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A valient attempt to find something not to hate in the Daily Mail:

But its worldview is more nuanced than its opponents believe. Unlike other Right-wing papers, it opposed the Iraq War. It regularly campaigns on civil liberties issues or the environment; Dacre, a true conservative, took a huge dislike to ubiquity of plastic bag litter. It dislikes open-door immigration and people taking advantage of the system but it has often spoken up for individual immigrants who are mistreated. It has a strong idea of fairness and decency, one reason it campaigned for Stephen Lawrence’s family.

Foucault as a tool for right-wing politics. The slave’s tools will rebuild the master’s house!

If Foucault’s thought offers a radical critique of all forms of power and administrative control, then as the cultural left becomes more powerful and the cultural right more marginal, the left will have less use for his theories, and the right may find them more insightful.

[Language Log] on compound words with ass, digs out a paper on the topic:

Although the origin of the ‘-ass’ suffix is unclear, it would seem to have spread from a more restricted nominalizing morpheme, which attaches not only to adjectives, but also to verbs: bad-ass (‘Check the dude in the leather jacket – he’s a total bad-ass!’), hard-ass, slack-ass, whup-ass (‘If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna open up a big can of Texas-style whup-ass on ya.’), lazy-ass, stupid-ass and kiss-ass, for example. Note that many of these can also be used as emphatic adjectives (stupid-ass, lazy-ass, slack-ass, hard-ass).

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