In an earlier post I mentioned it but only in the context of the upcoming VP debates. I completely missed something. If paying more taxes is patriotic, it stands to reason that paying less taxes is unpatriotic. Therefore, our troops in war zones who are exempt from income taxes are unpatriotic. That also means that poor people, who do not pay income tax, are unpatriotic. Obama’s efforts to exclude people from the tax roles are also unpatriotic. Joe’s deductions on his tax returns for charitable giving are unpatriotic. Any mortgage deductions are unpatriotic. Child tax credits? Unpatriotic. I could go on all day. I would really really like Joe to continue on this line.
I’ve noticed there is a particularly odious practice of “fact checking” about the tax plans of the prospective Obama/Biden administration — Obama/Biden is an anagram of “An Idea Bomb” — and the McCain campaign’s comments on those tax plans. Factcheck.org, to their discredit, has a wonderful example of this on their web site right now:
The ad continues McCain’s pattern of misrepresenting Sen. Barack Obama’s tax proposals as falling on middle-income families. It claims that Obama “promises more taxes on small businesses, seniors, your life savings, your family.” But that’s untrue for the vast majority of small businesses, seniors and individual taxpayers, who would see their taxes go down under Obama’s actual plan. He proposes to increase taxes only for those with more than $250,000 in family income, or $200,000 in individual income. [emphasis mine]
Under the economic plan proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, people earning more than $250,000 a year would pay more in taxes while those earning less — the vast majority of American taxpayers — would receive a tax cut.
Although Republican John McCain claims that Obama would raise taxes, the independent Tax Policy Center and other groups conclude that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under Obama’s proposals.
Classic example of gulping the liberal koolaid without knowing you’re gulping it: “Oh don’t worry, that’s a tax on super rich people, not you!”
The pattern is that if it can be categorized as a tax cut for 95% of us, then everyone should be thinking of it as a tax cut for all of us, even if the remaining five percent see their tax liabilities go shootin’ so freakin’ high that it ends up being a net increase. It all depends on your point of view: In my world, if we all end up paying more, then we all end up paying more.
But I notice if you look at this through the left-wing lens, whether you know you’re doing it or not…like factcheck.org and the AP up there…then 95% of us pay less taxes.
And then if you look at that through the Biden lens — we’re just hemorrhaging our patriotism. Oh dear!
What’s the An Idea Bomb administration gonna do about that?
Thank you Duffy. It’s about time this stuff was pointed out.
This is what happens when public servants mold and shape policies to prove what wonderful people they are. Moderation is the first casualty. Gosh, it just seems to make sense, doesn’t it — if a little of something proves you’re a great guy or gal, a whole lot of it would prove you’re just a walking bundle of amazement, wouldn’t it? “These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance” — Sorry, Jamie. In the real world, people will come to whatever conclusion they want to form. There’s no such thing as a policy that will stop that. Not in a society that allows freedom of speech and freedom of thought. In fact, it’s best just to presume that all politicians are scumbags, and when the time comes to form policies, form them based on that premise. That way nobody has to prove anything.
But you thought you had something to prove. And that you could somehow prove it. God only knows what unknown misdeeds, what skeletons in your closet, for which you were trying to atone, to gulp endlessly at some elixir trying to slake the thirst of a guilty conscience.
Whatever. You reformed policy to try to prove what a great wonderful public servant you are…going beyond what the law requires. And then people get killed. End of story.
Fascinating discussion going on at Dr. Helen‘s place, the inspiration for which is a Forbes column arguing the innerwebs have not offered us a tool that can unite us, but rather, a tool that crystalizes our differences.
The Web doesn’t bridge divisions; it multiplies and sharpens them. It doesn’t build consensus or national coalitions; it grows factions. Truth be told, the Web doesn’t network people at all–it lets them network themselves, which is quite different…During the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Nobody would ever say that about anything posted on a cronkite.com or a CronkiteTube.
:
The challenge now is to get disconnected people to accept how little they can trust themselves and their closest friends. People who live overwired lives — which means the young, especially — may easily suppose that they have a very good picture of what all the rest of America is thinking. Quite a few of them are going to find out otherwise in a few weeks…
The thread underneath debates the merits and liabilities of spending time prowling blogs that disagree with one’s mindset. Sissy Willispoints out the first thing that popped in my head…
The toe-curl factor is too great when I attempt to read “blogs and other sites” that “do not necessarily agree with [my] viewpoint.” I think they have bad ideas; they think I’m a bad person.
Add to that the observation that, if they’re there just to invent just so much b.s. about Sarah Palin faking her pregnancy or thinking dinosaurs roamed the earth 4,000 years ago, whatever-it-takes-to-win…the sensibility of Sissy’s pontificating becomes all the clearer. It is, almost literally, wallowing in muck (the word “muck” being a polite substitute for something else).
Why spend good time and energy seriously considering ideas that are so bad, that in order to be made presentable they have to be supported with lies?
dlbcontinues with a partially sympathetic line of thinking…
I’ve encountered this argument in various forms, but haven’t found it to be persuasive. Perhaps this is because I use the web to find the most credible sources that I can relevant to issues that concern me.
These individuals and institutions are often ignored by the MSM as they tend not to frame their arguments in the terms of a morality drama.
So rather than polarizing my views, I think that the internet has enabled me to recognize that those whom I disagree with are usually acting in good faith – that we share an ‘honest disagreement’.
In response to this, I would offer the notion that this thing we call the Internet has shifted the responsibility from broadcaster to receiver.
Walter Cronkite looks at the facts of what’s taking place on the ground, and comes to a conclusion. He disseminates the conclusion, under the guise of disseminating fact. President Johnson, apocryphally but accurately, surmises if he’s lost Cronkite he’s lost America.
Fast forward forty years — this web site says Barack Obama is a Muslim. This other web site says people who think Obama is a Muslim, are idiots. That other website over there says he attended a Muslim school. Another website points out he doesn’t anymore. Some web sites make things up, others don’t, others, stick to facts as best they can but get fooled by other websites that recycle garbage. Matt Damon thinks Sarah Palin wants to make America into a theocracy, and will, as soon as the old man bites it. Charles Gibson interviews Palin and tries to make her look like an airhead. Mark Levin gets ahold of the transcript that was edited to accomplish this, and posts the entire thing.
What is happening is caveat emptor. And it is a good thing. When you view the world through a Cronkite monocular, missing any perspective whatsoever, you may understand the principles of science and skepticism just fine and dandy — but you can’t very well use them, can you? You just get this tidy, sanitized, polished image of what’s going on, carefully cleansed of any contradictions large or small. So you can’t find the answers about what’s missing, if you don’t know what questions to ask. Therefore — yes, of course Johnson loses America if he loses Cronkite. This thinking stuff through, it isn’t even a responsibility Cronkite’s viewers surrendered…it was taken from them forcefully.
Left with the choice of simply believing versus not-believing, they had no opportunity to inject their own critical thinking into the process whatsoever. They might as well have been told their favorite color for a particular day was purple.
If being unmoored from that kind of Oceania drives us into separate factions, that’s a situation I’ll gladly accept.
In fact, it really makes me wonder what else we weren’t told before the Internet came along to divide us this way. A bunch of stuff…at the very least. And probably a good deal more than that.
Jonathan Brink was pretty impressed, last week, with something Sen. Obama had to say about sacrifice.
If we pretend like everything is free and there’s no sacrifice involved, then we are betraying the tradition of America. I think about my grandparents generation, coming out of a depression, fighting world war 2. They’ve confronted some challenges we can’t even imagine. If they were willing to make sacrifices on our behalf, we should be able to make some sacrifices on behalf of the next generation.
And I agree with every single word of what Obama said. That’s what makes Obama’s remarks truly despicable.
You see, in my eyes this is just another example of liberals using words loaded with deep meaning, in such a way that they look like they’re saying something that’s the opposite of what they’re really saying. Notice how I put my response together: I agree with every single word. With the text as written, I have no quarrel; I’d even agree with it. Enthusiastically.
Trouble is, you have to inspect Obama’s behavior to figure out what he really means by this. And with our most popular leftist policies, lately, I can’t help but notice: Just when we’re about to get a payoff for our sacrifices, a payoff that will help the people we intend to be helped when we’re making our sacrifices — that’s exactly the point at which our left-wing politicians lose interest.
I was a little bit more wordy on this point when I replied to Mr. Brink:
The question that comes up with that word “sacrifice” is a divisive one, and is seldom explored: Is sacrifice the point?
It seems people like Barack Obama never directly address this, and from that, it seems like they cannot afford to. T[o]o many rhetorical questions have the potential to expose the platitude as the empty promise it is.
You mention abortion. Would that not be a virtuous sacrifice, if the Supreme Court were to overturn it? Sacrifice the convenience to people who want to exercise this “choice”…for the sake of the future generation being allowed to live, and have opportunities. That might be the best example possible. But Obama says it’s above his pay grade. How about affirmative action with quotas in hiring and college admissions? Sacrifice grudges and personal crusades for tit-for-tat nonsense…to finally realize this equality everyone says they’ve been wanting for decades, and really make racism a thing of the past, at least, institutionalized racism.
How about sacrificing the global warming campaign? Sacrifice millions of dollars to be made by Al Gore and other holders of stock in fraudulent carbon-exchange mercantiles…so that the future generations can realize their opportunities in full, and the message can be sent to other countries that they need to stop being jealous of America’s prosperity. Or…sacrifice that guy who raped and killed little kids, to make sure he can’t ever do it again. We used to call it executions, we could just call them sacrifices.
I could go on like this all day.
The point is — it seems with people like Barry O, whenever there’s a real payoff to the sacrifice that would be meaningful, and precious to the people who would be in a position to benefit from it, inevitably, that is the point where they stop believing in it. And that leads me to my conclusion: The sacrifice is the point. They don’t want an exchange of lesser-for-greater. They just want pain.
Last month, I droned on about this for quite some time, exploring how this fit into the treatise about the virtues of sacrifice, as discussed by John Galt in that dreadful speech of his.
I think liberals like Carl are confused on the concept of sacrifice. There are two definitions to it: There is the outcome-based sacrifice, in which the “sacrifice” itself is just a negligible and unpleasant side effect in the process of upholding what truly matters. The narrower definition, in which the pain is the point, is what John Galt was talking about in that monstrously long speech of his:
Sacrifice is the surrender of value — of a higher value to a lower one, or of the good to the evil.
The code is impossible to practice because it would lead to death, and thus moral perfection is impossible to man.
The Doctrine of Sacrifice cannot provide man with an interest in being good.
Since man is in fact an indivisible unity of matter and consciousness, the sacrifice of “merely” material values necessarily means the sacrifice of spiritual ones.
The self is the mind, and the most selfish act is the exercise of one’s independent judgment. In attacking selfishness, the Doctrine of Sacrifice seeks to make you surrender your mind.
The Doctrine of Sacrifice commands that you act for the good of others but provides no standard of the good. And it requires only that you intend to benefit others, not that you succeed.
The Doctrine of Sacrifice makes you the servant and others your masters –and adds insult to injury by saying you should find happiness through sacrifice.
Somewhere in there Galt made a mention of the mother who went without eating so that her infant could eat; that would not be a sacrifice, according to Galt who was using the pain-based definition of “sacrifice.” That mother would be upholding an ideal important to her system of values, simply paying a price necessary to acquire it. Sacrifice, Galt said, would have been giving up her child for the sake of something not important to her…That is what is meant by surrender “of a higher value to a lower one.” It entails a net loss, because the pain is the point of the exercise.
:
This is why [liberal] ideas are unfit for implementation in the real world. Out here, if you have a job to do, and you get it done but it didn’t cause you pain, that’s a success. If it was such a painful experience that it injured you, it’s still a failure if you didn’t meet the stated objectives. Reality says it’s all about getting the job done, not what you give up to do it. Our liberals don’t agree. They think, if you’re suitably diminished that you can’t do anything else, and your intentions were noble, then that’s all that matters. Whether the job got done, is just a side bunny-trail to them.
And a couple of weeks later I had applied this to — as an example — the “climate change” issue.
It’s supposed to be all about cause and effect, but nobody ever puts it that way. As in, “if we make these sacrifices the temperature will go up 0.6 degrees over the next fifty years instead of 8.5 degrees and here is why 0.6 degrees will be manageable…”
In fact, nobody comes out and says we’re going to LIVE if we make these sacrifices. They say “we can do this” all the time. It’s the “this”; nobody says what exactly that is.
[Tom] Brokaw speaks for perhaps hundreds of well-known luminaries in his prattle. He doesn’t think “anyone doubts that we have to make some profound changes in this country,” and yet he has to throw out his meaningless bromides about self-sacrifice four times. Why repeat it four times if everyone already understands this is the case?
Getting back to Obama’s verbiage: It is powerful. His voting record has very little potential to win converts to his side, especially from the conservative bloc — this is where he makes up for it. Our country is filled with folks who nurture and labor to reinforce traditional values, and we are sick to death of the overly-materialistic, narcissistic, borderline-hedonistic culture that threatens to consume all of us. Obama mixes his honeyed words with bile, and it sounds like when he talks about “sacrifice” he’s talking about caring for each other instead of for ourselves.
He never actually comes out and says that, though; it isn’t what he means. When he talks about “sacrifice” he’s talking about that narrower, pain-based definition. The one that has to do with getting rid of ourselves, and the things upon which we place priority. About working ourselves into a state of non-existence. He doesn’t really want us to do what people of our grandparents’ generation did. That would be: identifying evil; saying to oneself “dammit there’s gotta be something I can do about this!”; marching down to the recruiter’s office; shipping out to Iraq, and killing as many evil people as possible, until our country won the war. That is what our grandfathers did. And Obama will have none of it.
No, he means what Tom Brokaw meant about climate change. FORGET the goal. Just coming together as part of a crowd, forgetting about your hopes and dreams as an individual. Report to your post and await your orders; leave it to your village elders to define what is important to you.
It is these two definitions of sacrifice that are critical to the method by which Obama seeks to confuse. There is sacrifice for an ideal, in which a commodity representing a lesser value is given up in exchange for a commodity representing a greater value. I throw out a disc in my back to pry a car off my girlfriend or my son, so they can live. I take a bullet for someone.
And then there is sacrifice of the ideals. The sacrifice not only of body, but of mind as well. The sacrifice that brings a human being, as a guardian of objectives and principles, to an inglorious end. That, it has been shown, is what Obama really has in mind when he talks about sacrificing “on behalf of the next generation.”
This is proven, easily. Let’s put a proposal on the table that all spending in the federal government be brought down, across the board, to 1985 levels. Just find a way to get along with that. Sacrifice! For the children. After all, we don’t want the next generation to inherit a government chock full of debt they’ll have to pay. If you take Obama’s comments at face value, he’d be all in favor of that wouldn’t he? Surely, he’d have to be?
But no; that inference is far too logical. He means the opposite. When he talks about sacrifice, he’s talking about increasing taxes.
Too many among us throw around that word “sacrifice” — not as the exchange of a lower value for a higher one, but rather, as the forceful expulsion of individuality. What the rest of us need to keep in mind, is that for them, this isn’t a sacrifice at all. Individuality carries with it some heady personal responsibilities, and a lot of us aren’t in any hurry to take them on. The conundrum they face is that in order to expurgate individuality from their own lives, they have to do the same for everyone else.
And with Obama now the presumptive nominee, that’s become one of the most central issues to the election this year…sadly enough. Obama’s hope is that most of the voters will never figure this out, and he has reason to maintain high hopes.
Movie critic Pauline Kael is often quoted as saying something along the lines of “I don’t understand how Nixon won [in 1972]; nobody I know voted for him.” That quote seems to be apocryphal. Perhaps this one is better sourced somewhere:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
Whether she said anything of this variety or not, the point is still there — it’s called the false consensus effect, and what it means is that you’ve been cloistering yourself without realizing it. Labor too long and too hard at chasing the next Hot New TrendTM, intermingle with a bit too much energy and dedication with your own Circle Of TrustTM, and gradually alienate yourself from whoever might be outside that crowd; pretty soon, you’ll become an expert on what everybody thinks, and you’ll be chronically wrong.
This, it would appear, is now an affliction suffered by Chris Collinswood of NBC (video at Ms. Underestimated, H/T to Karol), and manifested when he questioned Kobe Bryant about how it feels to be part of Team USA.
Collinsworth: Where does the patriotism come from inside of you? Historically, what is it?
Kobe: Well, you know it’s just our country, it’s…we believe is the greatest country in the world. It has given us so many great opportunities, and it’s just a sense of pride that you have; that you say “You know what? Our country is the best!”
Collinsworth: Is that a “cool” thing to say, in this day and age? That you love your country, and that you’re fighting for the red, white and blue? It seems sort of like a day gone by.
Kobe: No, it’s a cool thing for me to say. I feel great about it, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I mean, this is a tremendous honor.
I’m still mulling over a challenge posed by sf4 to come up with my own “comprehensive platform” defining conservatism as I see it. This one is definitely going in. I might call it the Collinswood Plank of conservatism: Yes, the United States is a great country, not in some liberal politician’s Utopian vision, but as you see it right now, in the moment in which you’re reading this sentence; and yes, it is very cool to think so.
That, and it’s up to the individual to decide what’s “cool.” We do not decide what is cool as part of a crowd. We use the brains the good Lord gave us, to figure out what’s right, and then we stand up for it.
I suspect the liberals would agree that this is emblematic of conservatism — as they usually do, by mumbling smart-ass comments, as opposed to coming up with meaningless examples purporting to express the opposite. And, I suppose further that the liberals would agree they are dedicated to the opposite — as they usually do, by changing the subject rather than debating the point. If I’m correct on all counts, I would advise the McCain campaign not to wait for my platform to emerge. They should campaign on this right freakin’ now. Let’s have an election about whether the United States is a great country or not. Make it about whether, when you happen to be in another country, you should be holding your head high as an American, or moping around, staring at your own shoes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MY PLAN….WELL………..of course you know its a combination of all three…….
Take all the plastic garbage and recycle it into a large plastic blanket…….in sections………..put it over the ice, melting ice, former ice at the Artic Pole…….this would create a large pool cover, blocking the sun from melting by insulating it .
This would generate jobs to gather it, create/manufacture it, and maintain it.
Ok….I know it sound silly and simple but……it “could” work……don’t you think…..?
Later Gator
Well, my initial thought had to do with something I’d been noticing for a long time: People in positions of authority, at some time or another, tell just about everyone you care to name to (to be polite about it) FECK OFF. John McCain’s said it to conservatives plenty of times, and Barack Obama just did it to our buddy Glenn Greenwald, to Greenwald’s great annoyance. But never environmentalists. Nope, environmentalists, who exist for the purpose of stopping things and making nothing go (except environmental movements), pretty much get every little thing they want, all the time. Big things, little things, in between things. Nobody in a position of authority ever tells a tree hugger to FECK OFF. With gas up toward five bones a gallon, there is more pressure now to show ’em the heave-ho than there ever has been…it might happen…but it hasn’t just yet.
And so it occurred to me that ignoring environmentalists would, directly or indirectly, address all three of these. Like Samuel L. Jackson said in The Incredibles, why don’t we do what we told our wives we were gonna do, just to shake things up a bit? — Why don’t we tell environmentalists to stick it where the sun don’t shine, just for a change of pace?
Another Item!
Gerard saw the clip we linked of that extraordinarily impressive montage of “I’m Not Here To Make Friends”…and he had an idea very much like Counselor Troi’s…
Could somebody please raise the money and gather the will to put all of these pathetic assholes in one single location and call in an overwhelming napalm strike on it? Please?
We’ll keep that one in mind.
Yet another Item!
Jessica over at Feministing, long an advocate of the hyper-populist “Can I Get An Amen Here” brand of feminism, which is nothing but a long procession of bitter hostile trial balloons sent up by feminist individuals for the endorsement of feminist groups along the lines of “I think this should be screeched at, can I get some help???”
For those of you who haven’t already been following it, here’s what went down.
Moe and Tracie appeared on Lizz’s show drunk. Very drunk, it seems. You can watch the whole video here, and the more controversial clips here and here. I was pretty much appalled by the whole interview. But it was the commentary about rape, abortion and birth control that have garnered the most criticism…The gist of it is Moe and Tracie said some extremely offensive and uninformed things – especially about rape – that they’re now being taken to task for. (They were later said to be jokes, but no one in the audience laughed.)
:
Here’s the short version for those who don’t feel like reading this monster of a post: 1) Whether or not you say you represent feminism, when you write about the subject to a ridiculously large audience, openly identify as a feminist, and make appearances to talk about feminism – you are taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed. 2) It’s awesome to use irony and humor as a tool – but if you’re not using it in a way that hurts women, is it really worth it?
This ties in, because I think Counselor Troi’s concerns about the floating plastic are an apt metaphor for the feminist movement. In the same way you can’t viably entertain any sort of plan that involves sticking a sort of giant pool-cleaner tool into the Pacific Ocean and bundle up all those tiny bits of plastic, you can’t nail down what the feminist movement is all about either. You find a feminist who gets caught unabashedly, unapologetically and unashamedly hating men…you raise the concerns this gives you about the feminist movement to another feminist…and you get back this doe-eyed innocent look, Oh no, I’m not all about that, I just want equal pay for equal worth!
And it is this kind of nail-jello-to-tree-ism that has given the feminist movement enormous benefit throughout the decades. They have been able to advocate the most hardcore, borderline-insane nonsense — like, for example, we need to believe Anita Hill over Clarence Thomas because “women don’t lie about this stuff” (That’s one of the worst examples, but there are others). Patently absurd positions like that one, are owned when it is convenient, and then jettisoned when convenient. The feminist movement ends up being a rather hodge-podge, disjointed, undefined pastiche of floating debris, just like the Great Plastic Soup out in the ocean. It can’t be criticized because it can’t be defined.
And now poor young Jessica has realized it is this lack of a endo- or exo-skeleton that has landed the feminist movement in trouble, so she seeks to lay down some rules about “taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed.” Sorry, sweetie. You’re trying to close the barn door long after the horse has left. Feminism, in 2008, is about intellectual lawlessness. It is about extending the indestructible umbrella of political cover of “Equal Pay For Equal Worth” over the rigid, hardcore extremist types who don’t deserve such cover…the “All Men Are Potential Rapists” brand of feminists. They are, by design, all part of the Great Plastic Amoeba of feminism that has no shape, has no structure, has no rules, and therefore cannot be faulted. What dear Jessica is trying to do, is roughly akin to making a pet out of the world’s largest jellyfish, and trying to saddle it up.
So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.
1. Scoop up the Great Plastic Soup for those bits, as best you’re able;
2. Make a giant plastic bulls-eye out of it;
3. Take it to the Arctic where all the ice is supposed to be melting down;
4. Put our drunk feminists on the bulls-eye along with the environmentalists who won’t let us build any power plants or drill for oil;
5. Add to those, all the reality show contestants who “aren’t here to make friends”;
6. Like Gerard said. Napalm the sucker. That takes care of the plastic, the drunk feminists, the enviro-Nazis, and the vapid silly contestants.
7. And the ice.
8. Jessica will be much less stressed-out, too.
9. Plus, the contestants won’t make any friends, which they didn’t want to do anyway.
10. Check back in a year, I’ll betcha there’s plenty of ice, and plenty of polar bears to go with.
11. I got a feeling our population of brain-dead cliche-spouting reality show contestants will also have replenished (although I’m not sure about that).
12. And jobs galore. Especially if we make an annual habit out of it.
Today’s Best Sentence I’ve Heard or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes to sonofsheldon, commenting on why we have so many kids in special ed lately…
Teachers aren’t trained to teach in the ways that some students learn.
It’s a Yin and Yang thing. When they’re at the elementary grade school levels, The Yang cram their heads so full of ways of achieving the desired level of collaboration with others — teachers, parents, peers, et al — that they don’t leave much room for retention of subject matter. Ask ’em a week after the test to recite the times-table, usually they give you a blank stare. The Yin, on the other hand, cram their heads so full of whatever titillates the left-brain…which could be the subject matter being studied, but is usually some super-special personal project…that they don’t leave enough room for the social programming that is necessary for getting along with others.
A balance would be a good solution. The one we’ve picked, though, is the easiest one, and the furthest thing from a balance: We put the Yang in charge of everything, re-defined their ways of interacting with the reality as “normal,” and relegated the Yin to the dustbin of special ed. Everything we can possibly do the Yang way, we do that way. It’s so easy to do, and comes so naturally. You can’t shut ’em up, so you might as well do what they want.
A kid who’s “ready” to skip a grade, rich in academic achievements but lacking in social skills, will be held back. But another kid who is altogether lacking in spelling-n-math ability, and at the same time a jibber-jabbering powerhouse of nonstop social interaction, has a much better chance.
I’m sorry. If you can’t see there’s something busted about that, yer just plain nuts.
Three weeks ago an expose appeared in Pajamas Media about the bounty on special education students. The point of the article: There are “lump sum” districts in which the funding for special ed programs is kept independent from the number of students enrolled, and there are “bounty” districts in which there’s money to be made per pelt, just like hunting beavers or mice. Bottom lining it: Since the special education law went into effect in 1976, the increases in number of children enrolled in these programs, have been registering at different rates. The bounty districts have the faster-growing enrollments.
We live on a cozy dead-end street in suburban New Jersey with 13 school aged kids. Of those 13 kids, six qualify for special services and have IEPs, including my son.
:
These diagnoses cause real problems in education. Many of us can think back to our own childhoods and remember the kids who were ostracized, lonely, strange, smelly, weird, hyper, and angry. Today, those kids have a much better shot at life, and at an education because they are getting appropriate services. With help, they are more likely to finish high school and even attend college. They will be able to more fully function in society and provide for themselves, rather than spend a lifetime on welfare.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a single kid in my kid’s special needs classrooms that I thought should not be there. [emphasis mine]
Holy crap!
So what Laura McKenna is saying, is half the kids on this cozy dead-end street would have dead-end lives and end up on welfare if it weren’t for special education programs. Right?
Call Erin Brockovich. Look for power lines, chemicals in the water, barbiturates in the asphalt, whatever. Something’s wrong.
McKenna’s responses to our evidence fall into four categories:
Appeals to emotion and superior personal experience…
Misunderstanding of the issue…
Appeals to improved diagnosis…
Appeals to the awfulness of the system…
Tell me about it. I’ve been having this argument with people like McKenna, many times.
These people demonstrate intelligence, and yet they do not argue the issue rationally. I’ve noticed one pattern that occurs over and over again, that disturbs me more than anything else, is this: If you have the audacity to argue “Child X does not have Disability Y” (or may not) you will find yourself embroiled — in the blink of an eye — in a red-hot back-and-forth about whether “Disability Y exists” even though this is not what you called into question. I’ve seen it with ADD. I’ve seen it with dyslexia. I’ve seen it with hyperactivity. And then the anecdotes come out: This one kid, he had such a bad case…blah blah blah blah blah. And then you ask, what does that have to do with this borderline case that is the subject of our disagreement? And you get back this deer-in-the-headlights stare, and, uh, gee, well I dunno…I just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same stuff.
Horsepuckey. They’re just being drama queens.
And when they demonstrate the capacity to pursue a disagreement logically, but not the willingness to do so — that screams money, to me. That’s the way people behave when they’re motivated by money.
Not all of them though. Some of them are parents. Parents aren’t all the same, it turns out; some of them want their children to be strong, and others want their children to be weak.
I think that’s why they don’t argue these things logically. If you argue something like this logically, you identify the areas of disagreement — this child cannot make it without specialized help, and if he gets the specialized help it will help him more than it will hurt him — and you make the dialog about those points of disagreement. That is not what these people do.
They presume this is “The Help That He Needs”; they go through the motions of leaving this open to question, but they don’t. They settle on it, and then they monologue outward from there, that of course he needs the help, I just pulled that one outta my ass. They won’t allow any debate about it, even though any disagreement confronted is supposed to be about that and very little else.
“Kids” who get put on this stuff, are overwhelmingly boys. The “parents” who want them on it, are overwhelmingly the mothers. Why do we need special ed? A lot of the time, it’s because the “parent” feels like she should be able to relate to the “kid” emotionally in every single way, and she simply isn’t going to be able to. And if McKenna thinks those kids belong exactly where they are, in a special ed program, well then she’s quite plain and simply wrong.
An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.
The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.
The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.
The boy’s father has lodged a complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman.
He says the two children were left out because one did not invite his son to his own party and he had fallen out with the other one.
The boy handed out his birthday invitations during class-time and when the teacher spotted that two children had not received one the invitations were confiscated.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” On this Fourth, I’m thinking about something a little bit different. Suppose somewhere there is a nation in which each citizen has the precious and inalienable right to be smart, but is wholly deprived of the right to be stupid.
Where I’m going with this, is that I strongly suspect such a nation is something that never was and never will be. For a number of reasons. Starting with, someone would have to sit in judgment of what’s smart and what’s dumb. The truth of the matter is, “smart” people haven’t done a great deal for us because what’s usually thought of as something smart, is thought of that way because it’s orthodox. It’s same-ol’ same-ol’. The car you drive, the light bulb you turn on, the cell phone into which you do your chattering, they were all invented by someone whom someone else thought was doing something abysmally stupid.
And then we have those things that really are stupid, like the mutterings of Matthew Rothschild and Chris Satullo, along with the usual gang of nitwits…M. Moore, K. Olbermann, N. Chomsky…along with the ones who just tone down the anti-USA rhetoric a little bit, because after all they’re competing for a position in which they would run it. Clinton, Kerry, Obama, Dean.
What I think is really great about this country, is that these chuckleheads are running around, advertising by their blatherings what is wonderful about it without even knowing they’re doing it.
Abu Ghraib, you say? Abu Ghraib was a bunch of rotten stuff done to rotten people by ignorant stupid Americans…who were then caught by other Americans, and tried by other Americans and sentenced by other Americans while yet other Americans observed the whole process and reported to the whole world what was going on. Moral of Abu Ghraib: Americans do stupid things just like people all the world over. And then Americans tattle on other Americans. We are not perfect, nor have we ever claimed to be. But where we can be transparent and still defend ourselves, we make ourselves visible to general audiences. Our government is split — the executive, the legislative, the judicial, none of the three beholden to any of the others.
We fall for a lot of bullshit, like that the planet is in danger and if we all just unplug our waffle irons when they’re not in use, maybe we can save it. That’s the price of free speech.
Like I said, if you want to recognize the right people have to come up with smart things, you have to recognize the companion right people to fall for stupid nonsense.
We have a lot of weapons, but it isn’t the stockpile of weapons that makes us great. It is the difference between what we have, and what we use.
When we were attacked, we flew over Afghanistan, the country from which the attack came, and out of the bellies of our airplanes dropped — food and money.
Update: I see Gerard is also pointing to the “worst critics prefer to stay” slogan that is mutually enjoyed by us both, along with others.
Speaking of Gerard, he’s taking apart another America-hating halfwit and his performance in this regard exceeds all expectations, even if you’re accustomed to his wonderful work. He’s pretending it’s some kind of dreary chore but I’m not buying it for a second, as the old boy seems to be enjoying himself immensely…
As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter — in the commenter’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad — a mindset in which “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” This is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange, almost masochistic, pleasure.
Faced with such a deeply-rooted but deeply wrong mindset, we find ourselves eavesdropping on Macbeth as he discusses his wife’s madness with a doctor:
Macbeth Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
That is a random sample, not creme de la creme. It’s all that good. Head on over.
Also, Locomotive Breath has graciously pointed to our home page as a place you should go if it’s taking awhile for the sun to set and you’re sittin’ there in your lawn chair all bored, wireless laptop in one hand, sparklers in the other, beer in the other. He also has others. I stole his pinup because he probably stole it from somewhere else (most likely here), and there’s many others along with lots of good stuff. So hit both places if you have the time.
Last night I had a dream about a kingdom in a faraway land, closed off from the outside world by very high walls. The kingdom was ruled by a strong and wise King, who did everything he could to make sure everything inside the walls worked as normally as possible. Toward that end, he made sure to sit in judgment of a swift trial whenever anyone was caught doing something strange.
The sentencing looked a lot like that scene with the old guy in Judge Dredd. The convicted strange-person would be banished forevermore from the kingdom, and sent to walk outside the great doors and live outside the high walls, forever. This would be a huge ceremony with great celebration and fanfare. The villagers would gather by the great doors and jeer at the unfortunates forced to walk through them, throwing rotten vegetables at them. The people of the kingdom rejoiced in the power and wisdom of their king, and once the great doors slammed shut behind the condemned man, they imagined the worst.
A left-handed blacksmith was caught pounding on a new horseshoe with his left hand instead of with his right hand. He was banished from the kingdom.
A farmer’s wife was caught harvesting eggs from the chicken coop, grabbing them by the pointy end instead of by the big end. She was banished from the kingdom.
A boy was caught cleaning the horse stables with gloves on his hands. He was banished from the kingdom.
Nobody was too concerned about learning what happened to these people, but at suppertime they would let their imaginations run wild. Giant eagles would carry the condemned to their nests to feed their young, said an old woman. Jackals would drag them to the ground by their necks, and tear into their bellies, said an old man. Giant ants would cover them head to toe while they slept, and eat them alive, said a particularly obese little boy. The villagers saw them take the “Long Walk” through the great doors, the doors slammed shut, and the condemned might as well have disappeared. Then the villagers went back to their normal lives doing their normal things…as normally as was possible.
Then a funny thing happened.
They ran out of horseshoes. People had horses, but they couldn’t ride them anywhere.
They ran out of eggs. Families went hungry.
Nobody was cleaning out the stables, at least, not as quickly as they needed a cleaning. There was horse maneure everywhere.
Disease became rampant. A famine struck the kingdom.
The problems became worse and worse — and as they did, the wise, benevolent king became more strict about making sure his subjects were doing everything the normal way. A one-legged man was banished for limping wrong. A farmer harvesting corn was banished for wearing his harvesting bag over his right shoulder instead of over his left one. Another farmer was caught milking his cow by pulling on the teats in the wrong order, and he was banished.
Food became more and more scarce.
In desperation, someone finally decided to go hunting; and so, for the first time in a century or more, the villagers stepped outside the high walls of the great kingdom.
What did they find?
They found — another kingdom. Their whole world had existed inside of another one, a greater one…in which people weren’t afraid to do things in creative new ways. A larger kingdom full of stable boys shoeveling horse waste with gloves on their hands so they would stay healthy; farmers’ wives picking up eggs by whatever end was handy; and blacksmiths building horseshoes by swinging the hammer with whatever hand could do it the fastest and best. The handicapped made their way in whatever manner they chose, and nobody scolded them for it. The corn was piled high at harvest time because people picked it in whatever way they wanted to. The milk flowed freely because it was milked in whatever way made the most sense to the guy doing the milking.
The villagers realized that the “condemned,” upon walking out of those great doors, simply took up residence in the larger kingdom. The villagers had imagined that they had ostracized the condemned, but all this time, that had really only been ostracizing themselves. They sought to bind others and free themselves, and succeeded only in binding themselves and freeing others.
And in the great kingdom there was no disease, and there was no famine. People lived life fearlessly…pausing only to gaze at the high walls isolating the tinier kingdom in their midst, and shake their heads sadly. As for the villagers from the smaller kingdom, they had locked themselves up in a prison and hadn’t even known it. Bound by rules that made no sense. Deprived of freedom enjoyed by others. Blinded by their own ignorance. But — of course — painfully “normal.”
Upon waking, I realized my dream was simply Logan’s Run in reverse. The City of Domes citizens had rejoiced in the “renewal” of the thirty-year-olds on “Lastday,” presuming this was the natural outcome of “Carousel.” The spoiler was that there was no renewal and everyone who was dead was dead-for-good. In my dream, the villagers had presumed that anyone who was shut out of the gates had ceased to exist; the spoiler was that those who were ostracized, not only continued to exist, but enjoyed a greater standard of living than those who went on inside the high walls of the smaller kingdom.
They had become obsessed with normalizing things, and in so doing had going through a sort of play-acting like they were causing someone’s existence to come to an end. Out of sight, out of mind…but in the end they realized it was their own existence, if any at all, that they had brought to an end. They had sought to make their kingdom — their micro-kingdom — the epitome of cleanliness, and instead had made it into an object of filth.
My dream seems to have a lot of smooth parallels with real life, and the errors we tend to make as we live it. I think Rod Serling would have liked my dream.
Why is it that people who can’t take advice always insist on giving it?
Crummy Factor #5: Innovation Comes to a Standstill Day-to-Day Impact: Good ideas are ignored, and employees get resentful.
With accounting bureaucrats empowered, most managers can forget about pushing out new R&D projects, marketing campaigns, and innovation efforts. Although going aggressive can put a company in a better position to survive a slowdown, few firms can resist becoming risk-averse. Thus, mid-level leaders find themselves pulling back and focusing entirely on how to meet short-term financial goals. Not only can this strategy set a company back competitively, it also can demoralize top performers.
A mid-level employee at Restoration Hardware says slowed consumer spending has the company in lockdown mode. The staff used to be intense and driven, but motivation has deteriorated as top-level management becomes fixated on saving every penny instead of investing in better tools to manage inventory. “There are people like myself who are capable and willing to create the tools,” she says, “but it’s a combination of not having the financial resources or the desire for change.”
You know what I’ve noticed from my twenty years in the industry, is that when things start to look like this the word “change” becomes as popular as it ever has been, even moreso. It is the concept that loses it’s luster. The syllable itself does just fine.
I remember long, seemingly endless processions of big muckety-mucks who’d just been hired to fill the position left vacant by the last muckety-muck, and each guy would call an entire division in to a cafeteria somewhere. Just like those assemblies from high school. And he’d answer every question conceivable except for “so is this going to cost me my job?” and talk, and talk, and talk about change.
Saying exactly the same stuff the last guy said.
Then he’d high-tail it out of there inside of a year, and we’d be listening to exactly the same speech again from some other guy.
I think that’s where America is right now. I see it in Sen. Obama, big-time. The guy talks about change, but he’s delivering exactly the same speeches we heard before. He’ll end up being another Jimmy Carter before he’s done; everything he touches will turn to crap, in the years after he’s thankfully out of office there won’t be any reasonable way to doubt it anymore, and his biggest fans will insist that even though President Obama did a lot wrong and nothing right, we are all to think of him as a really nice, decent, all-around good guy.
And sixteen years from now, we’re sure to fall for the same crap from someone else. It’s what we deserve; we think we’re hungry for change, we say so, but we don’t act like it.
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.
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.
So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.
Speaking of Gerard, he’s taking apart