Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
…just as soon as someone else figures out who that first someone is. Don Stott at Musketballs has an interesting entry…
New York Residents With Disabilities Outraged by ‘Retard’ Comment
Are we not at the point of absurdity about this sensitivity thing?
NOWHERE TO HIDE: The Monroe County Legislature in Upstate New York is a place where the politics are partisan and the 29 county legislators scrap fiercely. But some say that last month, during a roll call vote, someone in the room went too far — using the painful and socially unacceptable word “retard.”
Video from the meeting suggests the utterance was aimed at Democrat Steve Eckel, but it isn’t clear who said it. [source]
Said source continues with some stuff that makes things just a little bit sillier; I can see why Stott evidently felt this was not entirely necessary.
Area residents with disabilities are outraged — stunned that anyone would use such a term in that way. This week, led by Bruce Darling of the Rochester Center for Disability Rights, they converged upon the county legislature.
“If you think someone is being an ass, just call them an ass,” Darling said. “Don’t bring us into the discussion.”
For 90 minutes, members of Darling’s group stood before the political body to explain how they had been hurt by the comment.
“All I want is respect,” Deborah Duminuco said.
They came looking for an apology from the person who made the comment.
“Whoever said it, I would like it to be stopped,” Jason Belicove said. “Please stop.”
So far, they have yet to find out who made the comment, let alone receive an apology.
No one’s going to fess up? No? Okay, wise guys, we’ll all just stand here until someone comes forward, even if it takes ALL day. Let’s just see how you all like that. We’ll just stand here. That oughtta show ya. Tell you what, I’m going to turn around for a whole minute, and if someone wants to put an anonymous written apology on this desk in front of me, there’ll be no questions asked. Not as long as we get our apology. I’m turning around now…dum de dum de dum…
Okay, now if you’ve been reading the pages of this blog for awhile, you know I’m fond of the parable of the dispassionate but reasonable space alien. We don’t think about this very often now, but awhile ago there was a whole genre of teevee shows devoted to this situational trope, and the space alien wasn’t always a space alien. The idea is that some naturally curious non-human being is placed in a situation where he has to live in our society and figure it out, and hijinks and hilarity ensue. The “alien” understands logic, but is foreign to the cultural idiosyncrasies we’ve been accumulating incrementally. The point is that our cultural idiosyncrasies make sense only to those who have been present to watch them accumulate incrementally…
The TV Tropes page, one of my favorite spots on the whole innerwebs, calls this The Alien Among Us.
So here’s a question the alien, who knows common sense but doesn’t know a damn thing about conservatives or liberals or oppressed minorities, would have to ask his homeowner one evening as he emerges from the laundry room or kitchen cupboard in which he lives:
If people show this righteous indignation to get favors out of people who otherwise would not be remitting the favor — how can they know what they’re trying to get, if they don’t even know who would be giving them the apology? Doesn’t that make it kind of a “grab bag” arrangement, so to speak? The laws of probability confer a high likelihood on the outcome that, presuming the offender is ever identified, it turns out he doesn’t have anything to say about anything. How is that worth ninety minutes?
Also, if you think such an exercise is worth the ninety minutes but you don’t have an answer for the above…this can’t be a productive exercise for anyone who’s concerned about having his intelligence insulted, can it? Kinda like dousing a house fire with a bucket of gasoline.
You know, I’m not familiar with this particular legislative hall. I got me a gut feel that if its walls could talk, they’d have a lot of stories to tell about people, disabled & otherwise, fully fit for having their various aptitudinal gifts fairly slighted in inglorious ways. And the ninety-minute demonstration didn’t do much to help scrub that unflattering history.
Perhaps the Alien Among Us would have so many questions from this one event, he’d give up on finding out about it. Write off this planet; no intelligent life here.
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“You know, I’m not familiar with this particular legislative hall.”
Oh but by the grace of your god Morgan I am here to help you out.
This is my town, born and raised and since ‘nobody reads this blog’ I don’t mind sharing that (also Buck already knows since he had a cup of coffee here, so to speak). I could tell you some stories that would have your heading spinning – the 20 million we just washed down the drain for the failed downtown performing arts center (slash) bus terminal (slash) community college satellite wing (I kid you freakin’ not) OR the 35 million (I believe) wasted a couple years ago on a failed ‘Fast Ferry’ between here and Toronto. I could go on but you get the picture. We’re talking real men, (and women) of genius.
To really put it into some perspective, try adding insult to injury by having some of the highest property tax rates, crime/murder rates and high school drop out/teen pregnancy/STD rates in the country (just to name a few of our “achievements”). Please note I did not say “State” but COUNTRY!
Now back to the subject at hand, this little episode was such a waste of time and energy as you already discussed. The first thing that came to my mind was that the people from “Rochester Center for Disability Rights” most likely had to inform the “intellectually challenged” (that’s what the local news referred to them as) folks of the alleged use of the “R” word. Isn’t that just a form of abuse in reality? I mean what their saying is “Hey, since you haven’t heard, somebody, we don’t know who said something that you should take offense to and you should be mad about it. Now tomorrow we’re gonn’a use you as props so we can get on TV to show people that the use of that word offends you even though you didn’t know about it in the first place”. (You needed to have seen the local news video to fully grasp the complete sad and pathetic picture.)
Ironically, the day after this incident a Downs Syndrome kid happened to be in my office and he wasn’t upset about it though it’s possible he was since we didn’t broach the subject. But since his mother didn’t say anything about it I’m just gonn’a assume. Makes a much sense as the nonsense discussed above.
The other thing that came to my mind was that I didn’t recall the people from “Rochester Center for Disability Rights” and their folks protesting when a certain someone went on national TV and joking referred to his bowling game as “watching the Special Olympics”. But then that was so different, more people saw that, more people with special needs heard that and were insulted…but oh well, never mind that was President Barrack Obama, carry on.
BTW, a stroll thru the interwebs lately and my hometown is getting some serious pub lately. From a local representative sticking his foot in his mouth (http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/08/honest-blue-dog-rep-massa-says-he-will.html), welfare recipients misusing back to school stimulus cash (http://tryingtogrok.new.mu.nu/since_when_is_an_x-box_a_school_supply), to this fiasco. As Hank Stram use to say “What in the hell is goin’ on around here?”
- tim | 08/19/2009 @ 09:30Your comment is approved, and I see why I needed to approve it, you used the word “hell.”
I’d like to state for the record (other folks have been wondering) this naughty-word-filter is NOT operating according to my blessings; between laundry and dishwashing, sometime tonight I’m going to make a priority out of this.
Sorry for the OT response, small-tee, but at this point it’s not really OT is it. We’re gonna bring this beast under control.
- mkfreeberg | 08/19/2009 @ 10:33…between laundry and dishwashing…
Say WHAT? This is a rather jangling disconnect from someone whom I thought had a good grasp of gender roles in our society. That said… Could you mebbe make me a sammidge and bring me a beer, while you’re up? 😉
Back to the subject at hand… Small-tee-tim kinda beat me to it, when it comes to Ra-cha-cha. I kinda-sorta tended to ignore the local politics during my five year cup o’ coffee there, doing the usual customary and reasonable straight-R-ticket voting exercise when it came to judges and local pols. That said, Ra-cha-cha DOES have some wonderful folks, GREAT bars, and some visually stunning scenery… in the summer but not so much in winter… as snow and ice all tend to look the same except when it’s in 12-foot or higher drifts. The pols are retards, though.
- bpenni | 08/19/2009 @ 12:29This is a rather jangling disconnect from someone whom I thought had a good grasp of gender roles in our society…
Oh, believe me I do, and my entire household agrees. But just because it’s a lady’s role to do a job better doesn’t mean she should be the only one doing it. And although the Queen of this Castle does it much, much better…as in, gets about the same amount of work done in two minutes that I do in two hours…this type of chore is handed out according to who gets home first. Golden Rule. If I’m working until nine o’clock at night I do not want to come home to full garbage cans, piles of clothes, dirty dishes and a gaggle of virtual strangers sitting on my balcony chatting away telling jokes looking for ways to kill time (or blogging). Been there…done that. So before you go snatching that man-card out of my fingers, bear one thing in mind: I never said the shirts are going to be folded particularly well!
- mkfreeberg | 08/19/2009 @ 12:45No explanation(s) required, Morgan, I was just raggin’ on ya. I did my fair share of KP and cooking back in the day… but hardly ever laundry. There ARE lines, yaano?
- bpenni | 08/19/2009 @ 18:09Aside from retard, ‘tard for short, where I diverge from the APA by considering anything left of 100 on the bell curve as retarded, I try to include imbecile, idiot,
and moron where appropriate. Midget, dwarf, cripple, and deformed, are part of my vocabulary (and dictionary) as well.
I can’t grasp why SOME folks get all ‘splodie head when I discriminate between the memes of “Gay Activists”, Lesbian Rights advocates, the “gay” community, and simply homosexual either. Of course, my common reference to the first three’s plaints as retarded MAY be suspect.
I’ll confess to a fondness of LIAR over disingenuous, or misleading, where appropriate, but thanks to SOME feminist champions, as well as SOME “State” employed psychologists, SOME folk only seem to respond to the words on the right in Roget’s Thesaurus that served them well in their second semester “Humanities” and “Poli-Sci” papers.
At least engineers and chemists still have a comprehension of the value of such words. I’d HATE to have to contend with insufferable oversensitivity in a differently intellectualized” ignition system , adhesive viable “working” time, or paint carrier vehicle evaporation rate.
- CaptDMO | 08/19/2009 @ 19:16I lived there for six years.
(sorry for posting so late – I was on vacation.)
- wch | 08/25/2009 @ 12:24