Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Fadduh Smiff sez on 09.25.11 @10:46:
Hell, why not check their skills at fantasy football while you're at it?

Dude! I think you've got something, there:

"Mr. Perry... if you were coaching the 1972 Pittsburgh Steelers, who would you start at QB against the '67 Packers: Bradshaw or Hanratty?"

C'mon, man, that'd work. I'd actually tune in to the next GOP debate to hear him answer that one.

What if... what if... what if. Life in the subjunctive mood. Highly characteristic of American political discourse...

Ahh, yeah, the two magic words, "What if...?"

Reminds me of the street "debates" at the antiwar protests during Iraq War v1.0. People on our side were making reasonable arguments against the war and reasoned critiques of Poppy Bush's foreign policy, and the rightist boneheads trying to provoke us from the other side of the police lines would come back with whacked-assed out-of-nowhere questions entirely unrelated to the issue, usually along the lines of "What if Saddam Hussein was trying to invade your neighborhood?" or "What if Saddam Hussein was trying to rape your daughter?"

Lord Keynes' sometime boyfriend, Lytton Strachey, who was a pacifist during the first world war, had the best answer to idiotic questions of this kind:

Q: Mr Strachey, if a German soldier were attempting to rape your sister--

A: I should interpose my own body.

Let us not forget one of the golden oldies: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Poor Michael Dukakis. A wretched schmo, of course, but one felt a twinge of pity. His answer, for all the what-if porn fanciers, was judged to have been sadly lacking in passion. Apparently he should have said something like "Death penalty? Screw that. It would have involved a stupid trial and all that crap. I would have tortured, killed and eaten the bastard myself."

I've read a few articles about job interview questions. Sadism ain't the half of it. Look at exquisite theater-of-the-absurdisms like this: http://shine.yahoo.com/event/poweryourfuture/20-craziest-job-interview-questions-2497002/

I especially like the selection from our friends at Goldman Sachs. It begins: "Suppose you had eight identical balls..." If you work for Goldman, you need to have eight balls? I'm impressed. No wonder they get to rule over us.

All those discombobulating job questions: tests of resourcefulness, ingenuity, character, ethics, philosophy and so on to infinity. And for what? So you can get hitched for a slot in some big-name, worker-drone, soul-slayer, mind-puree factory. But then, in some of the places I've worked for, the Human Resources folks were often the least occupied and the most pretentious.

Yep. The Dukakis wife-rape question is certainly the locus classicus. Of course Matty Woodchuck's equivalent is "What if the Eurozone breaks up?" -- which says something very depressing about Matty.

If we asked penetrating, difficult policy questions in the debates, would we convince more Americans to vote for the bozo who could actually answer them, or would they be turned off to such a smarty pants intellectual and vote for a dumb-ass cowboy? Also, do we really want a smart, well-informed lackey for the military-industrial-financial complex in the White House or is it better to have a incapable moron in the job?

Seems to me our recent history shows there's not bloody much difference.

The white man's deepest fear is of a strapping black man finding his wife's eurozone.

Fear -- or hope?

no one expects the merit class inquisition

Au contraire, Owen. Everybody expects the merit class inquisition -- and quite right too. Some even spend a lot of time working out their answers in advance -- to questions which are, in every reading of the phrase, hypothetical.

antonello sez on 09.25.11 @13:21:
I've read a few articles about job interview questions. Sadism ain't the half of it. Look at exquisite theater-of-the-absurdisms like this: http://shine.yahoo.com/event/poweryourfuture/20-craziest-job-interview-questions-2497002/

I especially like the selection from our friends at Goldman Sachs. It begins: "Suppose you had eight identical balls..."

My flabber is seriously gasted by those questions, but, somehow, I'm not surprised at all -- especially the Google question; in fact, that question sounds surprisingly sane for a Google interview question.

Those questions are all-timers for sure, but for sheer asshattery, none of 'em beats the tried'n'true: Where do you see yourself in five years?

I'd basically tell 'em what I'd like to be doing ideally in five years -- art director, perhaps creative director, doing higher-end print design, more illustration, more magazine work.

But where I actually see myself in five years? Jeezus, who do I look like -- Jeane Fucking Dixon?

What if the Eurozone breaks up?

Hell, I'd think a guy from Yglesias' generation would be trying to figure out what to do now that R.E.M. has broken up.

Charles D sez on 09.25.11 at 13:35:
...do we really want a smart, well-informed lackey for the military-industrial-financial complex in the White House or is it better to have a incapable moron in the job?

Well, now that I've had experience with both, I gotta tell ya', I'll take a dumb-assed President any goddamn' day. If nothing else, they're more entertaining. This goddamn' smartypants we've got now, this self-serious Harvard puke, totally bores the shit out of me. At least the last guy was funny.

Better yet, MJS, I believe he said, "I should attempt to interpose my body."

@IOZ: Yes. Definitely an improvement, though I couldn't tell you why -- perhaps the finely-calibrated implicit assessment of potential difficulties. Makes the whole imagined scene so much more real, y'know?

Mjs
It is rare I invert or play the hapa game
Being as I'm a chap of blunt aspect
But of course you are exactly right

We have two ethics here about
A Job ethic and a schooling ethic

And both have their respective merit class gate keepers

I myself prefer the job site gate keepers
It's nice to see the meat of a prior applicant in their teeth

Of course I'm thinking of the old days
Now the for profits have to act like non profits
When it comes to LSMFT
or what ever the letter string of oppressed communities is these days

I'm told the ultimate liberal identity group are the "undecided"
Which captures the agnostic soul all the rest
are desperately seeking to escape

I've got to hand it to you, you are on a roll. Harris,vanden Huevel,and now Yggles. Great work.

In one supposedly unbowdlerized version, Strachey replied, "I should attempt to come between them." At least that's one thing I took away from that Bloomsbury seminar.