My son will disown me if I manbaby him, as he rightfully should.

In reply to this comment by critttter:
Oh yes, there is a growing consensus...Manbaby! Manbaby! Manbaby that photo!!!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
I see you still lurking around this video. I don't know if I've ever seen you so angry here. I can't imagine Squink with rabies.

In reply to this comment by critttter:
^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??

The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

Oh yes, there is a growing consensus...Manbaby! Manbaby! Manbaby that photo!!!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
I see you still lurking around this video. I don't know if I've ever seen you so angry here. I can't imagine Squink with rabies.

In reply to this comment by critttter:
^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??

The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

Rabid Squink? No, all it takes is sleep interruption for Squink to go to the dark side. For about five seconds. Then she remembers there's food in the awake world, and she's happy again.

I'm just alittle rabid because I foresee a long summer of Republican expertise at successfully dividing the Democratic party with non-issues. Again.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
I see you still lurking around this video. I don't know if I've ever seen you so angry here. I can't imagine Squink with rabies.

In reply to this comment by critttter:
^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??

The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

I don't disagree with you. It's not the basic premise. It's the undercurrent. I'm not trying to say that a majority of women will vote for Hillary because of her gender. I'm saying some will. How many? I don't know. But, you can't tell me there aren't women out there who think it's past time for a female president, and more power to them. The guys have really been making a mess of it lately.



>> ^critttter:
^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??
The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

I see you still lurking around this video. I don't know if I've ever seen you so angry here. I can't imagine Squink with rabies.

In reply to this comment by critttter:
^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??

The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

^ Snoozedoctor your premise is valid, of course, if white guys feel comfortable voting for white guys, that old chestnut, but floating Hillary as a paramount feminist voting cause is like backing Margeret Thatcher just because she's a woman. If this really worked, don't you suppose the Republicans would have had a female candidate if it all boils down to such a basic premise??

The Republicans are masters at dividing the Democrats, who willingly walk right into it. Sad.

From Harpers Six Questions for Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’

3. In America today, the debate seems to focus on the efficacy of torture—whether it is a useful tool for getting at the truth. You note the flow from the Roman Ulpian, who accepts torture as something quite normal to be used in interrogation (though he does at some points express skepticism about its usefulness) to Cesare Beccaria, whose monumental denunciation of torture did so much to influence European ideas about torture and criminal justice in the eighteenth century. But today we seem stuck in a debate in which those who use torture are eager to try to justify themselves but unwilling to let a bright light shine into their conduct, ostensibly for national security reasons, though many will inevitably suspect that secrecy is driven by concerns for their own culpability. You offer up a very lengthy and nuanced discussion on the efficacy of torture, and in your Washington Post column on five myths you have pulled some chestnuts out of it. One of them is that “people will say anything under torture.” But isn’t the claim rather the way Shakespeare put it in act III of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ that people will say what they think the torturer wants them to say? And doesn’t that explain why societies that put a premium on confessions like torture to extract them, and why al-Libi told the CIA about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD plans? Don’t you think that the efficacy discussion has to address the broader consequences that a decision to use torture has to reputation, and conversely to the ability of a terrorist foe to recruit?

Yes, I do. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Shah’s torture was the best recruiting tool the opposition had. Prisons were places where prisoners met each other and professionalized their skills, as I and others have documented. It feels like a nightmare watching American politicians make the same mistake as the Shah. I like to believe that with every mistake we must surely be learning, but sometimes it is hard to believe.

When I talked about people under torture saying anything, I was especially interested in the cases where torturers interrogate for true information. That’s what I document doesn’t work. But it seems pretty clear that torture works to generate false confessions, which serve equally as well as true confessions for many state purposes. When judges and juries value confessions as decisive proof, police are happy to generate confessions for convictions. This can happen in domestic crime, as it happened in Chicago in the 1980s where African Americans were sentenced to death on the basis of coerced confessions. They’re also good for international show trials, trials that exonerate the state’s failures. Stalin wanted show trials to demonstrate that terrorists and saboteurs caused his failures, and he wasn’t the last leader who liked show trials to vindicate his decisions. And lastly, states use false confessions as blackmail to turn prisoners into unwilling informants. Torture allows one to collect dependent and insular individuals, spreading a net of fear across a population. This can happen locally (as in a ghetto) or in a whole state, like East Germany.

It’s also true that torturers often hear what they want to hear. In fact that’s one of the big problems with torture that I document in the book and the “Five Myths” article. Even if torture could actually break a person and they told you the truth, the torturer has to recognize it was the truth, and too often that doesn’t happen because torturers come into a situation with their own assumptions and don’t believe the victim. Moreover, intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to deception. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. In intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.

And let’s remember, torturers aren’t chosen for intelligence; they are chosen for devotion and loyalty, and they are terrible at spotting the truth when they see it. In the “Five Myths” piece I talk about how the Chilean secret service lost valuable information in that way when they broke Sheila Cassidy, an English doctor, and she told them everything but they didn’t believe her. And one can just repeat dozens of stories like this. My favorite is when Senator John McCain tried to explain the concept of Easter to his North Vietnamese torturer. “We believe there was a guy who walked the earth, did great things, was killed and three days later, he rose from the dead and went up to heaven.” His interrogator was puzzled and asked him to explain it again and again. He left, and when he came back, he was angry and threatened to beat him. Americans couldn’t possibly believe in “Easter” since no one lives again; McCain had to be making this up."

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Vic Chestnut, Bill Frisell, Ghetto Bells' to 'Vic Chesnutt, Bill Frisell, Ghetto Bells' - edited by therealblankman

eeeeyep. warms your heart, don't it?

chestnuts roasting in a warm tub of water and some razor blades...
the grim reaper, nipping at your nose...

The Japanese subs give an old chestnut of a song the gravitas it could probably use by now. Upvote for the old dirtbikes. I should prolly put down the whiskey 'cause i feel like i sound like choggie.

With the basting and the butterballing and the chestnut stuffing!

Ah, the old Fox News "some people say" chestnut (in this case, the harpy said "some investors" at the beginning) -- come up with a premise for a segment that has nothing to back it up, but say that "some people" are talking about it.

The question always is, other than the ones in the Fox studio, what people? The answer, almost always, is: no one. And that's your propaganda lesson for the day, kids.

(On a related note, aren't there ANY conservatives out there that are embarrassed by this sort of dumb, pandering "journalism"? How through-the-roof would conservatives go if this aired on another network with the "ultra-far-right" as the foil?)

How 'bout some alliteration:

charters' channel, charters' champions, charters' charts, charters' checklist, charters' chestnuts, charters' chilis, charters' choices

and for a Sifters Coffeehouse tie in:

charters' chickory


OK, back to what I was trying to do before the brain ran overdrive . . .

Hey, QM - doesn't pretty much everything look better in comparison to beheadings?
How long you gonna keep using that chestnut to avoid discussing the subject at hand?

- Paul Bremer lost $8 billion dollars meant for Iraq - but at least he's never beheaded anyone!
- Douglas Feith cherry-picked intelligence on orders from Bush to link al Qaeda to Iraq, just like we all knew he did - but at least he's never beheaded anyone!
- Dick Cheney tried taking someone's head off with a shotgun, but he only wounded him and almost gave him a heart attack.

This chestnut of a divorce story has been substantially tweaked over the years.

1980s - My Dad Lives With His New Stripper Wife.
1990s - My Dad Wore Leather at the Pride Day Parade.
2000s - My Father is a Furrie. Raccoon, if you must know.

Who on earth is Beau Bridges talking to in that clip?