Back to Main
July 25, 2005
WB: Self Esteem
Comments
“Catastrophic success, George! Well done! and you too, Turdblossom!”
Posted by: Jeff (no, the other one) | Jul 25 2005 18:18 utc | 1
And like ‘They Might be Giants’ once said – If it wasn’t for disappointments, he wouldn’t have any appointments.
Posted by: biklett | Jul 25 2005 18:32 utc | 2
Gives me a lot to mull over while I am standing in the deferred-employment line.
Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 25 2005 19:03 utc | 3
Likewise, the word ‘success’ should also be avoided, as it tends to create differences between those who have had their success deferred, and those who have had deferred failure thrust upon them.
Posted by: SteinL | Jul 25 2005 19:15 utc | 4
This is great. I guess if I weren’t a chump I would successfully defer payment on all my bills until the collection companies successfully defer allowing me to get away with it. At which point I could successfully defer to show up in court after incorporating myself in Barbados, and then successfully defer paying all debts indefinitely.
Or do I have to have commitments to employees before I can successfully defer honoring them?
I considered asking Judge John G. Roborts if this would work, but he successfully deferred answering. Now that is a successfully deferred democracy!
Posted by: citizen | Jul 25 2005 19:30 utc | 5
Neo failure won’t be if the insurgency destroys Iraq.
Neo failure won’t be if we pull out now, and go back
later once SCOTUS is secured and a draft reinstated.
The only *possible* failure then? If tax money tap’s
turned off, and Pentagon is bounced out of the bar.
The US Senate just voted 100-0 to buy another round!
E.g. Only failure here is all talk, but no action!
Posted by: Limp Citizen | Jul 25 2005 19:41 utc | 6
It is a matter of scale. What these people do really can not be called a failure. It is too modest a word. Something of this magnitude should be memorialized with its own eponymous term: n. an arbusto; v. to arbusto.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 25 2005 19:50 utc | 7
There’s a good article in Counterpunch about the attempt by bible bashers to get creationism taught in the classroom. I’ve never been a fan of extreme left = extreme right but I will go along with control freak = control freak. In other words there are people out there for whom political theory is just a means to make everything line up nice and tidy. Once they get out and actually try and control the uncontrollable the result is a parody.
Changing the words we use to make the situation more palatable is a classic example. There would have been a time when the failure word was emotionally neutral but once it got consistently applied to people/situations that were perceived as being negative, the word failure began to carry negative baggage. So changing failure to deferred success simply means that after a time deferred success will carry exactly the same connotations as failure.
So the stolid burgers of Topeka will change the description of the development of our bio-systems from evolution to intelligent design and in the end all they will have succeeded in doing is equating science with intelligence and blind faith with stupidity.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 25 2005 23:07 utc | 9
And by the same token, Richard Cheney may not not have been exactly drafted, but he did the next best thing.
If bitter jokes were Congressmen, there would be hope for this country.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 26 2005 0:17 utc | 10
Creationism, n. The reassuring view that people are badly made because God has so far had only a brief run of experience with building them.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 26 2005 0:22 utc | 11
This reminds me of an apocryphal story attributed to one of my favorite teachers at Yale, the historian Jack Hexter. An undergraduate came up to him to question his mark. Hexter is reported to have said to him, ‘Sir, has it ever occurred to you that you might be stupid?’
In later years I have wondered whether the apocryphal student in question was G.W. Bush, who was there at the time.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell | Jul 26 2005 0:54 utc | 12