however, is that rather than retreating into blandness, he's backed into an embarrassing mix of pretension and irrelevance. Let the snickers commence!
Let the snickers commence!
Ryan, I shouldn't have to remind you that we are totalitarian health food Hegelian liberals here. I think what you mean to say was "let the granola bars commence".
You made a mistake. That's OK. Just make sure it doesn't happen again, citizen.
Holy crap-- check out the link at my name, the cartoon version of The Road to Serfdom linked by Tim Noah.
Scroll to the bottom, and check out the third-to-last cartoon.
It is worth your time.
Ha ha ha. Thanks Elvis. Kinda eerie that they could see Thomas Friedman coming several decades ago.
That cartoon is awesome. And put out by General Motors, no less.
Q. What do these 4 things have in common?
--Hegel
--Mussolini
--Hillary Clinton
--Whole Foods
A. One of them was a totalitarian.
What people like Jonah never mention is that a large chunk of the US economy consists of corporations feeding at the taxpayers trough. I've never seen Jonah decrying the hundreds of $Billions passed to defense contractors , for example. Or how drug companies profit from federal R&D.
And anyone who's ever worked in the military or intelligence sector knows that there's no difference between the old Soviet central planners and the Pentagon. WHich may explain why we spent roughly $3 TRILLION in the decade prior to Sept 11 yet 19 goatherds from a primitive country were able to pull off Sept 11 with a budget of about $150,000. I don't recall Jonah criticizing that either.
Plus the last place shameless buttkissers like Jonah could survive is the "free market". Like Ronald Reagan, their lifeboat is finding some plutocrat who will give them crumbs in exchange for endless diatribes re how the rich DESERVE to be rich.
If Jonah ever actually got a real job , he would discover that the last thing Wall Street investors want is the uncertainty of a "free market". Those investors NEED for the government to set hard and fast rules -- to reduce uncertainty.
That's why both political parties received over $300 MILLION in the last election cycle. That money did not come in as $25 checks from the little people and that money was not buying "democracy", the "national interest" or "good government".
Why is it that people like Jonah and Ann Coulter can get published by writing false, misleading fiction and claiming it is political philosophy?
Is the criteria nowadays simply "How many morons are willing to buy it?"
Re "Who on god's blue-green earth is going to buy this f***ing work of genius? "
---------
Ah, I just remembered how this dung gets sold.
Everytime Ann Coulter comes out with her trash, I get spam from something called Newsmax.com offering me the book at a HEAVY discount. Somewhere around $5 if my memory is correct.
I'll wait and see if I get similar spam floggin Jonah's work. If so, I'll post it here so we can snigger.
I try to get my head around how farcical the subtitle change is. I can't.
A Very Serious & Careful Argument with a Shifting Rationale.
A poseur caught between his desire to sell lots of books (Hillary the Brownshirt) and his desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual (Hegel?!). The intellectual poseur wins! Such fearless principle!
Whole Foods? People who shop at Whole Foods are "tempted by totalitarianism"? The organic food industry is choking off our freedoms? People who don't eat organic are marginalized by thuggish Food Nazis? I thought the culture-of-victimhood thingy was a leftwing preoccupation.
I can't fucking wait. Write Jonah, write! As the impresario implored Mozart in the movie Amadeus, Just write it down, get your genius down on paper, before it's too late!
This just doesn't stop getting funnier.
Comments closed July 11, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
According to Garry Wills in "Confessions of a Conservative" (you'll recall that he worked for NR during Meyer's editorship), Meyer was also convinced that the introduction of the Zip Code was a dangerous step toward dictatorship. Substitute "psychotic looniness" for "theoretical maximalism" and that other NR author has a point.
Posted by Bruce Moomaw | June 27, 2007 9:37 PM