Open Comment Region — Hyde Park Corner


Have at it, ladies and gentlemen.

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TheMom said…
Free speech in America? No way!
July 23, 2020 at 8:35 PM
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Some Scary New Initials to Start Flinging Around — MMH

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Are we being distracted from the real problem? This is a fairly typical posting from the right-leaning media… FTA: <<Liberal celebrities and entertainers love to get preachy with the public. It’s almost like it’s coded in their DNA. They just can’t resist it.   One public relations expert recently said that the public is sick and tired of it. People want to be entertained, not lectured to.   He used two specific examples. Bruce Springsteen and the Black Crowes. Springsteen’s concerts have become more like liberal talk radio and the Black Crowes actually had audience members walk out on them for trashing the USA.   Doug Eldridge, the founder of Achilles PR, says people have had it with this.   “At this point, it’s fatigue,” Eldridge said.   “Much like compounding interest, it’s not a linear calculation; it’s accumulation,” he continued. “For the last decade, fans (read: average Americans) have been lectured, lied to, gaslit, and shamed, if they didn’t confo...
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The Voices that Haunt Our Dreams

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 How this post got started… No secret that my sleep habits are a lot like That Man’s, the one so many Americans love to hate. I’ve been losing my optimism about 2.0 for a long time now, not because I don’t trust his resolve or motives but because the pessimism is a powerful force I’ve struggled against all my adult life. Which began too soon, as I’ve described elsewhere. Like him, I’m running out of time in the natural human sense of it. More still to do than likely years to do it in. My sleep comes only in chunks, punctuated by dream-induced wake-up calls that send me to the keyboard and the net and the pile of work sitting there in the in-basket. I sympathize with the champions of MAGA who are sounding so tetchy and miserable at the moment. They’re convinced they must keep trying to impress on the low-attention-span voters in their audience just how important it is to understand the depth and depravity and dastardly deeds of the Deep State. But I don’t need to be reminded. What I...
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Seventh Heaven for Hamilton

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  Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
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REPOST w/Update & Links: An Open Letter to Trump Haters

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One of these installed in at least five different cities You probably think this is going to be a screed or a lecture. It isn’t. It’s an honest question, asked out of curiosity: WHAT ARE  YOU  GETTING OUT OF ALL THIS? Almost no one comments here, so I’m not expecting answers. I’m asking you to think about the question for yourselves, with some specificity. To wit: Has the amount of emotion you’ve invested in hating Trump for 10 years made you happier? Is your marriage better, your sex life more satisfying, your circle of friends wider, your career more prosperous, your state of mind more equable and fulfilling? How has your perspective on life changed during the last 10 years? Are you more or less optimistic, diversified in your leisure-time pursuits, content with the personal choices you’ve been making on a day-to-day basis, balanced between the frequently opposing pulls of intellect and emotion? How has your self image (your amour-propre, as the French would say) evolved dur...
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Welcome to ‘Reels’ Fans

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A snip of what’s up at Reels. I wouldn’t normally use this site to promote a single joke at Facebook’s Reels investment in ACHD social network communications. This is a special case in a couple ways. The graphic basis comes from a post at Breitbart by John Nolte, whom we admire for his courage and his encyclopedic knowledge of (yeah, I’ll use the highfalutin’ word…) Cinema . It’s long been a conviction of mine that the most indispensable credential for opinionating is knowing at least one subject extremely well. Nolte’s love and expertise about all things connected to Hollywood and its extraordinary cultural contribution for over a hundred and fifty years now qualifies as just such a credential. He was with Breitbart from the beginning and has survived all the ups and downs there because he never stops doing what he does best, which is write about all the phenomena that have affected and changed the world since this breakthrough project was produced in 1872: Edward Muybridge. Ever hear...
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abcdefu

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This is cross-posted from a confidential site I use to communicate with an old friend on matters more concerned with writing than this one normally is. Sometimes the two sites intersect in unexpected ways. (e.g., See The French Hurry-Up from Feb ‘26.) This does seem an appropriate follow-up to my most recent IPR post. Up to you what you make of it… Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here… Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too. …to  here ? The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed,  Thoughts on Foul Language I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song  abcdefu  because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My...
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The List

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It’s not a long list. That’s the point. Hardly anyone gets to be on it. Nobody’s on it who isn’t a superhuman human. Actual gods don’t count. Only two of those, deliberately excluded. Shakespeare and Mozart.  End of that list. You want to fight? Tell me why your guy should be on the List. I’ll tell you why he isn’t. First Guy St. John the Divine Italian Guy Dante English Guys Milton Newton Blake Orwell French Guys Voltaire Pascal German Guys Bach Nietzche Jung Spanish Guy Picasso American Guys Poe Bierce
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A Few Thoughts on Foul Language

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  A cartoon stolen from ****ing Alarmy, who always watermark their stuff There comes a time when you realize some critical cultural variable has reached the kind of tipping point that transforms into chaos. I recently realized one of these tipping points has been reached when the streaming services, desperate for new product in the vacuum left by their failed woke productions, suddenly dumped a bunch of theatrical releases and straight to video movies from the years 2023 and 2024 on their platforms. I watch a lot of movies on streaming services, but I quickly learned not to watch anything dated ‘23 or ‘24. Too much gender confusion nonsense, too much (un)veiled lefty politicking about this and that, but most of all, way way too much foul language. I’d long had a rule that more than 10 F-bombs in 5 minutes was a signal to bail from any movie. Now I knew that this low bar couldn’t be met by the overwhelming majority of movies from the past few years. I’m not a prig. I probably hold ...
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Concerning the 250th Anniversary of Our Nation

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Happy Independence Day No. 250!  I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial.  In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
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