Last month I became interested in the story of a pensioner in Wiltshire, England, who slowly began to realize nothing was going to be done about the “youths” throwing rocks at his house, and took matters into his own hands. He used a stick to chase off the blokes. The story didn’t mention him whacking anyone; he chased. With a hunk of wood. For which he faced prosecution.
The story has now repeated in the Land Down Under. This time the “youths” are party-crashing, and this time the vigilante threatened law-and-order by means of a sjambok. A five-foot whip.
“I told them it was a private party and to clear off but this big youth put his face right into mine and said: ‘make me’,” said Mr [Dion] Driman, 46.
The South African electrical contractor said he had “sensed trouble” when he saw the youths outside and had armed himself with a decorative sjambok from inside the house.
The gang split into two groups and entered the house at the front and side, kicking a screen door off its hinges in the process. Mr Driman, the only adult at his son’s party, confronted the ringleader as he came around the side of the house.
“As I tackled him, six of them came over the top of me. I received a big hit to the side of my head,” said Mr Driman. “It happened really quickly.”
And…drum roll please…along comes the pencil-neck police spokesman bureaucrat.
None of the youths could be identified and so no charges were laid. Hornsby police were called to the incident and are understood to be considering whether the force Mr Driman used to protect his home was excessive.
NSW Police could not comment on the incident yesterday but a spokesman told the local paper Mr Driman had the right to defend himself – the question was whether he had used too much force.
“All I would suggest, if a situation arises again, leave it to the police to handle,” he said.
+++snicker+++ Yeah, handle it like something out of a Monty Python sketch. “Here here, now, trashing someone’s house, that’s not nice. What’s your name, son?” “Heywood. Heywood Jablowme.” “Oh, now, you’re smart-mouthing the wrong copper, m’lad. I’m well up on the Heywood Jablowme prank. Can only fool me so many times with that one…so you won’t give me your name, huh? Well, I’ll show you. You have no identity. And thus, you’re free to go.”
And that — I am left to presume, from the good nameless faceless spokesman’s remarks — is the proper way to handle it.
After you’ve prosecuted that reckless, vigilante homeowner. Who has a name. And then we can have a civilised society!
Eh…sorry, Mister Namless Faceless Non-Existent Unaccountable pencil-neck police spokesman guy. You know…I think I like my definition of civilization a whole lot better.
Parent site Webloggin has as decent a round-up of the events as anyone, it seems at this time:
A man stormed into the State Democratic Party Headquarters and critically shot party chair Bill Gwatney. Gwatney died hours later. According to the the Arkansas Times the man may have been a former employee of Mr. Gwatney’s body shop and was recently let go.
:
The following description appeared in the Arkansas Times.
Arkansas State Democratic Party Chair Bill Gwatney was shot and critically wounded at State Democratic Party Headquarters on Capitol Avenue about 11:50 a.m. today, witnesses at the scene said.
:
Police may have picked up the shooter’s trail because he threatened someone with a gun nearby. Reports were that a man with a gun confronted a building manager in the Arkansas Baptist State Convention office building a few blocks east of Democratic headquarters and said he’d lost his job. This apparently was not long before the shooting. He pointed the gun, but didn’t shoot. He fled in a vehicle whose description may have been reported to police.
Gwatney, a former state senator, was an executive in a car dealership group, a business in which employment changes are not uncommon. Rumors immediately arose that the shooter might have been a disgruntled former employee of a Gwatney dealership. There were layoffs at a Gwatney dealership this week, according to employees.
The rumors about the car-dealership association between the two men have now been denied. One Police Lt. Terry Hastings is quoted as saying, “This is one of those things we may never know,” regarding the gunman’s motive.
Regarding the liberal attempts to blame conservatives, you can go anywhere. To the Webloggin link above, to Cassy’s spot, to Michelle Malkin, Democratic Underground, and DailyKos (“Please god, let them find RW stuff in the perp’s house”).
I found out from this incident that it has become popular among lefties to use the initials “RW” for right-wing and “LW” for left-wing; that way, you can argue about these two entities as if they were single people. So there is a blizzard of accusations going on now that RW has motivated killings of LW by invoking hate speech against the LW.
I guess this rap music posted by Malkin, which seems to be quite plainly inciting hatred and violence by LW’s against the RW, just doesn’t count.
REFRAIN
We gotta get ’em, get ’em.
We gotta chill ’em, chill ’em.
We gotta get ’em, get ’em.
We gotta kill ’em, kill ’em.
…
Hate dominates like the Celts in the East
Michelle Malkin wants to snitch
Like you tell the police
She ought to be shot
They gotta be stopped
…We gotta shut down Fox News
That’s the way it has to be…
But anyway, as blogger friend Philfound out at Cassy Fiano’s blog, there is a template flying around the “LW” blogosphere helping to detail all the hate speech by the “RW” for whoever might come askin’ for it. It’s the typical LW recruitment job; if you go researching into things like date, location, and most importantly context, you find what’s being called “hate speech” is poor taste at worst — and very often, not even that.
1. Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.”
2. Senator Phil Gramm: “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”
3. Rep. James Hansen on Bill Clinton: “Get rid of the guy. Impreach him, censure him, assassinate him.”
4. John Derbyshire intimated in the National Review that because Chelsea Clinton had “the taint,” she should “be killed.”
5. Ann Coulter: “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.”
6. Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
7. Bill O’Reilly: “…those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains.”
8. Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said he was “thinking about killing Michael Moore” and pondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” before concluding: “No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”
My thoughts about it? I think there’s a major miscommunication going on. This antagonism left-wingers have toward the concept of an individual making decisions for himself, has caused a sort of psychosis that results in classical psychological projection. They don’t think any right-winger is capable of expressing any thought, it seems, without some sort of fax or e-mail campaign giving him the idea. And thus, when a right-winger says something irresponsible or dangerous it has to be the result of some widespread conspiracy.
My other thought — if Bill Clinton ever tires of having his name fasted on to the Monica Lewinsky legacy and wants to be known for something else, I think he could make a fair claim to the concept of “hate speech” in the United States. History will record, I’m afraid, that we suffered an enormous erosion of real civil rights through this legal concept and researchers will have to trace the genesis of the landslide to the Clinton administration’s actions in the wake of Matthew Shepherd‘s murder and the Oklahoma City bombing. Our 42nd President, quite plain & simply, did not handle these events as a public steward concerned with protecting our constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression. And now we have all these lefties on the blogosphere babbling away about hate crimes. And that’s to preserve human life? Don’t be silly. Ask them about abortion. Ask them about executing convicted criminals who are certain to kill again if they’re allowed to live. Ask them about taking down Saddam Hussein as he was oppressing people living in his country during his bloodthirsty, corrupt regime. In all three cases they’ll come up with some kind of rule — an inviolable rule, inviolable while other rules may be violated at leisure — that says, essentially, we have to let innocent people die.
They don’t give two farts about the sanctity of human life. They want to infringe on the liberty of individuals to say things. To say things…without checking with some centralized authority first.
Hate Speech (n.):
Intangible noun descriptive of accidental harm done to other people by means of words. Ironically, it is also a battle cry used just before someone practices deliberate harm to other people by means of words.
First, the lead. George Will writing about Bill Richardson:
Clinging to the Obama campaign’s talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, [New Mexico Governor and former Ambassador and Presidential Candidate Bill] Richardson said this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama’s zest for diplomacy, and that America should get the U.N. Security Council “to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint.” Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the U.N. for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.
Now, your paragraph. It is roughly paraphrasing the outburst I had yesterday when I heard on the radio about Sen. Obama calling for a cease fire. Which made the veins stand out in my neck and forehead. You might not understand that in the moment in which you read this sentence; but the paragraph below will make it all clear.
Begin paragraph.
Republicans talk to people as if they’re talking to teenagers; democrats talk to people as if they’re talking to little tiny kids. When you talk to a teenager, you essentially say “you do what you want, but if you do this then these are the likely results, and if you do that then those are the consequences.” You do not do this when you talk to little kids. When you talk to little kids you are responsible for weighing consequences yourself, and then you say “do this…don’t do that.” Normal kids eventually mature to the point where they can weigh cause-and-effect on their own — but democrats don’t seem to think that is the case. They talk down to people, cradle-to-grave, saying do this…don’t do that. You see it in Senator Obama. The man seems to have a medical condition. He can’t stop telling people what to do and what not to do. The folly of this communications tactic in foreign policy is evident when democrats achieve positions of power, and conceive new doctrines that consist of telling recalcitrant foreign powers “do this…don’t do that.” They do this even against history’s backdrop, in which it’s fair to assert that every foreign policy success has been a direct result of conducting diplomacy in the style one conducts diplomacy with a teenager. They do this in situations in which it has been proven that the teenage-diplomacy is the only viable option, short of military force. They don’t seem to be capable of rising to this challenge, intellectually. They dispense instructions…they form their foreign policy around the dispensation of instructions…like teaching a preschool class…and then the policy crumbles, inevitably, the day it comes up against a foreign head of state who defeats it handily with a single syllable, simply by saying: “No.” We’ve seen this happen, again and again and again.
End paragraph.
I would further add one more thing:
As ethereal and sloppy a definition the word “conservative” has managed to achieve in domestic issues, with foreign policy the definition has remained crisp, clear and distinctive. It means, quite plain and simply, to elevate the cost of being our country’s enemy by any means necessary, and to reduce the cost and enhance the benefits of being our friend. Liberalism is quite the opposite; liberalism, with regard to other countries, is very much like the slutty woman who spurns the likable nerd who brings her chocolates and flowers and carries her piano up the stairs on moving day, and then talks her mother into taking out a second mortgage on her house so she can buy truckloads of beer for her other boyfriend who bruises her face and dreams of one day getting the band back together.
When a liberal runs the United States, you know how to get the United States to do what you want. Just say you don’t like the United States. The liberal will come running to drink tea with you at Camp David, and find out what your “demands” are. If you go on record calling yourself an “ally” then the liberal won’t give a rat’s ass what you want. Liberalism means only bending over backwards for people who don’t like your country.
And so left-wing diplomacy is always doomed to fail. By saying “do this…don’t do that” what it is saying is “if you want to be our friend then do this and don’t do that.” But then, it says, you’re only going to be treated decently if you’re our enemy.
In a sane world, the “do this don’t do that” people would make it a worthwhile proposition to be on friendly terms with us — so that there would be some motivating agent to get foreign powers to do things. In reality, it is quite the reverse. Don’t ask me to explain it. Ask them.
Via Ezra Levant, via Mark Steyn, via Five Feet of Fury: Naomi Lakritz’ write-up of that patently absurd “The System Works” argument appears in the Calgary Herald. Maybe you’ve heard this one. Canada’s Human Rights Commission figures out it has been harassing an innocent man, as a result of its very own proceedings, dismisses the complaint, and this just goes to show how successful it is at protecting the freedoms of everyone.
University of Calgary law professor Kathleen Mahoney is absolutely right when she says the outcome of Levant’s case demonstrates the process works. It does, indeed, and without such institutions as human rights commissions, where would people go for redress? In other countries, when people feel their racial or religious identity is under attack, they take up arms. Here, we have a civilized outlet for making such complaints — the human rights commission.
Just disgusting. Levant responds:
Kathleen Mahoney is a left-wing kook. And she’s a thin-skinned liberal fascist in her own right. Here’s a story in the Globe and Mail about her own human rights complaint filed against Alberta Report, for daring to suggest that some Aboriginal kids benefited from residential schools.
The article cited by Levant tells a grim tale:
In the past year, the Regina Leader-Post, Alberta Report, the North Shore News, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and The Toronto Star have all had to appear before tribunals to answer charges of publishing “discriminatory” material, in violation of the human-rights codes in their provinces. A quick refresher: Human-rights law was created to prevent discrimination in lodging and employment. So why is it now being used to prevent the dissemination of certain ideas? Isn’t this the sort of thing the free-expression section of the constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms is supposed to prevent?
The strangest case of the bunch is the one against Alberta Report. Last year, reporter Patrick Donnelly wrote a feature article for the magazine entitled, “Scapegoating the Indian residential schools: The noble legacy of hundreds of Christian missionairies is sacrificed to political correctness”. The thrust of Mr. Donnelly’s argument was that residential schools, government-funded institutions operated by religious orders, were on the whole positive for natives.
His argument was supported with quotes from former students and teachers, many of whom said that they had nothing but positive memories of the residential system. He alleged that this point of view has been buried by Indian advocates hungry to capitalize on white guilt by portraying the institutions as a form of cultural genocide.
Whether his analysis is insightful or misguided is, legally speaking, entirely beside the point. Or rather that’s the way the law used to work. Not any more.
University of Calgary law professor Kathleen Mahoney responded to the publication by filing a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, alleging that Alberta Report had “expose[d] First Nations people to hatred or contempt on the basis of their race or ancestry”. She asked for remedies including “an apology, damages, and an order that the respondents attend education sessions about human rights in Alberta.”
The creepy call for “education sessions” was not laughed out of the Alberta commission. Instead, the commission has asked Alberta Report to respond to the complaint. It will then consider whether to prosecute the magazine.
So what we have here — assuming Lakritz and Mahoney are on the up-and-up — is a situation in which the people get their rights from the government, after the government defines what they are, and this includes supposedly “free” speech.
Levant owns the chicken analogy, and he thinks it’s lame. I disagree. The only way it could fit any better, to my way of thinking, is if the chicken saw one of his fellow chickens tossed into the McNugget hopper, and lucky for him the blades were suddenly jammed at exactly the right moment, allowing the intended victim to walk away — and the first chicken, because of this, gleefully began clucking away about how the machine works.
The longer I’m on the planet, the more suspicious I am of intellectuals who base their arguments about a bureaucracy on a fundamental axiom that the bureaucracy consistently produces results that are “correct,” by virtue of possessing the authority to define exactly what “correct” is. It is a child’s discourse. I expect anyone of respectful intelligence who’s graduated from the sixth grade, or anyone of mediocre intelligence who’s graduated from the eighth, to immediately see what’s wrong with it.
For a law professor to use it, or a Calgary Herald columnist to use it, is tantamount to admitting said user-of-argument somehow expects to be kept out of the machine’s blades. Access to attorneys, names in the rolodex, knowing where the bodies are buried…whatever.
The most likely and common ace up the sleeve: A determination to spend the balance of one’s career staying well away from the wild frontier. To stick to doing what others are already doing. After all, is the highest point of a mountain not at its center? Of course it is, and so to the center we shall stick. Thus, the McNugget blades will always be whirring treacherously against the flesh of another chicken who ventured too far. Not us. So what’s to worry about?
These people are, quite plain and simply, not to be trusted. They pretend to be the guardians of a civilized society. In reality, they don’t belong in one.
1. I accept the responsibility.
2. I don’t mean to offer this as an excuse.
3. I am going to have to live with this for the rest of my life.
4. (Spouse) is a wonderful person.
5. I love (Spouse).
6. Felt trapped/unfulfilled at the time (or under great stress).
7. Funny thing is, it has been good for our marriage.
8. (Spouse) has seen this affair as a wake-up call (cheating wives only).
9. Never meant to hurt anybody.
10. Stupid thing I did.
Even better, have someone else take a drink when the confessing, cheating spouse says something that does not fall into one of those ten. See who gets drunk first.
Also, switch to paint thinner of the cheating spouse comments on the questions this raises about his/her character issues. Because this probably won’t happen. They might confess to being “weak,” but that’s as close as you get.
These things are always so sad. The real damage that was done, is that from that point on the cheating spouse can’t be trusted by any rational person — and so whenever the marriage runs into an event in which trust is imperative, the betrayed spouse has to behave like an irrational person.
Cheating spouses never seem to say anything to directly address that. They just roll out a bunch of sound bites calculated and designed to motivate others to behave irrationally.
I think we’re getting closer and closer to the day when schoolchildren read in the history books how Bill Clinton got caught cheating, how he was allowed to stay in office, and want to know “how in the world could that be?” When it actually happened, we were being bombarded with propaganda to the effect that the “strongest public servants” in our history were cheaters, and it looked like we were about to enter an era in which cheating on your spouse was a sign of nobility. I thought the bewildered-schoolchild event might take a hundred years. Now, I’m hoping for twenty or thirty. This is good.
We are gathered here today to prove that Catwoman, Joker, and their men are guilty of several major offenses. To wit: robbery, attempted murder, assault…..and battery! Mayhem…(dramatic pause)…and overtime parking.
It seems to possess a social-commentary parallel against real life, does it not? It’s hard to take an indictment seriously when it offers up a major-minor juxtaposition like this. Butchering a hundred girl scouts and failing to return a library book on time. And yet so many impassioned prosecutors, stewing in their adrenaline, lost and drowning in it, so offer.
George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes, violating the Geneva conventions, lying about weapons of mass destruction…and acting like a cowboy.
Americans…spew more than their fair share of carbon, thereby poisoning the entire planet…and are fat.
Men…assault their wives on Super Bowl Sunday (which was nothing but an urban legend in the first place)…and aren’t in touch with their emotions.
Republicans…want to force women to carry pregnancies to term, against their will…and aren’t funny.
What follows next is something I don’t like writing because it’s an exercise in belaboring the obvious. And yet, it seems, the people who most need to understand it, don’t: When the minor indictment is included, the major one is damaged. The major indictment may contain a kernel of truth, but no more than that. He who accuses, cannot be taking the accusation as seriously as he’d like it to be taken by whoever is being presented with the accusation. This would not be consistent with the way people function as they evaluate guilt in other people.
Simply put, if you really do think George Bush is guilty of war crimes you don’t give a rat’s ass whether he smirks & swaggers or not.
That’s why these Batman-prosecutors aren’t taken seriously. Hmmm. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut and let them go on the way they’ve been going.
Obama’s game is the retread of every Democrat playbook for the last 30 years. Appeal To Emotion. Change change change was all we heard from Stephanapolous and Carville. Same tune, new dancer. Hell even Cliton’s hagiographic film was called “The Man From Hope”. (Yes they were talking about Geography but the double meaning was evident.) Lofty rhetoric is great but I don’t know if it’s enough to get him to the goal line. The shine is wearing off and people are asking, “yeah, ok, hope and change but what does that mean?”
Having asked that for awhile, and having been accumulating little morsels of information useless in isolated solitude but beginning to make some sense cumulatively when one observes them together…I think maybe I’m ready to field that one.
The hope is that Barack Obama will win. But it is not proportionate to popularity. If it was, Ronald Reagan with his 49-state sweep would earn, at least, a grudgingly superior magnitude of acceptance compared to Bill Clinton, who didn’t even win 50% of the popular vote in ’92. Reagan was more conservative than Clinton, but Reagan was much more popular than Clinton. Reagan, the argument could be made, was more charismatic than Clinton, and probably moreso than Obama as well. Nevertheless, Clinton, until Obama came along, was the walking definition of what was/is being sought. Reagan was not.
The reason why this is so, is not entirely related to political ideology. Ideology is a filtering device, of course — Reagan is a Republican, so the slobbering Obama fans are not permitted to think fondly of Reagan in any context. But here is your riddle wrapped in the enigma: Where is the liberal democrat Obama fan, wandering around, wistfully opining “why, oh why, can’t we find someone who shares my beliefs who is capable of a 49-state sweep, like Reagan was?”
Maybe they say this behind closed doors, but demure when the time comes to express the wish out in the open, lest a chink appear in that liberal democrat armor.
Well, I don’t think so. I’ve been watching these people, and I notice they don’t seem to be able to count to fifty-two. By which I mean — any electoral contest that comes up, winning that magical 51% of the vote is just as good for them as winning 99%. Like shoving a heavy Cadillac off a cliff. Just get that center of gravity over the precipice, that’s all that matters.
And that scares the hell out of me. It tells me that when they express all their hatred for people who don’t think the way they do, they have equal measures of hatred for an ideologically-opposed fairly moderate 49% as they would for an ideologically-opposed fringe-kook 1%. It’s a festering, but dull, dismissive type of pustulating hatred they have for the 49%. But it erupts into a rancid, venomous fountain of spite once the 49% reaches 50%.
To put it another way: These people, their catchphrases notwithstanding, have little or no concern about how many people disagree with their values, or what this might say about their culture’s evolving viewpoint — so long as they can still win elections. They look across the aisle to do their sneering. To roll their eyeballs. To elbow each other in the ribs, jerk their thumb in this direction, and say to one another, “get a load of that guy.” Quantity, so long as the car makes it over the cliff, is well outside of their concern.
Conservatives are different. A poll comes out that says 80% of a community is opposed to same-sex marriage, for instance, and this says something better than if the poll said only 55% was so opposed. If the poll said it was 95% percent, that would be even better.
When the issue comes to capital punishment it’s pretty easy to see why conservatives feel this way. If 40% of us are opposed to capital punishment, that means there’s a real chance someone will eventually be released from prison and kill a young woman or a small child who didn’t have to die. So naturally, if only 20% of us are so opposed, that’s a happier situation. Of course there will always be at least 5% and we realize this; we wish we could get it down to zero. Because some people are simply inclined to kill, live for no other purpose, and anyone who has any effect on how the justice system works ought to understand this.
But our liberals don’t care. They can’t count to fifty-two. They want that 51% and that’s all they care about.
It’s two different ways of looking at cause-and-effect. Some of us go around saying “I’ll bet” about the stuff that really matters. I’ll bet it would be a good idea to take the car in for an oil change early. I’ll bet we’re going to get little tiny flies in the kitchen if I leave that pineapple rind out. I’ll bet I’m going to find my kid has homework due tomorrow that he isn’t getting done, if I ask him. In other words, when we make predictions about the future, what we’re doing is engaging in On Your Left Nut thinking.
These people who are the subject of Duffy’s concern, are different.
They only say “I’ll bet” about one thing: The ability of a candidate to get to that magic 51%. Witness all this unbridled exuberance over Bill Clinton sixteen years ago, and Barack Obama now, over something called “charisma.” But not too much charisma, because ninety-nine percent is no better than fifty-one. Just to win.
Didja ever notice this about some people? You see it a lot with ballot initiatives; and therefore you probably see more of it where I live than anyplace else, because California is drunk silly on referendums. Nobody reads ’em all here.
People gather the day after the election and recall how they voted. And some of these people say something like “I voted yes on that one…but it went down 61 to 39.” And they look down at their toes. But they can’t tell you what the referendum was going to do. One gets the distinct impression if they could go back and do it over, they’d vote no. In other words, the object of the exercise of voting, was not to put a policy in place that would have beneficial results for the community, or even for a class of persons living in it. It was simply to win. Just like playing the lottery. Make the call, will this one go through or will it not; then, proceed on to the next choice and do it again.
They do exactly with predicting the outcome of a democratic process, what the rest of us do with other things that really matter — things that are left up to our own individual choices. They learn their lessons, maybe avoid any publicity they can about how the subject immediately under consideration works. Then they resolve to do better next time. They undergo the same paradigm shift that you do, after making an incorrect guess about whether there is a nest of black widows under your kids’ playground equipment. But they only think that way here. And, maybe with the above-mentioned lottery. And spectator sports events, of course. Other than those three things, they just can’t see any point to saying “I’ll bet” and using their noggin to figure out what’s going on. About anything.
We get frustrated with them, because we’re arguing about what happens if guns are banned; what would happen if Saddam Hussein was left alone; what will happen to the unemployment rate if the minimum wage is raised. We might as well be arguing with a brick wall. These people don’t think in terms of cause and effect, except for things watched by many of their peers, with fairly immediate results. Elections, lotteries, and sporting events. That’s all.
And so all this enthusiasm for Obama being the “real deal,” has to do with what I defined that phrase to actually mean:
REAL DEAL: Flattering slang attached to an individual who possesses a unique ability to sell products unneeded.
Obama still has some mob-support, but it has nothing to do with cause-and-effect, sound policies, beneficial results, inflating your tires to bring down gas prices. Nothing to do with any of that.
It has to do with getting to that 51%. Making people ineffectual, who ought to be ineffectual, because they don’t believe what “we” believe. What do we believe, though? Not a whole lot. Whatever Obama tells us to…today. Go check his website.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier’s requiem for her home state of Michigan. Fire it up the flatscreen tonight, folks. Commit it to memory, just like Washington’s Farewell Address. Live it, learn it, love it.
When I moved to Detroit seventeen years ago, I was struck by this weird succotash of concrete jungle urban decay, and the beauty of neo-colonial classic architecture that began with the suburbs, on or about 16 Mi. Road. I had never seen anything like it. And half a year later, the following summer, was the first time (software developer, remember?) I really stepped out of the office for any length of time. Drove ol’ Bessie up and around the “mitten,” saw Batman II, spent the night with an eccentric but beautiful young barmaid in Cheboygan, jetted over from there to Sault Ste. Marie, and just really did all the the partying I should’ve been doing in the half-year leading up to that. Ah, it was really all the sightseeing I would do in that area for the entire year I lived there. And I still have regrets about that. I regret not taking a camera. Lots of young-mans’ indiscretions, committed within hours of each other.
Great googly moogly, what a beautiful country.
Geographical locations are just like women. I don’t know if it’s politically incorrect to say that now…I suspect it is…but I don’t give a good goddamn, it’s true. Ranking them is quite useless. They’re all special. If I had my life to live over again, it would be missing something if I didn’t swing by Yreka, CA, Portland, OR, Kirkland, WA, Coure d’Laine, ID, Fargo, ND, and on and on and on…and Cheboygan, MI. No, not because of the barmaid. She was quite a good looker, but my real memories (aw gee, I hope to hell she’s not reading this) are of those three hundred miles plus-or-minus of lush greenery. Wonderful, wonderful place. I hope to go back there again someday.
I digress.
The real lesson has to do with liberal policies destroying places. I saw it in the winter of ’91 to ’92, the coldest one Detroit saw in some 25 years at the time. Back then, the state was conservative (Engler) but the city was liberal and corrupt as all holy hell (Young).
It was bad. Heap big bad. But the badness started on 8 Mi. Road back then, and headed south. If you were on foot and darkness was falling, it might’ve been a good idea to be somewhere north of 12 Mi. Road by the time the sun set. But anyway, I guess it got worse than that since then.
It didn’t have to be this way. Egregious taxation results in disastrous economic consequences. There’s no avoiding it. The Wall Street Journal summed things up nicely (go read the whole thing to get a perspective of how taxes can kill a state):
The tax hikes have done nothing but accelerate the departures of families and businesses. Michigan ranks fourth of the 50 states in declining home values, and these days about two families leave for every family that moves in. Making matters worse is that property taxes are continuing to rise by the rate of overall inflation, while home values fall. Michigan natives grumble that the only reason more people aren’t blazing a path out of the state is they can’t sell their homes. Research by former Comerica economist David Littmann finds that about the only industry still growing in Michigan is government. Ms. Granholm’s $44.8 billion budget this year further fattened agency payrolls.
Michigan’s unemployment rate as of June was 8.5%. It will get worse as GM makes more cuts.
And that’s another thing: the Democrats, for all their lovey lovey talk seem to not understand that high gas prices brutalize the families they ostensibly care about so much. With high gas prices, just getting to work is an issue because money is already tight. Democrats, Obama leading them, seem to think that another industry bailout by the government (taking more money from taxpayers) will solve this problem, but it just creates more of the same. Then, high gas prices change consumer behavior–i.e. they buy smaller vehicles. Plants making bigger vehicles close. The guys working at those assembly plants, the guys working at sub-contractors manufacturing parts for the plants, and the smaller businesses that supply parts for the parts, fold. Jobs are lost. And when jobs are lost, taxes aren’t paid. And then the government services can’t be sustained just when people need them the most. Here’s what the Heritage Foundation found:
Analysts at The Heritage Foundation recently examined how going from $3 and $4 retail to $5 and $6 retail per gallon of gasoline would affect the U.S. economy. If prices continue to rise at an accelerated pace over the course of a year:
Total employment would decrease by 586,000 jobs, Disposable personal income would decrease by $532 billion, Personal consumption expenditure would decrease by $400 billion, and Personal savings would be spent to help pay the cost.
The contrast couldn’t have been greater in Michigan: gorgeous landscape, bereft of people. Again, I am reminded of Upstate New York, where the death occurred fifteen years ago. The Finger Lakes region possesses the striking loveliness that characterizes Michigan. And yet, these once vibrant areas are devoid of industry and the people who fuel it.
Well, now.
At least we’re making these rich, greedy, evil businesses pay for what they’re doing to these poor people, right? By that, I mean, those awful things businesses do to people. *cough* Give ’em jobs *cough*
That is, after we blame all the suffering poor people do, on those businesses.
Still waiting for someone to explain to me, how jobs are made, and how products are brought to the market with lower price tags, by means of artificial barriers that make it artificially more expensive to do those things. How capitalism is made more painless, after it’s been mucked with by people who just want to make the process more difficult for all concerned. How’s that work again?
I have been waiting a very long time for that explanation, but I’m a patient man.
Undefined Word:
A word that is loaded with meaning, supposedly, but in fact is lacking in practical definition. The litmus test is not whether you can find it in the dictionary; it’s, if you can reach a plurality of people who use the word frequently, and query them in isolation about what the word means. Will you get back a number of definitions smaller than the number of people you queried? If not, then the word can’t really be used to communicate anything. With an undefined word, you’ll find there is very little cultural agreement, or none at all, on the actual meaning.
Undefined words tend to be used often, to the point of becoming cliches. So most undefined words were useful once, and then abused into uselessness. Unfortunately, after they reach that point, the tendency is to abuse them a whole lot more.
I’ve come to be aware of something: There are three different grades of bullshit, each one distinctly different from the other two, both in substance and in purpose. There could be more than three, but a quality personal awareness of just those three would be useful in detecting it. If you think in simpler terms of “bullshit” and “not bullshit,” it is far easier to get snookered by it.
The background is this: I was having a debate with one of the characters over at Cassy’s place during my guest-blogging stint, which is still ongoing until sometime Sunday…and during the debate, we began to wander into the overarching theme of whether private industry exists because of government, or is it the other way around. People keep questioning me about why I do this with these people. It’s not like an obsessive-compulsive disorder or an addiction; contrary to belief, I really am trying to learn something about what makes them tick.
It’s more complicated than it looks. I’ve been arguing on the innernets for over twenty years now, and I’m still learning things. This last epiphany is more practical and useful than most.
First, another few words about bullshit. About three years ago I bought H. G. Frankfurt’s three thousand word hardcover book (yes, you read that right) On Bullshit, in which the following profound point is made:
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar…A [liar is] responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it…For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
So in the bullshitter, we have this sense of apathy about what the truth really is — which is missing altogether from the liar who must know what the truth is so he can misrepresent it.
There is something insidious about the kind of bullshit we’ve been enduring lately, I notice. It has evolved to become sufficiently sophisticated to bullshit people in the twenty-first century. We need to learn about how that works, so that we can fight this new-grade bullshit when it engulfs us. And engulf us it does; often. Without this edification, you don’t really have a mechanism for deflecting bullshit when it comes to consume you, apart from the purely Victorian-era method of cataloging your acquaintances according to whether they’ve been known to bullshit you or not. That’s a nineteenth-century technique that simply isn’t going to work now.
People are presented with a premise A. A is proven by B. Global Warming is proven by “Day After Tomorrow,” or President Bush called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper” because some crappy tabloid says he said it. In cases like this, B is widely acknowledged to be bullshit. Even people who desperately want to believe A, understand B is bullshit.
And yet, they believe in A more fervently with B, than without B.
Stating the reasons why they believe A, they cite B, which they know to be bullshit…this trend lately of reinforcing assumptions that may or may not be true, based on pieces of evidence known to be rancid crap and nothing more — with a straight face no less — is a harbinger of bad times ahead.
Prophetic, no?
So there’s a sultry and subtle seductive quality to the results of this exercise of mixing different grades of bullshit together. This is a sort of epoxy bullshit, if you will. The mixture has a more powerful bond than either of the component agents in isolation. What has merit, is blended together with what lacks it.
You see it in the comments of “Baz,” my sparring partner…
The job stability created by unions enabled mortgages to come into existence. The interstate highway system encouraged car-buying and promoted tourism. The Internet spawned whole segments of the economy. The GI Bill made it possible for many families to have their first college graduate, with all the economic benefits that go with it. Investors demand the safety that government-regulated economies provide. When a government collapses, money is the first thing to flee the borders. Why is there no investment in Mexico? Weak government.
Here are your two grades of bullshit. You have sub-bullshit, which isn’t bullshit at all, it’s absolutely true. Mexico has a weak economy, because Mexico’s government is corrupt. There is a slight skewing of the facts here, sort of a sleight-of-hand. As far as I know, nobody in a position of knowledge is asserting Mexico’s government to be particularly lax. It’s just dirty.
That’s something of a miniscule and insignificant distinction, since Baz’s argument is essentially utopian. Governments should be benevolent, strong and meddling. His vision incorporates all of these things, and I would agree that all three of those attributes would have to be present in any situation that honestly tests his theory.
And then this sub-bullshit is paired up with opti-bullshit, which is the bullshit that is supposed to be carried around and gossipped. Eventually, it will be sold via argumentum ad populum fallacy — everyone believes it, so it must be so. Mexico’s corrupt government is injurious to foreign investments…therefore…an economy rises and falls based on the strength of a country’s government. And here we have our epoxy effect — the mixture of these two layers of bullshit, is much more salable than either one of those layers by itself. It would be silly to contest this by advancing the notion that Mexico’s government is a good one, and this has an intimidating effect on those who would challenge even more vulnerable parts of the argument. Like, for example, that the mortgage owes its existence to labor unions.
This is what we see with global warming. Sub-bullshit, bullshit that exists as bullshit to sell other pieces of bullshit, but by itself isn’t bullshit at all. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere…carbon dioxide is recognized as a greenhouse gas, and in recent years we have a higher concentration of carbon dioxide; human activity contributes to this. All of these things are measurable. From that, we have — human activity is about to push us past a point of no return, and the world will become incapable of supporting life as we know it. That’s silly and absurd. If you can’t bring yourself to dismiss it, you’d certainly have to permit a challenge to it. But the human tendency is to evaluate challenges to this complex argument, as challenges to the single strand of the argument that is most durable.
“Are you denying there is such a thing as global warming?” How many times have you heard that.
But there is a third component to this, the supra-bullshit. This is what I saw Keith Olbermann pumping out tonight as he was giving his softball interview to Paul Krugman. My goodness, the things I learned from that.
– Our high national gas price average is the direct result of “two oilmen in the White House,” and we really should’ve seen it coming.
– All these other countries are years ahead of us; they’re already driving around in cars powered by sugar cane.
– Vice President Cheney is the “Worst Person in the World” because he doesn’t care when people get killed.
As I watched this drivel pour out of the boob tube, it slowly dawned on me what Olbermann’s position is in all this bullshit we’re being sold. He and Paul Krugman bring to the table this third layer of bullshit, which is more important to the process than those other two.
We indulge in “modest” bullshit about why we were late for work; why we aren’t wearing the sweater Grandma gave us for Christmas; that our wives’ asses aren’t fat; being from the Government and being here to help you; that the check is in the mail. But on the subject of dangerous international criminals who would give their very lives to take a few of us down, and on the unrelated subject of good-lookin’ young women in skimpy clothes, logic takes a complete, pure, undiluted, five-star don’t-even-page-me holiday. “Modest” bullshit, on those two subjects, isn’t good enough for us. We wade in neck-deep into triple-A grade, twenty-four-karat, 99+44/100 percent pure platinum bullshit. We use this high-grade quality bullshit, it seems, on no other subject save for those two…and on those two subjects, we haul it out with a reliability and with a punctuality we display nowhere else.
To the list of terrorists and girls in tiny outfits, we should add the subject of our oil men in the White House driving up gas prices.
The job of the supra-bullshit is to be this platinum bullshit; it is there to be doubted. It is there to fail the sale.
It’s exactly like negotiating a salary increase with your boss. You walk into his office wanting a ten percent increase, knowing he wants to give you a four percent increase that will barely keep pace with inflation. The boss is probably expecting to give you a six percent increase anyway, so if you walk in asking ten, six is probably what you’re going to get. So here is what you do: You ask for a twenty-five percent increase you know you’re not going to get. He’ll say no, and demonstrate by his counter-offer just how ludicrous you’re being…seven is as high as he can go. Well hey, you’re not that tough, you could settle for fifteen. And he says aw, shucks, maybe nine. Maybe at this point you bring up another company that has been interested in your talents lately. The negotiations proceed from there.
And that’s all it is, is negotiating.
That’s exactly what the bullshitters are doing with us. You have your sub-bullshit, your opti-bullshit and your supra-bullshit. We get snookered by this blend time and time again, because we have a tendency to say: I know the sub-bullshit is true; I do not agree with the supra-bullshit, but compared to that the opti-bullshit is believable. And so we believe the opti-bullshit, the bullshit calibrated to the optimum degree of self-reproduction. We will repeat the opti-bullshit to people we know. And if anyone dares challenge it, we will treat the challenge as a challenge to the sub-bullshit. Anytime the sub-bullshit is demonstrated to be true, which it will be, we will take that as further proof of the opti-bullshit, and become more convinced of the validity of the opti-bullshit…which we haven’t even tested, or observed anyone else testing.
Through it all, we will think of ourselves as critical, skeptical thinkers simply because we’re showing some ornamental reluctance to agree with the Olbermann brand of supra-bullshit.
“I do not agree that we’re going to lose the oceans in ten years…but…it seems to me there’s definitely global warming going on and that humans are causing it, and if we don’t bring our excesses in check we’ll pass a point of no return.” Good, smart, reasonable, and even critically-thinking people say that every single day. Every single one of them is a convert to the cause, and the poor bastards don’t even know it. I mean, read that aloud as one sentence. Listen to how reasonable it sounds! It certainly comes off sounding responsible. But it isn’t either one. You’re saying humans are about to irreversibly alter the climate of the planet. George Carlin’s monologue makes much more sense.
The moral of the story is what I said at the beginning. You can’t protect yourself from bullshit if you don’t recognize it. You have to know enough to break it down into its component parts, the sub-bullshit, the opti-bullshit and the supra-bullshit.
As a chain, an argument is as strong as its weakest link, not its strongest one. We are not inclined to evaluate complex arguments that way. We tend to treat complex arguments, all complex arguments, even complex arguments to which we’re not necessarily endeared, as sacred cows. We tend to become more hostile to honest challenges to the idea, than to the idea itself. There is no intellectually sound reason for us to behave this way.
Audio here, and you can find other interviews and comments on this page.
This is like the “other side” of the 4-A debate, because some of the people running around with the strongest opinions about Autism, Aspergers, AD(H)D and allergies don’t even understand there is a debate going on. They don’t understand how little of this is proven to have any physical cause. This is the loyal dissent, and in my opinion it should be required listening for anybody who seeks to contribute to any meaningful decision about a child’s future with regard to these supposed maladies.
I’m not a big fan of these interviews by Dr. Savage. If you listen to an infomercial in the middle of the night, and then twelve hours later you listen to one of these softball interviews Savage does, you’ll notice they sound exactly the same. I don’t like that. I never did like it. But I’ve been following Dr. Breggin’s work for awhile now, and his side of the story is one that needs to get out. He is not overstating the financial relationships at work here, so far as I know — contrasted with that, a lot of our “4A cheerleaders” base their opinions on the unfounded premise that all the professionals involved have pristine motives. You see them, often, abruptly ending their presentation of an argument and “resting the case” after quoting a professional. There, He Said It! That settles it! Argumentum ad Verecundiam writ large. This works for them…even though said 4A cheerleaders are receiving services, or are pushing their opinions onto other people who are receiving services, that are free.
People need to think more critically about this stuff. If services are provided, and they’re free, then money has to be sloshing around somewhere. And that raises the potential for a system to be abused. That needs to be checked out. People should look into this and they should presume shenanigans are goin’ down until the opposite is demonstrated. That is the very least that should be happening. The very least.
I would point out one other thing about this: Since Dr. Savage got started on this tempest in a teapot, a recurring defense I’ve been hearing of this tidal wave of autism diagnoses with regard to borderline cases, the children who could probably succeed fine without the specialized instruction they’re receiving is this: “Since the diagnosis was made and little Johnny started receiving these services, it has done him so much good.”
That is not the litmus test. It’s exactly like saying “Since little Johnny started eating more food than all the other kids, he’s gotten so fat.”
Abnormal kids benefit from specialized instruction; normal kids benefit from specialized instruction. Kids do better with specialized instruction.
That doesn’t mean that everyone who’s received it, under mistaken or fraudulent pretenses, should keep it. It certainly does nothing to address the central question of whether those pretenses were indeed mistaken or fraudulent. In short, it’s a very poor argument for justifying the status quo.
Something you need to understand about this guest blogging gig over at Cassy Fiano’s: She gets ten times as many hits over there as we do over here. Of the people who read her regularly, we’ve engaged in spirited debate with a tiny, tiny fraction of ’em, and I’m guessing just a tiny fraction more came to be aware of us. And so when we picked up the baton an hour or two ago we published a pre-drafted page that had been edited and edited, endeavoring to introduce ourselves to those unacquainted without too much bloated bloviating.
I’m pretty sure we failed in the brevity department. Oh, well.
But I’m pleased we placed so much emphasis on bullshit things said by people for the sake of getting attention. For here it is just a hundred and six minutes later, and look what Sister Toldjah has put up. It’s as if some cosmic divine kismet read our remarks and thought to itself, “This stuff that Morgan K. Freeberg guy is saying, doesn’t make sense; we’d better make some things happen that will make his comments make some sense.”
The theme is, people saying nonsensical things to get attention. Showing off for other people, and in so doing, losing track of what the facts do & do not support.
Saying nonsensical, stupid crap.
I must say, I am amused, feeling somewhat vindicated, that Sister Toldjah heard these things at a wedding reception. What happens at a wedding reception? People get nervous as all holy hell. They act around each other in a manner much more civilised than they’d like. That’s the point where the family of the groom holds court with the family of the bride…for the last time, until, maybe, in the hospital when the first grandchild is about to be born. And so people put-on-airs. They say things that may or may not make logical sense — usually, not — for the express purpose of making themselves popular, or trying to make themselves not-unpopular.
We need to improve our standing in the world.
PFFFFFFTT!! Yeah, right. I’m so sick of this meme.
Some smelly guy in Gay Paris is pissed off at us because we did something, we need to turn ’round and run out of Iraq and Afghanistan before international resentment sets off World War III. Some other guy in London or New South Wales is pleased as punch we did what we did…well, he just doesn’t count.
It would be patently absurd if you were to run around saying something stupid like “We need to improve our standing with Morgan K. Freeberg.” But you know what? That would make more sense. There are other folks smarter than me, but as an individual, I’m accountable for the opinions I have. “The World”…that’s just a false sense of consensus. It goes to what I’ve been saying for awhile now — when we say “everybody” wants something or “everybody” is pissed off about something…”everybody” does not mean “everybody.” “All” does not mean “all.”
Words like “everybody” and “all”…and “the world”…those things all really mean one thing: “Me, and people who agree with me.”
We shouldn’t be putting up with these phony aggregates. Nobody anywhere should be left with the impression that they can improve their posturing, by engaging them.
Who are these smelly frenchmen, anyway? What happens if we don’t do anything about global terrorism and we end up with Chicago or Philadelphia being bombed — is someone from France going to cover the cost of rebuilding, since we went dormant just to make them happy? Maybe send over big sacks of francs? Send along a couple more Statues of Liberty to auction off?
Bah. Have a couple more glasses of champagne and shut your cake hole. Standing with the world…bleh. More like standing with a bunch of deranged moonbats who happen to live overseas.
And what’s up with this other voice, saying McCain isn’t qualified to be Commander in Chief because he was shot down in a war zone. What, Obama somehow is?
Fine situation we have here with so-called old-fashioned etiquette. If I went to a wedding reception and said, simply, “Reagan Won the Cold War” that would be a horrible infraction. But you can jawbone this Move On Dot Org nonsense all afternoon long, until bride-n-groom drive off with all those tin cans trailing behind…and that’s all okay. Yeah.
Why Christians S**k Jesus might have harsh words for Christians today. Here’s why…and what you can do about it.
By Tom Davis
Each Sunday, millions of Christians in America gather to worship the God who commands us to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” We belt out praises to the God who tells us that “pure and undefiled religion is caring for widows and orphans in their distress.” We kneel in pious prayer before the Almighty God of the universe who describes Himself as loving, gracious, merciful, and generous.
Then, we walk out the back door of the church, step into a world in need, and proceed to withhold the love, grace, and mercy that’s extended to us.
We might as well give God the middle finger. Outside of a tiny minority of Christians, we have become a self-centered group of priggish snobs.
In short, we s**k.
:
Here are the facts:
Eighty-five percent of young people outside the church who have had connection to Christians believe present-day Christianity is hypocritical. Inside the church, forty-seven percent of young people believe the same thing.
And why wouldn’t they? We’re pretty stingy with our money:
– 80 percent of the world’s evangelical wealth is in North America.
– Giving by churchgoers was higher during the Great Depression than it is today.
– Christians give an average of $13.31/week to their local church.
– Only 9 percent of “born-again” adults reported tithing in 2004.
My conclusion is, they are projecting psychologically.
I do not mean by that to say they are hypocrites, failing to tithe and then accusing others of failing to tithe. What I mean is, I think they’ve missed the point. I think they are, at heart, nasty people. They do not care about the poor people being helped, quite so much as the people donating, losing their solvency. Pain is the point of the exercise, in other words.
You know what some jaundiced observers say about the police and the sheriff and the mall cop: Some people have a desire to beat up other people, and for them a natural career path is to become a policeman, sheriff’s deputy or mall cop. They say, you round up a hundred policemen, sheriff’s deputies or mall cops, and you’ll find ten or fifteen of these bullies…maybe twenty…maybe fifty. A greater concentration of bullies than you’ll find in the surrounding population. The bullies just naturally gravitate to that line of work, is the point.
I don’t know if that’s true. But I suspect Christianity is going through the same problem.
Donating to help those in need, to me, is a private affair. I think that’s what it is supposed to be, for everyone. Well, smacking the knuckles of people who have not donated as much as you think they should’ve, every time I’ve seen it happen, is a very public affair. I’ve never come to be aware of it happening without someone taking extraordinary steps to be sure I’d come to be aware of it. And as far as that goes, I’ve never seen anyone lecture someone about it while knowing a great deal of what they were talking about. It’s just assumed — you didn’t donate enough. Shame on you!
Bullies.
Tithe bullies.
Maybe they think, if they dish out this lecturing it’ll be for the better, because people will feel guilty and start hauling some real coin down to the local church. That may be so, but wouldn’t it be more effective to show up in church, with someone who needs those donations, or visual facsimile thereof? To say a few words about where the money is going and why it is so badly needed? And then, respectfully, leave each worshiper to make up his or her own mind about what to do with the wallets and purses?
Plus, in that scenario, you’d be knowing so much more about what you’re talking about. That’s always a good thing, isn’t it?
I think these people just want to scold. I never hear them offer a carrot alongside the stick; I never hear them say something like “I would think happy thoughts of my fellow Christian if he were to tithe X percent of his income.” It’s always about what falls short. What’s inadequate. What’s unsatisfactory.
They’re always there to talk smack.
After a time, I have to conclude that must be the point to the exercise. Besides, they put so much effort into being seen dishing out these lectures. I have not yet seen one written anonymously, and I don’t think I ever will. So let the record indicate Tom Davis thinks we suck.
You know, what really strikes me as odious about the Loose Sweater Thread Paradigm isn’t quite so much this notion that all situations must be connected, when they’re really not — although that is bad enough. It’s this notion that you can test the quality of a thought process by the conclusion reached when one uses it.
Your Home Team is playing against Visitors this weekend. You think the home team is going to win. Therefore, you know whoever is betting on the visitors is failing to engage in “critical thinking.”
What’s even worse, is somehow, inexplicably, you become convinced that everyone who agrees with you has followed the proper steps for reaching a decision. They may not have followed anything of the sort; some of them might have flipped a coin.
This problem with Michael Savage’s comments about autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), has a lot of overlap with this. Now, he chose to make his comments indelicately, and so it’s inappropriate for him to demand kid-glove treatment. But that doesn’t have to do with the merits of what he was talking about. And it seems to me we’ve forgotten something important here — your kid is diagnosed with autism, my kid has been diagnosed with autism, you think the diagnosis is sound and I think my kid’s diagnosis is a bunch of bullshit…it’s a real possibility that maybe we both used sound thinking processes to reach the conclusions we did.
We forget that the two situations are different…and that’s what this “Loose Sweater Thread” thing is all about.
We also have a tendency to forget that a sound thought process can reach whatever conclusion it’s going to. And, being nonsense and therefore adhering to the nature of nonsense, an unsound thought process can conclude in just about anything. Which is a slightly different fallacy, but one well worth deliberating.
I was reminded of this by means of a link from Rick, to a bloggress (bloggerette?) who is nigh-on fed up with people not engaged in “critical thinking” — she can tell it’s a problem because people aren’t reaching the conclusions she’s reaching.
And oh, my goodness. The condescension, it just drips…like venom off fangs of a rattlesnake, cobra or black widow…it’s an amazing thing to behold.
My first thoughts are that all Christians need to take a course in critical thinking. This is critical. As an adult convert (at the age of 30) who went to a regular liberal arts college and learned the art of critical thinking and discourse, I have been regularly appalled at the lack of critical thinking that I see amongst the brethren and sistren. It is why so many are now so bitterly disillusioned with President Bush. Those of us who are critical thinkers saw him for who he was back in 1999; a charlatan. But most Christians only heard what they wanted to hear in 2000 and again in 2004. Having done that, and been so badly burned they seem unwilling to trust any politician again.
They need to listen for themselves and read for themselves what the candidates are saying. Do not rely on the media reports…For instance,hen [sic] the story broke about Barak [sic] Obama’s pastor (Dr. Wright), I searched YouTube until I found his entire sermon and found the little bitty clips in context. They meant something then and were not nearly as offensive. If you know anything about the African-American church in this country, then you can understand where they came from. If you don’t, then shame on you. You have some homework to do.
“Those of us who are critical thinkers saw him for who he was back in 1999; a charlatan.” So if you engaged in critical thinking, you saw him as a charlatan, and if you did not, you saw him as something else.
As far as the thing with Jeremiah Wright, some Obama defenders have intoned that no matter what the Pastor did or didn’t say, this has no bearing whatsoever on the character of Barack Obama. And you know — the possibility arises that they may very well have a point. But if they have a point, she doesn’t, and vice-versa. They’re mutually-exclusive points. Especially when the author of this posts insists that if you don’t understand where Wright’s comments “came from…you have some homework to do.”
I left the following comment there:
I agree wholeheartedly on the bit about critical thinking, and am interested in your definition of it. I think I’m solid on the “you’re thinking critically if you agree with me and you’re not if you don’t” part, but it looks like there’s something more to it than just that, something more structured. At least, that’s the impression I get. Can you fill in the empty spaces?
And then, being the nasty two-faced little ogre I am, I expounded further at Rick’s place, Brutally Honest:
This guy goes into a bar at eleven o’clock and there’s this blond sitting there with a glass of wine, watching the TV. As the news comes on, there’s a story about a man threatening to jump from the bridge. The blond leans over to the guy who walked in and say “That’s so sad…I hope they manage to talk him off there.” And the guy says, “Nothin’ doin’. He’s gonna jump. Twenty bucks says.” So the blond says, okay, and they both put up twenty dollars.
Five minutes later, the man on TV jumps from the bridge, and dies.
The blond orders another glass of wine, and hands the guy the money. He says “Miss, I’m sorry, I can’t take your money. I already knew what happened to the guy because I watched it on the six o’clock news.” The blond says “So did I, but I was hoping this time it’d turn out better.”
Methinks she went to the same liberal arts college and learned about the same arts of critical thinking.
1. You’re included in a class
2. Some other guy is included in a class
3. You react to your inclusion into this class a certain way
4. Your response to being included in the class should not affect that other guy in any way, shape, matter, form or regard, and yet…
5. It does.
Radio host Michael Savage has said many controversial things in the past, but this is just downright stupid.
WOR radio talk show host Michael Savage, who makes a good living being outrageous, found himself in the middle of a new firestorm Monday after he branded most autistic children fakers who just need tougher parenting.
“In 99% of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent?” Savage said last week in remarks that lit up the Internet over the weekend.
“They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz.'”
A few dozen parents protested outside WOR Radio, demanding Savage be fired.
They called it ironic that a loudmouth known for rants about immigrants, Jews, Muslims, gays, Democrats and nonwhites would go after innocents who often can’t even verbalize.
Ed Moffitt, 75, proudly showed a picture of Bob, his 8-year-old grandnephew. “Bob can’t speak. He never called Savage any names,” Moffitt said.
“We are dying to hear him say ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy.’ And [Savage] says that he is just acting out?” said the boy’s grandfather, retired NYPD officer Bob Moffitt. “It hurts me.”
WOR said they couldn’t be held responsible for what Savage says because he is a syndicated host broadcasting out of San Francisco. “We regret any consternation that his remarks may have caused to our listeners,” the station said.
On the air last night, Savage said his comments were “ripped out of context” by “far left Stalinists.”
I’ll agree the far left Stalinists are out to silence him, and any other conservative voice for that matter, but really, do you have to say such things about disabled children?
Just stupid.
It’s this chucklehead, Ace, Cassy Fiano and a few of her commenters on one side — me, Michael Savage, about three-quarters of Cassy’s commenters (her thread is the place I’ve been debating it) on the other side.
See, here’s the deal. Michael Savage was tactless. He was tactless to the point of being technically inaccurate. If you take his “99%” literally, his comments are easily disproven and even he will not stand behind them. In his remarks wherein he refuses to apologize for them, you see he’s taking the liberty of protesting he was taken out of context, by declaring the context after-the-fact. Barack Obama would be proud.
Here’s my ordeal:
My child — on paper — has “severe autism.”
He’s been diagnosed that way.
And it’s a crock of bullshit. No, that’s not just my opinion. It’s the opinion of anyone who’s ever met him…including his mother, who was really banging the drum and swinging the pom poms to get some kind of diagnosis — any kind of diagnosis — to make him genetically weird, so nobody else would have to take responsibility for his weirdness.
Here’s the part I don’t get…and if someone can explain it to me, I’d be grateful.
We have kids who are diagnosed with PDD-NOS and other shades of autism, who definitely have something neurologically wrong with them. We have other kids who simply don’t have the personalities their teachers would like them to have, and so the school district wants to skim cream off the top of the Medicare program — so along comes a convenient, and fraudulent, diagnosis. We have both of those going on.
Why the Loose Sweater Thread Paradigm? From where are all these parents, uncles, acquaintances, etc. of “kids who have been helped so much” by their specialized education programs coming? They’re swelling out of the cracks in the walls like angry red ants, ready to rip into Michael Savage or anybody they think is defending him.
Yeah I know what they want me to say. Michael Savage is a big crock and a doo doo head who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Well, sorry. I know better. My kid’s been diagnosed, and it’s part of a big scam to rip off Uncle Sam. I’m not going to partake in it, and I’m not going to pretend everything’s on the up-and-up when I know better.
It’s a scam, folks. This doesn’t mean every single child diagnosed with autism is in fact healthy; I know better, and while a word-for-word technical reading of Savage’s comments might produce that as a literal meaning, I think it’s safe to say this is not what he meant. (He did say 99%, after all.) Quoting from his clarifying remarks (linked above):
Just a few weeks ago doctors recommended dangerous anti-cholesterol drugs for children as young as 2 years of age! Without any scientific studies on the possible dangers of such drugs on children, corrupt doctors made this controversial, unscientific recommendation.
Increasingly, our children are being used as profit centers by a greedy, corrupt medical/pharmaceutical establishment….To permit greedy doctors to include children in medical categories which may not be appropriate is a crime against that child and their family. Let the truly autistic be treated. Let the falsely diagnosed be free.
And that’s my attitude. I’ll freely admit — there are kids out there who need help. It’s just that my kid isn’t one of them, and along with him, there are probably millions of other kids soaking up social services they don’t need, that could be going to other kids who need them more. That’s a busted system. And no, I don’t care who I’m pissing off, I’m not backing off of it.
I would instead question why they’re getting pissed off. Yes, they know kids who need the help. That means, as far as I’m concerned, they should be on my side. The resources their kids need, are limited. Let’s stop skimming them for fraudulent purposes. From whence arises this “all boats in a tide” nonsense? How come it is automatically and instantly dismissed that a plurality of kids, all laboring under this diagnosis, can be toiling away under different circumstances? What’s this artificial notion of sameness all about? This phony sense of unity?
You know what it reminds me of — is labor unions. As in, everyone else on the shop floor is putting together seven widgets an hour, you’re doing nine…so when you go home tonight, we need to set someone up to meet you with tire irons and baseball bats and give you an education. Just like that. Loose-sweater-thread; I cut a thread over where I am, somehow, irrationally, in a way that defines any logical explanation, some other guy miles away thinks his sweater is going to be undone.
I’ll just quote what I said on Cassy’s thread…
Some form of special instruction has been helpful to a child who has been so diagnosed. Therefore, anybody who pushes for reversing the diagnosis, or merely opening it to further question, must be wanting to HURT the child, right?
Wrong. News flash: Just about any child, save for the most brain damaged ones, will benefit from special instruction. It does not necessarily follow from that that they need it, or even that there is anything unusual about them. It proves nothing. Kids benefit from special instruction, period.
Stop it with the anecdotes, people. They don’t prove anything. They don’t even suggest anything. All it shows is that you’re using weak logic — the question under consideration is “is there a significant number of false diagnoses” and you’re answering it with “I know of one or two diagnoses that are not false.” It’s like saying, dolphins have fins, all fish have fins, therefore dolphins are fish. It’s phony logic and it doesn’t work.
If this was all above-board — I could comment on every single blog I can find, “Hey, my kid has been diagnosed with severe autism and I know it’s a huge crock of bullshit.” So long as I’m just talking about my own kid, and none other, I wouldn’t be pissing anyone off because they’d all look at my comments and say “okay, that kid doesn’t have autism, but I know mine does, so it’s all good.”
Instead, there’s all this angst.
That’s a big giant red flag for corruption if there ever was one. Sorry, it’s just true. If your child is really neurologically damaged and he has a real need for these services, you shouldn’t have any reason to fear some total stranger raising new questions about them.
We stopped spanking kids.
At the same time, we stopped using embarrassment to punish kids. In effect, we stopped punishing kids in any way.
“Learning disabilities” skyrocketed…at exactly the same time.
People who are paid good money to figure out what’s going on — can’t see a link between those two trends. Meanwhile, they or their employers are making money, directly or indirectly, on a per-diagnosis basis. And ASD (autism spectrum disorder) diagnoses are through the roof.
Sorry, if you can’t see something smells to high heaven on that, you’ve got a learning disability yourself. Maybe more than one.
My goodness, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen an article so eager to jump to reckless conclusions:
It appears sexism is alive and well when it comes to tattoos. Although just about as many women as men get tattoos nowadays, a new study shows that women seek removal of tattoos more than men because of negative social fallout.
About 25% of people ages 18 to 30 have tattoos, and that number is expected to rise to about 40% in the next few years, according to the study, published today in the Archives of Dermatology. Previous studies have shown that about 20% of people end up dissatisfied with their tattoos, and about 6% seek tattoo removal using laser treatment.
In the study, researchers analyzed data from two surveys of people undergoing tattoo removal. One survey was taken in 1996 and a second survey in 2006. In both surveys, men and women said they wanted the tattoos removed because their identities had changed and they had grown to dislike the tattoos. But in the 2006 survey, women also reported that they felt stigmatized by the tattoos. For example, 93% said having to hide the tattoos on occasion was a factor in the removal compared with 20% of men. About 40% of women endured negative comments at work, in public or in school compared with 5% of men.
From whence arises the notion that things should be parallel between boy-land and girl-land in the tattoo department? Yeah, “just about as many women as men get tattoos nowadays” but what in the world does that mean, exactly? Do they intend to send the same message with their tattoos?
Lemmee see…a guy gets a tattoo, the message he wants to send is if I look at him wrong, he’s gonna kick my ass. Is that what a lady wants to tell me when she gets inked? When she has that “tramp stamp” needled in down south by the tailbone? She’s an ass-kicker? I think not…I think there’s a difference there. Something about being wild and sexually adventurous.
You know, call me crazy — but I think most people would have some words for someone who imprints herself as being sexually adventurous…like, at work…that they wouldn’t have for someone who brands himself as being an ass-kicker. Without being the least bit sexist. Especially if they think their asses might really get kicked.
The author of this article is also apparently forgetting what a tattoo is. It is a measured dose of individuality. In many cases, it is an inherent contradiction because it dares to stand alone against hated convention, but only to a certain extent. Nowadays the real rebel has piercings. But of course, to most of us that’s a little too “weird,” and so the thing to do is get a tattoo. To show your uniqueness, but not to show it in a way that everybody else isn’t already doing it. And don’t forget to work in your personalized design.
My question is, when do the gals work up some personal responsibility here? They go and get their bodies permanently altered in anticipation of the reaction they’ll get out of people. They get a different reaction, and then grind off the marking just like they’d go into a department store and return a dress they wore for one occasion…knowing from the outset that this was not what the procedure was designed for. And then they get to chalk it up to sexism on the part of the people who didn’t show the reactions they were supposed to.
There’s another little-known fact about women; little-known, because it is seldom-discussed.
Women are trusted. They really are.
I go to the bank to deposit a check, maybe a larger check than usual…and when I reach the front of the line, if the next teller who is available for me is a dude, my heart’s going to sink a little bit. Why is that? Because with a female teller, there’s a certain potential that she has a certain amount of experience throwing money around. It’s an even distribution…slightly bell-curved. There is a marginal possibility she’s a “newbie” and a marginal possibility she’s been doing it for thirty years or more. The overwhelming likelihood is her experience level will be somewhere in between those two extremes.
The dude? He’s a newbie. It’s almost a sure thing. Yes there’s exceptions to everything; gimme a break, I said “almost.”
I’m not alone.
And here’s where it relates to tattoos. Once the teller is waiting on me, if it’s a dude and I see he has a tattoo, I’m not any more disappointed than I was before. Hey, it’s 2008. A lot of dudes have tattoos. But if the woman is waiting on me and I had all this confidence she’d handle my money right, and then I see she has a tattoo…not a subtle or discreet one, but something that will show nearly all the time. The barbed wire around the upper arm, maybe. Or a neck tattoo. A snake on the face, something like that.
That just isn’t good. No, I’m not going to grab my check and deposit slip and go running out the door shrieking. But it isn’t the reaction you want out of customers, either.
Is that sexist? Absolutely — although it should be noted it’s reverse sexism; I have confidence in the gals that I don’t have in the guys, and so my hopes can come tumbling down from loftier heights where the women are concerned. But that isn’t the kind of sexism the article was trying to talk about, was it? It was the typical bitching. Oh mercy me our poor gals are oh so oppressed. The kind of crap that sells newspapers — “World To End Tonight, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.”
Here’s something to think about: Maybe articles like this manufacture stereotypes where they did not previously exist. Think about it — once again, our tattooed neighbors, man and woman alike, come off looking a bit…short-sighted. Failing to consider the consequences down-the-road. Living for the moment. Twenty percent of guys (plus the guys who are lying), and ninety-three percent of gals. That’s a lot. Now those statistics could be overblown, but the nature of a tattoo is such that you aren’t supposed to regret having it. It’s supposed to show you’ve got some balls and you can make lifetime commitments to things, that your identity isn’t going to change. So when it happens, and it causes this kind of crisis, it makes you look like a little bit of a flibbertygibbit.
But only if & when people start talking about it. So to me, it’s a little bit of a dichotomy to see someone scribbling up articles like this, and then bellyaching away about “sexism” and “social stigmas.” Articles like this make it happen. They cast a shadow even on the tattooed folks who haven’t changed their minds yet.
CIO World has an article for executives who want to achieve the ultimate IT mission, which is doing more with less. Oh no! It isn’t about that at all! It’s about fostering diversity.
“We’ve heard jokes—more than jokes—about not being able to understand the accents of people at the call center,” says the CIO [of one Fortune 500 company], who asked not to be identified for this article. “Our team decided that we had to make it clear that we won’t accept that kind of behavior. Our business case is that in today’s environment, you have to be able to accommodate different cultures and lifestyles.”
The matter was discussed in leadership team meetings, with managers expected to communicate the company line to their own staffers. Surveys, interviews and call tracking were used to determine the extent to which real language barriers existed. In a small number of cases, where the mockery was “severe and pervasive with an individual,” the CIO says, the behavior became an issue for human resources.
Diversity has become a byword of good management in corporate America, with information technology organizations intoning the mantra as often as anyone. “Diversity is a characteristic of a good group,” says Ken Harris, CIO of Shaklee Corp. “Part of an IT manager’s job is understanding diversity and allowing it to flourish.”
Do I agree? Absolutely yes, if the word “diversity” is subject to the most positive definition imaginable. If I turn to my dictionary I see it says…
di·ver·si·ty (n.)
1. the state or fact of being diverse; difference; unlikeness.
2. variety; multiformity.
3. a point of difference.
I think it’s fair to say that when we absorb this word as a glittering sugary bit of fluff, what we have in mind is something a little different: Apathy and neutrality. “I Don’t Give A Good God Damn” ness. Someone can get the job done, and if it’s a white dude or a black one or a red one or a yellow one, or a woman, or a transgender…what the hell.
Well, in promoting it, we more often adhere to the dictionary definition which says you do care. If this guy over here is one color, that guy over there has to be something different. I don’t think most people have that in mind when they acknowledge the “benefits of diversity.” Furthermore, if you listen to people in authority talk about it long enough, you realize this dictionary definition isn’t what they’re talking about either.
Ten people, all of the same ethnic minority, work for you. Two of ’em quit and you replace them with white guys. The dictionary definition, above, says you just increased “diversity”; everything was the same before, now you have eighty-twenty. But that isn’t the concept we have in mind at all, is it?
No, apparently not:
Technology may be tougher to diversify than some other disciplines. For one thing, IT shops have a history of being largely male in makeup, with a certain boys’-club reputation.
Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.
Is that sexist in its own way? Absolutely yes. But she has a point. Men and women are not the same, and we have some fields that don’t attract women — not all of them glamorous. There isn’t much of a movement afoot to diversify the field of garbage men, for example; or truck drivers. We can have a thousand out of a thousand straight white men in those positions, and nobody says boo about it. Shouldn’t that bother someone?
Well, there’s a reason it doesn’t. There are some jobs women don’t want.
Now to be fair about it, in my years in IT I’ve met some women who were very ambitious and showed more than their fair share of left-brain acumen and capability of mastering the concepts needed. But remember — this is a numbers game. If the overall population is 52% female, and there are fewer than 52% of females in the IT jobs, someone has a new cause.
That simply isn’t right. Nobody should be forcing women into IT if she doesn’t want to be forced into it, and as you swell the ranks of those female IT professionals, you’re going to be running into that as an issue. There just aren’t that many takers.
Now on the language thing…yes, it’s a rare thing that you actually have to choose between solving a problem, and continuing to converse with one specific guy in another country who’s working on the other side of a language barrier. Sooner or later, you can break through. But there are times when that simply isn’t an option. You just can’t understand what the guy is saying, and vice-versa.
And so backed into that corner, I can’t help but wonder what the intrepid systems engineer does about the problem when he works for the anonymous CIO quoted at the top of the story. That CIO admits to sending people to human resources. Wow! Imagine having your career ended because someone else is supposed to be able to speak English, but can’t.
I suppose the problem would go into the “ether.” People who work in IT, I noticed, had a strong tendency to work on the things they knew how to work on. Whatever required “how-to-do” research had a much higher likelihood to just keep gathering dust in the in-box, under stacks of other things. Productive? Certainly not. But safe. There’s nothing racist about not working on something.
That, or I expect the phone “reset” button would be hit accidentally. Yeah, just hang up on the guy you can’t understand, call back and hope to get someone else.
Seriously, this is utopianism. And utopianism is dangerous no matter what its immediate goal. For it assumes 1) things should be a certain way; 2) if things are not that way it’s because there are people running around who have the wrong mindset; 3) if we obliterate people with the wrong mindset, and keep on doing it, we’ll eventually get to where we want to be.
I’ve only seen that work in one way, so far — and that’s with getting rid of crime. Lock up criminals until there’s no more crime being committed. Wouldn’t it be great if we all committed to utopianism on that issue, the one in which it effectively works? But we don’t do that. We’re much more inclined to use utopianism to solve things that aren’t really problems at all…like that, statistically, nerds tend to be boys, and they like talking to people who speak the same language.
Dude. They’re nerds. Professional nerds. Tasked with doing their nerdy things. Once tasked to achieve things as part of a team, they are required to exchange technical concepts in intricate detail. If you had to do that, you’d prefer to speak to people proficient in your own language, too.
And trust me on this — if & when a nerd-chick does happen along, and she can speak the language that is needed, she’ll be accepted into the nerd-crowd. Quite eagerly. Especially if she’s just as likely to be around when a server craps out at three in the morning, as the next fella. You won’t need some diversity program to make it happen, it’ll happen naturally…but she’ll still be outnumbered five-to-one, or more.
That’s just the way things are. If they conflict with Utopian ideals, and you want the Utopian ideals to win, it’ll come at the expense of getting things done. That means servers that go crash in the night, stay crashed.
Are Facts Obsolete? By Thomas Sowell
Friday, July 18, 2008
In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Sen. Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of “change” is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Sowell goes on to ponder Sen. Obama’s ideas against the backdrop of history, and how his ideas have been tried by other countries. He covers punitive taxes and regulations on business, restrictions on international trade, increases on minimum wage rates, and Obama’s disturbing “refinement” of these and other positions as he shifts his priorities from winning the nomination away from Hillary Clinton, to prevailing over his Republican opponent in the general election.
It’s a little unfair, if you ask me. None of this stuff has started with Obama or with 2008. But Obama and ’08 are both important in defining a zenith, or rather a nadir, of what has been transpiring for many years now.
Yes, facts are becoming obsolete. It started with “political correctness” — the term itself tacitly admits that whatever was under discussion was correct on some mundane, technical level, otherwise why include the adverb in “politically incorrect”? Why not just call it incorrect? And so, with that phrase and the underlying concept, we came across a destructive epiphany, that there were multiple levels in which something could be “correct” or “incorrect.”
And then Bill Clinton lied — but oh, wait, no he didn’t, it wasn’t any of our business and we shouldn’t have asked the question.
Saddam Hussein “wasn’t dangerous” even though he was…his “country never attacked us.” No one said then, or says now, that Hussein was a harmless ol’ teddy bear. They just form opinions that make sense only if he was, and then bully others into adopting those beliefs as their own. The accusation that flies around so easily is that if you were for removing Saddam from power, you were losing track of what mattered because Iraq had “nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.” But the central question was whether Saddam was a dangerous, deadly cog in the machinery of international terrorism, and we don’t talk too much about how our fifth-column peaceniks have lost track of that. Even though the facts say they have.
Don’t even get me started on global warming. Consensus? Science is settled? Debate is over? Nobody says so anymore, except to echo what was fashionable a year or two ago. But echo it they do.
Got a kid? Has he put an electronics toolkit together lately? Does he know who James Abram Garfield was?
Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.
That’s their problem. A politician’s problem is how to look like he is for “the poor” and against those who are “exploiting” them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.
Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.
I have been spending all of my life listening to our “leaders” talk about “talking” with some other nation’s “leaders.” In all those years and all that talking-about-talk, I’ve not heard anyone discuss the details of what these talks would be. I come from a strange planet called “Earth” in which this is more than a little strange; how can the details of talk, themselves, be trivial and unworthy of exploration, but it’s somehow worth rambling endlessly about whether the talks should take place? Especially when it’s an all but foregone conclusion that they should & will? But that’s the way it’s been done for quite some time now.
I don’t know where we go from here. My hope is that this stuff moves in cycles, and after we’re done being bored with facts someone will figure out that they do matter, after all, and we’ll have some kind of Renaissance. Tom Swift books, a generation of flesh-and-blood nerds ready to emulate him, and the rest of us admiring the nerds from the sidelines, dazzled by the things they build in their garages — not that a few more of them are nerdettes and isn’t it wonderful because it shows our commitment to something called “diversity.” In short, my hope is that we’ll admire each other for doing things, not for being things.
That’s where we are now; we earn adoration from our peers by being something, not by doing something. We do this because of the condition in which we have placed ourselves, through our sneering complacency about facts. Because of the one all-encompassing, grand-poobah great-grandpappy of all “facts” more important than all the rest, and this is what is being ignored: To live life ignorant of facts and what they mean, is actually boring. It is a meaningless, suffocating existence. Because when you are committed to avoiding the recognition of facts and what they might mean, life is just an endless menagerie of surprises. Nothing more than that.
We are exasperatingly bored, and we don’t even know it. We’ve done it to ourselves.
Becky, the Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Stuff, is making sense today.
We’ll keep watching for her to stop making sense. She’s fun to watch.
The United States corporate tax rate, at 35% (40% when state corporate taxes are factored in), is the second highest in the world. The “socialist” countries of Europe not only have lower corporate tax rates, but they only tax the income earned by the corporation within their country. This is why Anheuser-Busch is now a citizen of the European Union, and one of the reasons the Euro is worth sixty percent more than the dollar.
: In a perfect world there would not even be a corporate income tax. This is money that is taxed twice, and only causes increased costs to consumers and lower wages. There is no logical reason why corporations are taxed. When they pay out the money earned, either in the form of dividends to shareholders, interest to bondholders, or as wages—including the grotesque salaries that some CEO’s get, the money is taxed. There is no rational reason for taxing it twice.
Other than the government’s insatiable appetite for money, the only reason corporations are taxed is the populist-socialist idea that corporations are evil and all their money is ill begotten gains. So it feels good for people, who are struggling or parlor room Marxists, to strike out at these organizations, even if economically it makes no sense at all. [emphasis mine]
Like a breath of fresh air, isn’t it? Real capital-L Libertarianism. If we’re beating up on each other just for the sake of beating up on each other, let’s stop doing it for a year or two and see what happens.
That, my friends, is what Libertarianism is.
Sadly, in 2008 it has more popularly devolved into a small-l libertarian squishy, oozy mess. I would describe the more popular definition of libertarianism as something like this: “If a law is enforced against you and you don’t like it, do a lot of complaining about your ‘civil liberties’ being violated, add “Can I Get An Amen Here’ and if enough populist mob whores join you then we can grab some headlines.” Nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with mob rule and anarchy.
“Unconstitutional” means “I personally don’t like it.” Nothing whatsoever to do with whether there’s something in The Constitution proscribing against what you’re talking about. To throw around the “unconstitutional” word doesn’t even mean to make a promise, express or implied, that you’ve skimmed through the damn thing.
But this is good. She makes sense here. And I can’t help but wonder what her feminist friends think about her viewpoint on this.
Britain’s leading play safety expert has some simple advice for grown-ups: relax. Let your kids have fun; let them be challenged; let them explore – and let them take risks.
David Yearley, of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says that years of concentrating solely on safety has led to the spread of ‘boring’ public play areas. With £124m in lottery cash earmarked for sprucing up playgrounds, he says it’s time to shift the focus to ‘controlled risk’.
Yearley, keynote speaker at an international conference in Loughborough this week, said: ‘We need to provide play environments so that children can experience risk in a controlled and managed way.’
Yeah, for one brief, shining moment, there was light at the end of the tunnel. A little bit of respect for old-fashioned, rough-and-tunnel, “Hold My Beer And Watch This” manliness.
Maybe that was there, but the more pressing concern was…
Play can be dangerous: 40,000 British children – from an under-15 population of about 12 million – are injured each year. One child dies every two or three years as a result of a playground accident.
Yearley said that, unless playgrounds provide ‘exciting, stimulating’ diversion for children, there is a danger that children will not use them, and will play instead on railway lines, by riverbanks or alongside roads.
Well ironically, this much older article was more in line with the concerns I have about kids today.
A GROWING number of children’s playgrounds are too safe and designed more for anxious parents than the rounded development of their cosseted offspring, research-ers say.
A three-year study written in conjunction with the University of Manchester surveyed 872 families and found that a concern for safety often hampered children’s ability to learn for themselves. In two- thirds of cases, a decision to use a particular playground was made by parents and not by their children.
Dr John McKendrick, of Glasgow Caledonian University, one of the report’s authors,said: “There is too much concern with safety. Good parenting has been seen as interventionist parenting for too long … parents are using playgrounds for their own benefit and not for their child’s.
Bingo! Good parenting seen as interventionist parenting. How many times have I had this conversation with Kidzmom, and with mothers in general…”So, when he’s eighteen and graduated from high school, are you planning to be there to –” “Yeah, I know…” The final two syllables of the retort are drawled out wistfully, understanding the problem, knowing it’s a significant one, but not being able to dredge up the drive to confront it.
The sack race and three-legged race have been banned from a school sports day because the children might fall over and hurt themselves.
:
Simon Woolley, head of education at Beamish in Co Durham, said: “We looked at a three-legged race and a sack race but what we want to do is minimise the risk to the children. We thought we would be better to do hopping and running instead because there was less chance of them falling over.”
We are living in an over-lawyered society. The nightmare scenario that led to this, was for that dreaded playground sound to be heard — “++plop++ WAAAAAHHHHH!!!” — and a lawsuit to ensue.
So no plop.
This is a great definition of a bad idea. Everyone says “we had better do it this way”…but nobody wants to sign onto owning the decision. Nobody says this is a better way to do it.
Nobody really wants to sign their name under the idea that the kids are genuinely “unharmed.” Because deep down, we all understand that isn’t true. But we have to do it this way; it’s “for the children.”
I was fresh off of scribbling down the post previous, about making important decisions by popularity of the meme instead of by an even-handed and methodical review of history. And I came across this story of a mother whose daughter suffered from a mysterious illness and, tiring of the professional doctors comin’ up empty trying to figure out the problem, used her Mad GoogleSkilz on the innernets to figure out what the problem was herself.
It got me to thinking about the decidedly non-reversible gender roles that take place, with regard to medical professionals treating kids. Specifically, with regard to those things called “learning disabilities,” although the story itself was about something else.
Danielle Fisher, 13, fell ill in October and doctors were baffled by her mysterious condition.
Her mother Dominique, 35, took her to the doctors after she began suffering from viral meningitis-like symptoms, including severe headaches and fatigue.
:
“She was diagnosed with Epstein-Bar virus, without the glandular fever. Then meningitis, then the psychiatrist comment was the best one.
“They even suggested it could be a clot or a tumour at one point, which was worrying.
“The last time she was in, the doctor said there’s nothing wrong with her, she needs a psychiatrist, which I knew was wrong, the poor girl could hardly walk.”
Frustrated at the lack of an appropriate diagnosis, Dominique, who is an estate agent, was so worried that she began doing some research herself on the internet into Danielle’s symptoms.
She was shocked to discover her daughter’s illness may have been caused by a bite from a tick, a tiny spider-like blood-sucking parasite which usually feeds off animals.
Dominique said, “I’d begun doing some research myself by then as she had severe vertigo, couldn’t walk any more and had severe muscle and joint pain.
“I came across Lyme Disease and it just seemed to fit. There’s a lot of controversy over the treatment of the disease and over diagnosing the disease.
“I took Danielle to see a professor in Newcastle privately and he diagnosed her with Lyme Disease and three core infections. That’s why she was so ill.”
This is a great example of deciding by meme. Which means, to be more precise about it, making critical decisions according to the popularity, or lack thereof, of the meme. A meme is,
meme (n.)
A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
The definition from the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing fleshes this out, and perhaps better clarifies for first-time readers exactly how I’m using it here:
Richard Dawkins’s term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do.
Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
What does this have to do with gender roles, and children diagnosed with learning disabilities? Why does this fit in so well with my meme about memes? Well — as anyone who’s ever watch reruns of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman knows — the story of these uppity women overruling the classically-educated but practically ignorant sawbones is a decidedly popular meme. To exaggerate how much, would be pretty difficult. We saw this in January when I’d finally heard enough of that radio spot and chose to jot down a few words about it. Oh, she doesn’t believe a word the condescending old coot in the white coat has to say! How courageous! She must be right! Even to the point where the momma waltzes in and specifically asks for a diagnosis — something no medical discipline is supposed to tolerate.
Rather typical for the Daily Mail, there’s no daddy and not a hint of journalistic drive to find out about one. As one, trust me on this: Fathers overruling the docs…fathers expressing an opinion contrary to the docs’…fathers expressing an opinion the doc might possibly find interesting…fathers showing reluctance to believe what the docs have to say…fathers failing to follow step-by-step instructions from the docs…these are all gobstopperingly, mind-blowingly unpopular memes.
When it’s time to talk about learning disabilities, fathers interested in having some effect on the process — hell, they’re better off suggesting steel-belted radial tire centerpieces on the tables at a wedding reception. Dads are really swimming upstream here. To acknowledge that a male figure, one who doesn’t have letters after his name, might have something to interject worth considering — nobody’s ready to hear about that. But to stop everything and listen to the momma, is a Hot New Trend.
We’re just know-nothing, knuckle-dragging yokels. Relics from the bygone era before we began to know “so much more than we used to” — and could we kindly sit down and shut up, speak when we’re spoken-to. If my son had Lyme Disease and it was up to me to use search engines to figure it out — based on my eleven years of experience with parenthood — I have no reason, none whatsoever, zilch, zero, bubkes, to think for an instant anyone would listen to me. And no way in hell would any tabloid, Anglican or Yankee, write about the story in a million years. But everyone wants to hear about the strong-willed, Internet-searching momma figuring out what science’s best minds somehow missed.
I don’t mean to suggest the fathers are always right; far from it.
Nor do I mean to suggest the mommas are always wrong.
But the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, it seems to me. Doctors know things, because they’re supposed to. Parents know things. Momma’s known the bubbins his entire life. Some of us daddies have known him that long too.
Since we decide by popularity-of-meme when we decide which of these stories are going to grow “legs” and which ones are not, this has more of a bearing on that whole learning-disability thing than on the Lyme disease thing. In the court of public opinion, females have exclusive authority to overrule the docs. And it’s a powerful authority indeed; few are ready, willing or able to admit that they have it, or that it’s exclusively theirs. But they do, and it is. Meanwhile, females are far more likely to fall for the disability pitch. You can prove this easily by watching how mental/behavioral health professionals and school administrators behave, when they sell it. They act just like car salesmen — put all the energy into selling the medication to the mother, and it’s sold to the house. To discipline the kid, get the message across to him that being distracted is something you’re simply not supposed to allow to happen, and hey let’s keep the drugs bottled up and out of his system if it’s at all possible…that’s a daddy message. Men tend to be the advocates of that message, and we’re usually lonely voices in that department.
So when it’s popular for women to overrule the docs, but unpopular for the gentlemen to step out of line — when we have this expectation that every concerned mother is a Florence Nightingale in the making, but men should just buck up and do what they’re told — we create an environment in which certain false diagnoses just catch on like an old dry house-afire. And that’s the problem I’ve come to learn about, very slowly. What to do about it? I don’t know. It seems people do respect what men have to say, even genuflecting before them, if the man is a doctor. Maybe every man who has children should become a doctor. Or, maybe every woman who becomes a mother should go to specialized training about learning disabilities, and how they are oversold. Kids, of course, should be disciplined so they don’t act like weirdos…except on the playground.
But…as my son’s principal told me, and she’s completely right about this…you can’t do anything to punish them nowadays like they did back in my day. And, coincidentally or not, as that change was coming about, that’s exactly when learning disabilities took off. Like a rocket.
Hmmmmmmm…
Update: So critical is this concept in passing judgment on some of our most poorly-thought-out prevailing standards and viewpoints — a primary purpose of existence of The Blog That Nobody Reads — that I decided to add an entry to the Glossary.
H/T: Hot Air, via Cas, who bottom-lines the issue expertly, in a way we’ll be able to decide it in November.
This sums up, in a nutshell, the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans usually believe that Americans are smart enough to run their own lives; Democrats don’t. Republicans usually think that Americans deserve to keep their own money; Democrats don’t. Republicans usually think that Americans will lead their lives perfectly fine without government intervention; Democrats don’t.
Liberals just can’t seem to grasp the fact that people don’t need their all-knowing wisdom-filled genius to live happy and full lives. When President Bush said that it was presumptuous to tell Americans how to live their own lives, I wanted to cheer.
This is what President Bush says right before his approval numbers trickle upward a point or two — read that as, away from Congress’ approval rating which is much lower.
When he values agreement above clarity and starts “reaching across the aisle” to “unify” with the folks who have no qualms at all about telling us when to plug in our coffeemakers and where to set our thermostats and what language to teach our kids…that is when his approval rating goes DOWN.
…and the stupid, insipid movies, Broadway plays, musicals and commercials that pander to them — all you people who think I put way too much importance on this stuff — read that chick Rachel. She’s opining about some kind of house-hunting “reality” TV show. Maybe I’ve already seen it, maybe I haven’t, I can’t tell ’em apart anymore and I really don’t give a good goddamn. But this does ring a bell.
This makes me want to kill some bitches.
They are so proud of the fact that they own 50 pairs of shoes and two metric tons of cocktail dresses, and that they’ve shown their husband who’s boss by hogging all the closet space. You can see it in their eyes, every time, how cutely sassy they think they’re being. It is absolutely revolting.
I also love how they make a big deal out of pretending that they care what hubby thinks. Some of them are so brazenly unashamed – and proud – of how thoroughly they’ve emasculated their man that they even look right in the camera with a dull-eyed evil grin and say things like, “I like to let him think his opinions count, too.” Die, lady. Just die.
I made a decision, the one & only time I got divorced, not to get back into the marriage thing until the lady in question and society as a whole and most especially the law all agreed that the point of the exercise was for the man and the woman to share a life together. Not to make the woman rich by legalizing her theft of the man’s assets. Not to fatten up the divorce-law profession, and all the parasitic divorce sub-industries. Not to make women everywhere feel good by giving them a forum in which they could dispense and receive tips and tricks about how to make the bastard’s life more miserable. But to form a foundation for a united household…like what marriage used to be all about.
I think maybe we’re just about there, or headed in that direction. I got a woman all picked out, and I can trust her. The law? Well…I’m in California. So that’s a problem.
Society? It’s pretty much turned around. But this thing Rachel is talking about, is the one big exception. You know that timeless story about two guys who get together and they’re complete strangers, neither one knows what the other’s religion is, or favorite sports’ team, or political persuasion. But you can always make friends with another dude by saying “man, women are nuts, huh?” The women have a handy counterpart to that, I’m afraid; you just saw it. “I like to let him think his opinions count, too.” With a smirk. Oh, how droll. Presto! Two women with different backgrounds are instant buddies now! It’s a match for the “women are nuts” thing — worse than that, though, it excuses it.
I saw it on some new half-hour sitcom called “The Bill Engvall Show” or some such. Ah, here it is. A great candidate for the Sickest Show on the Air award. The pilot episode had some extended dialog wherein the wifey fooled the hubby into thinking he’d promised to give up watching the ball game so he could take her shopping on Saturday morning. As he confusedly staggered out of the kitchen to go get changed, the missus revealed that he didn’t really promise that, she just made it up. Hah hah! Isn’t that great? He’s the puppet, she’s the string. Hilarious! Can’t wait to see what comes next!
++Ca-LICK++! Whoops. I touched that dial.
This is what really gets under my skin about this: It’s anesthetizing. It starts out funny…and then, in a manner that would make Saturday Night Live proud…gradually, the jokes lose clever edge, but not their appeal. Eventually there’s really nothing funny about ’em, and people are just watching episode after episode where the man is made into a clueless boob, there’s no wit, no story, not even a twist-ending. No reason to laugh, other than the laugh track communicating the expectation that this is what you’re supposed to be doing.
Maybe that’s why it’s so popular to beat up on the man on prime-time TV — the mind-dulling effect it has on people. This would make economic sense. If I’m a sitcom producer, I’m going to bet there’s better-than-even odds that
1. By the third season, fourth at the latest, my new show is going to have been put up on the chopping block many times, assuming it’s still going at all by that time;
2. Inside of those three years, there is going to be a writer’s strike.
So it makes sense to have a built-in tranquilizing agent. Some meandering theme that dumbs the audience down, and dulls their sensibilities; makes ’em slow to realize the jokes stopped being funny.
Of course sometimes, the show doesn’t even try to be funny…opting instead to wallow around in the muck of “special” episode sermonizing, instructing the audience to believe men should live to do things for women, but women shouldn’t ever, ever, ever do anything for a man.
What household needs that kind of attitude problem?
So yeah, Rachel’s right. You change the rules of the game too much, and pretty soon, the guys don’t want to play anymore. There is a solution, though; it’s right in Rachel’s post title. You can stop watching television. I’ve often wondered what that would be like — wife gets home from the doctor, announces a special surprise, we’ll be hearing the pitter patter of little feet in a few months, and THAT AFTERNOON the television is ripped out. Never to be hooked up again until the kid’s moved out of the house.
That would probably be the most well-adjusted dude or gal ever to step foot on God’s green earth. A borderline superhero. If it was a girl, she’d happily make sandwiches for her man. If it was a guy…uh…well, he’d let ‘er.
Did that bother someone? Sorry. Feminists, you can just BLOW ME. Every morning I’m making coffee for my gal. Every evening, she makes dinner even if she’s been working. I water her tomato plants (even though I hate tomatoes). She straightens up my son’s bedroom so he has places to put his stuff. It’s called doing things for each other.
But this isn’t really just a sex-role problem. It comes from that cheap, easy, uninspired, utility-grade “comedy” in which you toss some guff at the family patriarch, and you have an instant punchline. I remember this spring my son made a friend in the neighborhood, a boy of about eight or nine. They ate their snacks and played their video games until one day, the boy told me to shut up. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Until he found out he wasn’t welcome to come around anymore, short of apologizing and promising never to do it again. My boy took care of laying down that ultimatum.
We simply do not tolerate this brand of humor in our household. And I do not understand households that put up with it. It isn’t entertaining, it isn’t about entertaining people, it isn’t about humor, it’s motivated around the personal agendas and pet peeves of complete strangers, there’s a lot of rage wrapped up in it, and it just isn’t funny. But worst of all, it’s a brain-killer. The women and children who delight in their false-victories over this kind of slapstick, and the grown-up so-called “male” who somehow tolerates it, over time they all become drooling idiots. It isn’t healthy and it isn’t natural.
This is not necessarily a Republican/democrat thing, or even a mainstream-media-versus-blog thing.
It’s more of a Madison Avenue prevailing sentiment thing.
If said prevailing sentiment is that someone is dense and stupid…that someone is
white, straight, male, Christian, conservative Republican, born on or after 1943.
If said prevailing sentiment is that someone is smart and brilliant…that someone is
white, straight, male, Christian, liberal democrat, born on or after 1943.
Got it? These do not apply to you if you were already alive before Pearl Harbor. Dick Cheney is not stupid, even to hardcore spittle-flinging liberals who have long ago built their own pronunciation keys for the word “impeachment.” He’s just plain evil. Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan weren’t really stupid — they were presented as thick, short-tempered, dozing and senile; that’s a different thing. Jesse Helms was no dummy, he knew exactly what he was doing. Evil bastard. Contrasted with those, George W. Bush is stupid, dense, incurious, poorly-read…as is Sean Hannity…and Dan Quayle…but Condoleezza Rice is not stupid. Clarence Thomas is not stupid. Clarence and Condoleezza are just “Uncle Toms.” They don’t call Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin stupid. They’re just evil, bitchy women.
Barack Obama, who is half-white, is supposed to be brilliant. Oprah said so, and there seems to be some kind of super-majority of Google hits on “he is brilliant” that are directly concerned with the Obamessiah. Al Gore and John Kerry were supposed to be brilliant. They both failed to sell us on their brilliance, and supposedly that was because they were so smart we couldn’t understand ’em. Ted Kennedy is too old, though. That Madison Avenue prevailing sensibility pronounced Ted Kennedy to be chock full o’compassion for the “little guy,” but he was rarely if ever pronounced to be a genius. If Ted Kennedy didn’t get his way, it was rarely or never spoken of as a consequence of his being too smart to communicate with the American people. Homosexual liberals, Jewish liberals, Muslim liberals — they aren’t referred to as “brilliant” or “smart.” Ditto for women…they are “strong willed,” but when other liberals engage the mouth without putting the brain in gear, they usually don’t speak of those women as being smart. They’ll jump all over you if you call those women stupid, of course! But that isn’t the same as showering compliments on them for being super-smart, as they so regularly have done with Al Gore and Barack Obama.
Hillary was a remarkable exception though. She got to be a genius. I guess she got to be a virtual straight white male. Interestingly, when Bill Clinton made history by putting lots of women in his cabinet, I didn’t see it come into vogue to refer to this as a “brain trust” and I don’t recall even any faithful liberals showering accolades on the intellectual acumen of Clinton’s women. Albright, Shalala, Wood, Ginsburg, Guinier…once in awhile a mouthpiece might call one of ’em “courageous.” Another good buzz phrase for liberal democrat women is “fiercely loyal.” Dianne Feinstein is fiercely loyal. Susan McDougal was fiercely loyal. To be smart, by & large you have to be a dude. And straight. Nobody says openly-gay Congressman Barney Frank is stupid, or brilliant either.
I think our lower-Manhattan ivory-tower types are having a little bit of an Inigo Montoya problem with those words “smart,” and “brilliant,” “dumb,” “dense” and “stupid”: I do not think those words mean what they think they mean. To really get a bandwagon message going that has to do with any of those words, the designated target has to be straight, white, male, Christian and a baby-boomer.
There are exceptions to this. But very few. So if I’m to take this seriously, I guess intelligence is on some kind of bell curve, and we straight white male gentiles are clustered around the wingtips. With, or across from, Hillary Clinton the World’s Smartest Woman. The “big middle” of the bell curve is just an Affirmative Action dream, chock full of all the skin colors, religious creeds and sexual preferences left over. If anyone within those minorities possesses high authority, and a pronounced abundance or dearth of intellectual wherewithal, it simply isn’t worth mentioning.
Every now and then you run into a piece of direct, irrefutable evidence that those who push policies ostensibly for the purpose of making us equal, in fact, don’t have any egalitarian motives at all and actually want to promote inequality. In this case, it is nothing short of a full confession in NEWS.scotsman.com (and it flew under my radar over two weeks ago) — we learn of it via Exposing Feminism:
Equality supremo Harman admits new law will lead to discrimination against men
Harriet Harman, the Equalities Secretary, yesterday unveiled proposals to tackle the gender pay gap and outlaw discrimination against consumers on the grounds of age.
The forthcoming Equality Bill would allow organisations to hire a woman or worker from an ethnic minority over a white male of equal ability.
:
Ms Harman agreed the Bill could discriminate against men, but added: “You don’t get progress if there isn’t a bit of a push forward.”
That is the Equalities Secretary using the “can’t make an omelette without breakin’ some eggs” argument. Equalities Secretary.
What in the hell is in the water over there? And is it on its way over here?
Tea. Crates. Boston Harbor. Ker-SPOOSH.
Update: Whoever’s looking for some Yankee nonsense on our side of the Atlantic, doesn’t have to look far or long. And we find it in the usual place…Feministing! No, I’m not going to pretend it comes as a complete surprise to me that feminism is supposed to be pro gay marriage and pro married-gay child adoption, or even that I didn’t expect to see the bully stick of feminism brandished in its tried-and-true, “Can I Get An Amen Here?” type of sermonizing in this direction.
But I do think it’s strange that feminism supports gay marriage and adoption of children. Yes, I do.
But I suppose I’m guilty of frustrating myself. Me being silly. I keep looking for a common thread between these decidedly unrelated issues, some connecting-rod more substantial than “Moderate Conservative Bad, Radical Liberal Good.”
Look what we got goin’ on here.
You make a boys’ club while you’re running a company, feminists say that’s bad.
You make a boys’ club while you’re raising a child, feminists say way-ta-go.
Diversity promoted and encouraged, pronounced a vital pillar of strength in one place, and ridiculed and marginalized in another. Amazing.
Volunteer, unpaid firefighters, who receive awards every year for saving lives, are in trouble for engaging in “frat house” horseplay. Blah blah blah caught on tape blah blah blah underwear over head hostile work environment blah blah blah zero tolerance policy blah blah blah blah blah.
Ah, we seem to be split right down the middle on this one. Real people take the Officer Barbrady approach, noting these are the lads who might be pulling someone out of a burning house at 3 in the morning, for no pay…so feck off. And our bureaucrats who enforce zero-tolerance rules, intone in that boring nasal resonance of theirs, utterly devoid of passion since they can’t defend the logic behind the rules they enforce…but curiously, behaving in a way for which you need to have some passion…that fireworks are illegal in Maryland.
Okay, I think that’s fair enough. The law is the law, and all that. If you break it, it might be a good idea to make sure your buddy isn’t pointing a camcorder at you.
But one rapidly gains the impression that the manly hijinks are more of a central issue than the illegal letting-off of fireworks. In fact it’s somewhat ironic, I think, that legal manly hijinks are thought to be out of bounds — but if you damage city property while engaging in brittle, petulant womanly hijinks you get off scot-free. In fact, the city elders sit down with you, figure out what you want, and re-customize the road signs to your liking.
So…the hazing creates a hostile work environment, huh. At that rule against hostile work environment extends to firefighters, huh. Volunteer firefighters.
I think it’s time we admitted that whenever you have a squadron of hardy folks training for ongoing readiness to engage an emergency situation, you’re probably going to have hazing. If we have zero-tolerance rules that say that’s somehow not kosher, what we need to do is admit that in those emergency situations — firefighting, crimefighting, combat, toxic waste management, etc. — we aren’t really committed to making sure things turn out okay. Because if we were so committed, the message would be “you guys do whatever you gotta do, and get ready in whatever way you gotta get ready.”
I wonder whatever became of that mindset?
Now it’s act in such-and-such a way at ALL times…all hours of the day. Otherwise, make sure we don’t find out. And where are the lines? Oh, we’re not trying to get rid of any specific type of behavior, we just want more rules. It makes us feel safe. Besides, when your compliance with our new rules is a subjective thing, and everybody can have his or her own interpretation of whether you went over the line or not — you’re owned. We pencil-neck bureaucrats like owning things, so we figure ambiguity is our friend.
Makes loads of sense until your house is on fire.
Great video. Wonder if that “butt” guy got burned.
And with apologies to my friends in Canada, he claims to have been talking to one of yours…and, having grown up within a stone’s throw of your border, by reason of experience from those olden days which I’ll leave unexplained here — this is why I believe this is not a joke. Don’t be too offended, I like some of your beers.
You Americans Aren’t Selfish Enough by LithiumCola
You pay all these taxes but you don’t want anything in return for it. You don’t want free health care. You don’t want time off of work. You don’t want anything. You’re not selfish enough.
You get mad when someone is taking welfare and sitting on their ass. What have you got against sitting on your ass? The whole point behind having a government and paying taxes is to have more time to sit on your ass. That’s what technology is for. You Americans work longer than anyone, pay all these taxes, make all these robots, and then not only don’t you sit on your ass, but you get mad when anyone else does. You’re fucking crazy.
You say, “people on welfare are lazy.” What the hell is wrong with lazy? Do you want lazy people to starve to death? Don’t you want to be more lazy? Don’t you want a hobby? Why not?
Again, I could understand that if you weren’t paying all these taxes, I guess. But you are, and you seem like you don’t want anything for it.
I see it over and over again and yet it continues to take me by surprise…just a little. But the left is everlastingly consistent. It has a message. When it comes to propagating that message, all work is worth doing (note that our KOSKid took the time to type this in…without a robot, I presume). All enemies are worth confronting.
Outside of propagating that message, no work is worth doing and no enemies are worth confronting. And that brand of nihilism — this is the surreal part — is the message.
It is self-reproducing, exponential expansion of quantity — with no quality. Do…whatever it takes…bear any burden, pay any price…to spread the word: No burden worth bearing, no price worth paying. Let the robots do it.
The first thing I notice, is how similar is the media’s reaction to a radical hardcore left-wing liberal getting caught saying what he truly feels, compared to a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. No protagonist; it’s nobody’s fault; both events are things that just “happened.” Well, in the natural weather phenomenon it’s the incumbent Republican President who somehow made it happen, but give the Jesse Jackson thing time. That’ll be George Bush’s fault too. You know if we don’t obey our instructions to forget about it, toot-sweet, someone in some strategy room somewhere will be brainstorming on a way to hold the current President responsible for Jesse Jackson’s latest embarrassment.
And that brings me to the second thing. Like Officer Barbrady said, “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” What a wonderful thing it must be to be Jesse Jackson! You get to express your profound regret that you got caught saying something, and this massive public-relations tsunami goes out…everyone should pretend it never happened. This is why democrats tend not to stand for anything. There are, in fact, deeply held principles in their camp; all these principles do not agree with all other principles; this causes deep divides and schisms that are well worth discussing.
But it would hurt both sides within the democrat camp to permit any discussion of them. So they remain undiscussed.
Here, the divide is over — and this brings me to the third thing — what is it we’re talking about when we use the word “responsibility?” Truth be told, this nation is chock full of reasonable, moderate-to-conservative people who call themselves “democrats” and look at the R-word the way any conservative Republican does: Responsibility is something inextricably intertwined with the decisions you want to make. Authority, autonomy, control, it’s-my-turn-at-bat…having sex with a good-lookin’ woman…driving a car. These all carry responsibility.
Well the truth of the matter is, Rev. Jesse Jackson represents millions of people — of all skin color — who don’t feel that way. To them, “responsibility” is a burden that bears down upon undesirables. Those who are seen as oppressors within history’s backdrop, people who run corporations, rich people, straight people, white people, males, white-straight-males, oilmen. We/they have the “responsibility” to provide…and there, there’s this huge exploding list. Jobs. Food. Daycare. Minimum wage. Education. Healthcare.
Obama just said “black people” — clearly, in Jackson’s mindset as well as in Sen. Obama’s, the useful meaning of this phrase is something that could be best worded as “our primary beneficiaries” — have responsibility. And Jackson was none to fond of this. On Planet Jackson, there’s the folks who’ve gotten away with stuff and are about to get their come-uppins, and there’s the folks who’ve been trampled and now get to live in utopia. And the latter of those two should not have to worry about any responsibilities, because you saw how he reacted when someone suggested something different.
My suggestion? Let’s go ahead and disagree about what responsibilities are. Let’s go ahead and disagree about whether Obama would be a decent President, or whether Jesse Jackson is good for America. Disagree about all that — but let’s agree the Officer Barbrady approach doesn’t fit in here. No need at all to “move along” from what apparently divides the Obama and Jackson camps within the democrat party.
This is a debate well worth having. What is responsibility? Are you burdened by it by the things you do, or by who you are? Is it a way for people to earn the privileges and the stature they want in life, to change what they want to change and achieve what they want to achieve — or is it punishment to be meted out to dirty rotten creepy jerks (DRCJs) who are somehow associated with historical skulduggery and need a good whallopin’ of some kind?
Because I don’t think this is a “black” thing at all. I think there’s millions of people who feel, when they see themselves or any of their peers or perceived constituents saddled with any kind of “responsibility,” for any reason at all, their first instinct is to cut somebody’s nuts out (or off). They seem to be angry people who have something to say. I’d like to know more about what they’ve got to say. I’d like everybody to hear it — right before it’s time to go into a voting booth and punch a ballot. Then we could show what we think of it. I think that would be a good thing.
Update: As a general rule, when a topic can be easily distilled down into a single intangible noun — Bill Whittle has an essay about it, and if that is the case it is an essay well worth reading. However, next month it’ll have five years of dust on it. Five years old, and solid gold:
Political Correctness, Deconstructionism, Trans-National Progressivism, Liability mania, Crime and Punishment, Terrorism, Welfare, Gun Control, Media Bias, Affirmative Action, Abortion, Education Reform, Social Engineering — all of it — will divide people according to their idea of Responsibility. [emphasis Whittle’s]
This helps to (partially) explain something I’ve often noticed about abortion, environmentalism and secularism. We have people who think humans have a “responsibility” to be stewards of the earth; we have other people who insist there is no such thing as God. There are people who believe when a woman becomes pregnant, it is the responsibility of both parents to carry the child to term.
Now, imagine yourself as an alien who is skilled in the concepts of human behavior, but wholly unfamiliar with our customs. You could be Mork from Ork, you could be My Favorite Martian, you could be Jeannie coming out of her magic lamp after two thousand years. All things dealing with contemporary events and prevailing notions, you need to have explained to you.
I think Whittle’s essay falls short here. You would have to logically predict, would you not, that the people who believe in God are the ones who insist we have a responsibility to act as watchful stewards over the planet. You would become confused even further once you were informed that our religious people are the ones (quite rightly and sensibly) who insist pregnancies are initiated by a Higher Power and it is a transgression into the glorious jurisdiction for any mortal man to abort a woman’s pregnancy. In fact, if one of your earlier introductions to this was through the Book of Genesis, you would become even more confused:
1:28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Once your “Master” or your earthly host got done explaining to you — no, actually, it’s our secularist types who insist we have this responsibility — you’d be mixed up about it for, I expect, an entire year or more. Yes space-alien-man, the abortion/pregnancy thing works exactly the way you inferred; secularist types insist there is no deity to be offended and it’s all about “choice.” But on the environment and “global warming” the whole thing takes on a hundred and eighty degree twist.
So this is where I part company with Whittle: The left does have a concept of responsibility. And they believe in free will.
What decides these issues for them is that they believe free will is only practiced by collectivist groups. In fact, it is a consistent trope of leftist thinking that free will does change the outcome of important things, and should. That they must bring it about.
But then they go on to believe, quite consistently, and often against the historical evidence, that this can only be done through “coming together.” An individual can’t “go it alone.”
I commented earlier this week that if global warming, for an example, was settled science as we are consistently told it is — we would handle it much the same way we handle science that really is settled, such as with regard to Mad Cow Disease. Grabbing hold of everyone we know, everyone within earshot and line-of-sight, and bullying them around until they thought of the subject matter the way we do… that wouldn’t have anything to do with what had to be done. Instead, we’d delegate responsibility for the outcome of the incident, to those who are best qualified to affect that outcome. And then we’d go about our lives hoping for the best. Nothing grassroots about it.
True leftists like Rev. Jackson, simply put, don’t believe individuals can have responsibility — except, as I wrote above, as punishment for historical wrongs. The more noble variant of free will, the kind that has to be embraced in order to enact positive change…that is reserved for groups.
Whittle goes on with an observation about an old speech made by Abraham Lincoln, that deals with the toxicity of the mindset disclaiming the virtue of noble, individual, free will:
Many years before his election as the nation’s 16th President, this man, Abraham Lincoln, spoke at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838. It is worth our time to whisper these words aloud, to ourselves, to be sure that we understand what he is saying across a gulf of a century-and-a-half of differences in rhetoric and speech.
He said:
We, the American People, find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them — they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader — to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
How then shall we perform it? — At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
The idea of individualism, of personal responsibility, is the centerpiece, the granite foundation, of the very idea of a free people. For that reason, it is under direct attack on many fronts from people, who, through motives well-intentioned or ill, find such an idea intolerable because a nation of individuals is immune to repression, coercion, social engineering and control by the elite. The threat, as Lincoln so eloquently foresaw, comes from within and it is here, now, well-established and growing.
We have to fight back. We have to fight back hard.
We have to fight back now.
So you see how responsibility for personal defense ties in with this. And this speaks to why, when responsibility and free will become intertwined with accountability, for someone to take on the heavy burden of overseeing the outcome…this is a responsibility, along with many others, that cannot be delegated to a group. For groups are notoriously lacking in this accountability. That’s why the environment and other endeavors are wholeheartedly embraced as “responsibilities” by the left that in so many other areas, rejects the concept of free will. When responsibility has to do with finger-waggling, the left likes responsibility just fine. Unplug your toaster! Change your light bulbs! Drive a smaller car!
And it’s quite reasonable for you to pick up an undertone in selectivity about the finger-waglees. The left spends a lot of time and a lot of hot air talking about how, in these efforts, “we all” need to “come together.” Well, as always seems to be the case, “all” doesn’t mean “all.” We see that when environmentally-conscious politicians drive to their speaking events in SUVs that get six miles a gallon or less; we see it in the celebrities who believe in “responsible gun safety,” whose bodyguards carry concealed weapons.
That, right there, is why Jesse Jackson wants to cut off Sen. Obama’s nuts. Noble responsibility, the kind you intertwine with an outcome-changing effort that is truly great, is a group thing; it is to be invested in a group, so that when a bad plan turns to crap it’s nobody’s fault. The pejorative cousin, the “You Hafta Worry About This Because You’re A DRCJ” (dirty rotten creepy jerk) is an individual thing, but it isn’t there to achieve anything. It’s there to weigh people down, to punish them.
Whittle’s right. This mindset that individuals are incapable of embracing glorious and productive free will, the kind of free will that is necessarily involved in accomplishing great things, is treacherous, toxic, and will eventually kill us if we let it. We have to oppose it at every turn.
University of Calgary law professor Kathleen Mahoney is absolutely right when she says the outcome of Levant’s case demonstrates the process works. It does, indeed, and without such institutions as human rights commissions, where would people go for redress? In other countries, when people feel their racial or religious identity is under attack, they take up arms. Here, we have a civilized outlet for making such complaints — the human rights commission.
Take A Drink When He/She Says…
I’m not a big fan of these interviews by Dr. Savage. If you listen to an infomercial in the middle of the night, and then twelve hours later you listen to one of these softball interviews Savage does, you’ll notice they sound exactly the same. I don’t like that. I never did like it. But I’ve been following Dr. Breggin’s work for awhile now, and his side of the story is one that needs to get out. He is not overstating the financial relationships at work here, so far as I know — contrasted with that, a lot of our “4A cheerleaders” base their opinions on the unfounded premise that all the professionals involved have pristine motives. You see them, often, abruptly ending their presentation of an argument and “resting the case” after quoting a professional. There, He Said It! That settles it! 
It appears sexism is alive and well when it comes to tattoos. Although just about as many women as men get tattoos nowadays, a new study shows that women seek removal of tattoos more than men because of negative social fallout.
In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Sen. Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
The United States corporate tax rate, at 35% (40% when state corporate taxes are factored in), is the second highest in the world. The “socialist” countries of Europe not only have lower corporate tax rates, but they only tax the income earned by the corporation within their country. This is why Anheuser-Busch is now a citizen of the European Union, and one of the reasons the Euro is worth sixty percent more than the dollar.
The sack race and three-legged race have been banned from a school sports day because the children might fall over and hurt themselves.
Of course sometimes, the show