Assorted Assertions IV: A New Beginning

Assorted Assertions IV: A New Beginning
by Dave Munger

"Enable every woman who can work to take her place on the labour front, under the principle of equal pay for equal work. This should be done as quickly as possible."
- Mao Tse-Tung 1955

I think Leon Redbone might be Frank Zappa. I've never seen them together. Maybe Zappa decided he preferred being Redbone full time, and faked his death.

All politics is negative. Without a grievance, one has no political position.

I think that ethnic slurs should lose their pejorative connotations and be used to replace the unsatisfactory designations of hyphenated Americans. Those who we now call German-Americans, for example, should just be referred to as Krauts. Since Germany is a nation, the word German should only be used to describe someone's nationality or language. In order to specify that one's nationality is American but his ancestry is French, calling him a Frog would be much clearer than calling him a French-American. If adopted, this proposal would work best if we started using it only on people of European descent, at least at first.

If I had to kill a bunch of people (less than 10) and I had to do it in person, at close range, I think I'd like to use a hammer.

Since I've been writing web polemic, I've coined a few terms that I was hoping might catch on. I'll put some of them here to give them another chance:

The Indulgent Nanny State; describes socialist governments that use superficially libertarian policies to make their subjects forget how high their taxes are (Holland).
Slack-jawed barristas; describes young macho Marxists who think they're anarchists and have never heard of Peter Kropotkin.
Empty headed Bill Mahers; refers to socialists who think liking pot and having gay friends makes them libertarian.
Pro-Rape; the position that one can implicitly define one's political opponents as holding (you are anti-rape, he disagrees with you, ergo, he's pro-rape).
Fossilized youth culture; the phenomena of young hippies, Fonzie jackets, rebellion without cause, music as a means of demonstrating group loyalty and alienating outsiders, people born in 1972 spending their whole lives reacting against the supposed Stalinist conformity of the '50s, popular credulity directed at any proposition thatis opposed by anyone perceived as The Man.

Violent criminals constitute a minute minority of the general population. Nevertheless, hitchhiking is unwise. Add all kinds of thieves, including embezzlers, and still you have a small minority, but we find it necessary to lock our doors and windows. Normal people vastly outnumber the sum total of all criminals, yet our way of life is determined by systems set up to deal with them. This is the devil's world.

I think the best part about having sex with a dog would probably be the look on its face. I was going to try to rephrase that so it wouldn't sound like I'm saying I like humping dogs, but everyone I know knows I don't even have one.

In the future, paranoid schizophrenics will hallucinate heads-up displays, like the Terminator. They will eschew J.D. Salinger, and carry dog-eared copies of Earth In The Balance.

People who never suggest that we adopt the death penalty for rapists often defend the practice of killing the children conceived by rape (after implicitly conceding the humanity of the fetus: if it wasn't human, there would be no need to concede that abortion was serious at all, or that rape was a special case). Then they say that others are not as concerned about rape victims as they are, and that it is hypocritical to oppose abortion on demand and support the death penalty.

Whenever I think the market niche for urine beverages is filled, they come up with a new one. By urine beverages I mean soft-drinks that look like urine, make you urinate a lot, have names that sound like urine, and taste nasty. There was Mountain Dew, Squirt, Mellow Yellow and now Surge.

Who liked "Fargo"? Why? Because it had ugly people in it?

Bill Clinton's entire presidency has been a continuous campaign for the position of Secretary General of the U.N.