Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Why is politics like living near a paper mill?

Because after a while, you don't notice the smell of home.

So, some writer of "literary mysteries" wrote a whining screed about how J.K. Rowling was taking up all the shelf space that was rightfully owed to little people like herself and should stop writing and let other kids have all the fun. It was several paragraphs laced with the politics of envy and zero-sum economic theory that could have been titled #OCCUPYBARNESANDNOBLE.

Larry Correia delivered a classic Larry Correia fisking of her little text-based hissy fit, which was widely linked, and the comments section filled up fast. Among the commenters was some guy signing himself "orangemike" who described himself as a writer and reviewer and was saddened that Larry's castigation of the woman's admittedly noxious screed couldn't be done without dragging ideology into it.

It was pointed out to him that, uh, she'd kinda started it with the ideology, actually, to which he replied "That's not ideology!"

I snapped.
“That’s not water,” said the fish…
That is too ideology. That lady's whining column-ette is the entire foundation of leftist ideology in Cliff's Notes form. That is the Reader's Digest condensed version of Das Kapital and the French Revolution and Cap and Trade and every UAW contract ever written and the Democratic Party's national platform: You've got too much stuff and you need to give some of it to me.
.

20 comments:

og said...

And like a fish in water, she shits where she lives.

Paul said...

2 year old's all. What is yours is mine, what is mine is mine, and what is theirs is mine.

Usually you can train the little monkeys out of that behavior. Some are harder that others.

perlhaqr said...

Yeah... I got really depressed yesterday. Even most of my friends have positions that boil down to "Someone has something I want, but they want too much for it, so we should use tax dollars to buy it for me instead."

*sigh*

Ancient Woodsman said...

In most paper or pulp mill towns here in northern New England, the old saying about "the smell" was , "That's the smell of money!"

At least in a paper or pulp town, with the smell came some prosperity. Unlike what comes with the smell of politics.

Ancient Woodsman said...

And that last paragraph of yours was absolutely wonderful.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

There's lots of room on the infinite bookshelf of self-published fiction on Amazon.

Next, maybe she should try writing something readable?

Firehand said...

"It IS readable! I'm not selling because bette- uh, other people who already made it WON'T STOP WRITING! It's not FAIR!!"

Etc. ad bullshit.

pst314 said...

"some guy signing himself orangemike"

FYI, Orange Mike is a far-left ideologue who lives in the Midwest.

Bubblehead Les. said...

So if I say you have too many S+W Revolvers and need to give some to me, that makes me a Commie?

Gee, and here I thought I was just being a Cheap, Greedy and Whiney S.O.B.

Oh wait, that IS a Definition of Communism. Never mind.

J. Sullivan said...

I've got to say, I think I like Correia's response to the guy from Facebook even better:

"Hey, look everybody. A weird mentally imbalanced stalker troll followed me home from Facebook! Yay! If you are wondering about that strangely out of context question, we had a long discussion about how he is totally illiterate on the topic of business finance before he got boring and I blocked him. Here it is for your amusement: https://www.facebook.com/#!/larry.correia/posts/765626926781572?comment_id=112032155&notif_t=like
First off, Hipster Douchebeard, that question is impossible to answer, because collecting interest on debt isn’t a binary, on or off, mutually exclusive thing. I’m going to put my retired accountant hat on for a moment. There will be times in anyone’s life where it will be advantageous to take on debt and pay interest, like purchasing a home, or making a neccesary business expansion. There will be other times where you have sufficient assets and taking on unneccesary debt is foolish. The only time intelligence comes into play is that you are doing the right thing at the right time.
So, your question is really a non-question (for those just joining us, Kevin hates capitalism and he has taken issue with my being a heartless capitalist). You should take on debt only when it is neccesary or wise to do so, and the rest of the time you avoid it. Sometimes taking on debt is stupid, like credit cards. Othertimes you make a bad business call. That’s what we call paying the stupid tax.
Since I’m not a statist libprog moron who thinks Americans have a caste system or that this is some zero sum game, I know that everyone’s personal finances will change over time. As your finances improve, then you will be able to take your wealth and invest it. Depending on how much risk you are will to take on, now you will collect interest. Many of us are collecting interest on some things, while paying it on others. If you are smart, you pay down your debt as quick as possible, so that you can use your money to work for you, rather than for somebody else.
(on that note, I’m guessing Hippy McDoucheprog isn’t a big fan of Dave Ramsey)
So to answer your loaded, dumbass question, pretty much. Now buzz off, twatwaffle, because you’ve already bored the shit out of me."

rickn8or said...

"...you have too many S+W Revolvers..."

I am unable to grasp this concept.

global village idiot said...

I took Mr. Correia's advice and started reading the Huffing-&-Puffington piece. As it trotted along I was at least willing to give Snowflake the benefit of the doubt for at least using good grammar.

Then I got to the second paragraph.

My daughter thinks the movie Idiocracy was set 450 years too far into the future. She's right, of course.

Doing my best, I soldiered through the rest of her whine, and it struck me.

The modern self-styled liberal/progressive has managed something I'd heretofore thought impossible - not only have they turned the Seven Deadly Sins into a political ideology, they've managed to make them bloody boring.

gvi

Kristophr said...

Commie arguments FTL.

Arguments about supposedly scarce "shelf space" have no validity these days.

Shelf space on Amazon.com is infinite. Everyone has a place on the shelf. Even some retard posting his crayon drawings and trying to sell them for $1.

If your work sucks, you will get no positive reviews, and your work will sink to the bottom of the internet cesspool, where it belongs.

Mike_C said...

An assertive yet myopic whine made with the finest of sour grapes.

Whine Spectator gives it an 85%.
...
I really want to believe that it was really a performance art thingamabob, but probably not. Shoulda listened to her friend.

mikee said...

I'm gonna say this one time, and one time only: there are millions of wonderful, well written, delightful to read books in existence.

Almost all of them were printed once in a short run and never again saw the light of day. They never made it to a bookstore shelf. They never satisfied a browsing library patron. They were used as landfill, because the used bookstores and Goodwill shelves were full when the garbage truck came on Tuesday.

We exist in a world of infinite but literate monkeys typing incessantly. There is absolutely no limit to the existing literature in the world already, and more is produced every hour.

If you write for a living, you are a writer first, and of course seen as such by your adoring fans, but to succeed you must also be a successful salesperson of your work.

IF you don't sell your work successfully, your blood, sweat and tears translated into prose becomes nothing more than a fart in a hurricane. Yell at that hurricane all you want, it won't mind a bit.

Noah D said...

not only have they turned the Seven Deadly Sins into a political ideology, they've managed to make them bloody boring.

Yup.

Windy Wilson said...

In the satire, Don Juan in Hell, the king of the writers was a man whose entire ouvre was in a trunk that was burned after his death, unread.
Don't know exactly how that can apply here, but if the whiner subject of this discussion has any new-age cotton in her head she probably has some sort of idea of Karma, so she should take comfort in the fact that there's a possibility that if no one reads her stuff she'll somehow be rewarded in the next life.

NotClauswitz said...

When you pull off the C-PAP-like water-breathing apparatus and get out of the pond and stand on a hillside, it's pretty cool to see what reality is like and where the fish really swim.
I'm so glad we moved to a place where we can triangulate, but there was no other sustainable way anyhow, only escape from the Sub-Borg.

BobF said...

I just finished reading his "fisking." Holy cow, that was more than fisking, that was a fricasee!

And she deserved every damned word of it.

Michael Z. Williamson said...

This is an Orange Mike:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/OrangeMikeAtCampusTraining.jpg/300px-OrangeMikeAtCampusTraining.jpg

It smells bad, has no social graces, is a policenannystate socialist, has no sense of humor.

It's infamous for attacking writers on Wikipedia, including trying to delete articles about some of Janet Morris' books, because he perceived one of her CHARACTERS was a rapist.

This is its de: https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/orangest/www/

This is what happens when it takes a shit: http://www.otakusoftware.com/blog/2009/11/08/ive_got_99_problems_and_orange_mike_is_one/

This is its proudest moment, receiving some county or state DNC lucite plaque for stuffing envelopes or something: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/User_orangemike.jpg/300px-User_orangemike.jpg

That's all you need to know.