(Insert Title Here)
Odd, Tyler, I had a higher opinion of you.
See? I can be wrong from time to time.
Tyler said:
And this is all they're allowed to do Tiassa? What the fuck does that mean? They can read, they can learn, they can get off their fat asses and make a new point, or even a valuable old one. They can try and understand the situation more, they can go do many many things to help make it better.
Perhaps you ought to try that one again, Tyler:
Tiassa said:
If liberals babble ceaselessly, it's because that's all they're allowed in deference to the folks on the other side of the aisle.
What that means, Tyler, is explained in a prior paragraph:
Tiassa said:
Pointing out the reasons this is true only pisses people off. They don't want to think about it. As current public opinion numbers show (see Washington Post, Dec. 21, 2004), Americans seem to realize there's something wrong with their endorsement, but there's patriotism (jingoism) and war (Pax Americana) afoot, so they're not thinking particularly clearly. Curiously realistic, Americans seem to be unsatisfied with their own endorsement. Where they're confused is in their unwillingness to deal squarely with unpleasant truths.
Watch the political discourse: noting problems in the war is giving comfort to the enemy; questioning the flimsy-to-nonexistent justifications for the war is un-American. Inventing lies out of thin air is suddenly elevated to the classic selective argument that is the methodological backbone of both American politics and salesmanship.
The other side of the aisle is so full of itself that it won't tolerate certain discussions, and these happen to coincide in many cases with vitally important discussions.
Take the yellowcake argument. As I understand it from conservatives, Bush didn't lie because he didn't believe the information was wrong. This makes sense if we characterize that disbelief as,
--Mr. President, all indications are that the yellowcake story is false.
"What? I don't believe that. Let's go ahead with it, anyway."
In other words, it makes sense if that disbelief is a political convenience.
Notice the poll question that doesn't come up:
Who is ultimately responsible for abuse of Afghani and Iraqi prisoners?
Technically, George W. Bush in the abstract, and as the stories develop even further, it seems to get closer and closer to him in the specific. Will people who acknowledge his office as commander-in-chief also acknowledge his responsibility for the actions of his armed forces? No. To most Americans, it is absurd to suggest that George W. Bush is responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib. Even though most recognize criminals aren't about to declare their intent in such a bold manner, they won't be convinced until Bush is stupid enough to leave that kind of evidence laying around the office like Clinton's Big Mac wrappers. Seriously, speaking of Clinton, who doesn't wonder why a woman keeps a semen stain? Do Lewinsky's actions seem any more sane now? If I have to start pulling up Captain Kirk metaphors, maybe "middle America" will like the argument more, too.
But asking people to connect the dots from the ICC withdrawal to the public-discourse murmur post-9/11 about letting our allies and neighbors do the torturing for us (see "
Do Americans Endorse Torture and Abuse Abroad"), on to the discussion of POW or "unlawful combatant" and whether it made any difference to the Geneva Conventions, through the first whispers of prisoner abuse and administration attempts to portray the issue as a limited one ... by the time we get to
the FBI complaining about American interrogators impersonating Bureau personnel, it's just too much to ask.
The serious discussion that comes with the actual facts is harrowing to American pride. We have, as a society, a nation, f@cked up completely, and it really bugs people to even think about. What leads us here is more than just an election or Al Gore or even Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. And it's the cancer that will, if left unchecked, be the undoing of "liberty and justice for all". But like anything else, when we get down to each person who steps into a ballot box and chooses, and even those who choose to not step into the ballot box, there are no real excuses. Do we let the drug addict blame society? Could Bill Clinton have gotten away with that one for adultery? It's society's fault? Americans choose by priorities that lend more toward their immediate individual comforts and preferences than they do toward posterity, integrity, or any other abstract concept. This is, to a degree, understandable. But the shame that turns their eyes away from what they do comes in a simple realization that comes whenever the principles and values of their formative childhood education--e.g. Sunday school lessons, kindergarten "togetherness", teamwork, "it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game",
ad f@cking nauseam--fail them completely. For some it's their parents' divorce, or even their own amid their twenties. There is a persistent subtle awareness, even in the seemingly-coldest of American hearts, of the daily betrayal of everything good about those formative principles. All of that good intention is reviled, that optimism despised and ridiculed. And like anybody trapped in a cycle of their own making, they'll blame anything and anyone but themselves. Take me, for instance; I'll be out of excuses for waiting for my partner to come back to sanity come the middle of next month. That's a guess. If I'm lucky, I'll get the Super Bowl in before I have to put my foot down, but that's a transition I sincerely don't want to undertake because it's one of those markers of irreparable damage. Acknowledging that failure changes the way we relate, and eliminates any chance of returning to certain halcyon days. Were we married, it would be the moral equivalent of filing for divorce. And believe me, I'll take any excuse I can to avoid it. And I'm running out of them. And it really sucks to have to think about. Because no matter how much of this is her fault and her problem, I still have to count up my own failures in the matter in order to figure out what comes next, and after nine years that's no short list. And what of these folks, with nation and a lifetime's principles, and cultural identity? Maybe the
New York Times should find some first-generation naturalized immigrants and ask them their opinion on whether this is the same country their hopes brought them to. But we've got millions of lifers with god-and-country sentiments running thick in their blood. And look at them: they're rebelling against the Constitution while simultaneously asserting the American identity all while doubting the government's ability to pull it off. If they ever sat down and walked through it point by point, it might actually kill them by breaking their hearts.
And really, there are only so many jokes that can be made. Xev once made a point about it being cruel to be kind, and that's the problem. The right wing isn't interested in playing the game anymore, they're out to run it. This isn't inherent simple greed, but a desperate effort to avoid looking at themselves. The problem facing liberals is similar to facing down a suicidal. Anything you say or do or fail to do might cause them to leap or slice away. Or an addict: every word plunges deeper into the blood.
And one thing we do know, though, is that ridicule works among that conservative crowd. Or else, if it doesn't work, they seem to expect it to work. Reagan's condescension, the Atwater campaign for Bush '88, talk radio, the Rove School class of '04 .... I still think Dennis Miller is a great example: given an opportunity to make a point, he turned around and made a joke. The flip-side is that if he actually expected people to treat his explanation of his politics in
Time seriously, he thinks we're all, regardless of our politics, such idiots as to believe it. The reasons he gave might as well have come from GOP talking points. It wasn't an explanation but a recital. If you look closely, what has happened is that Miller turned into a p@ssy, and lashes out to hide that fact. And I'm not going to say it's just him. This is a very common thing. As far as liberals can tell from observing conservatives, the only really effective method for talking to conservatives is ridicule, bullsh@t, and paranoia.
The alternative is to simply withdraw from the discussion and let those who would exploit and divide humanity according to diverse animosities have their way.
It's almost like conservatives hope if they're priggish enough, liberals will just get sick of it and go away.
Frankly, I think if the jokes are so frustrating, you're focusing on the wrong priorities.
Tyler said:
Fuck, they could even try rational debate with the right instead of calling them names
See, if you'd just acknowledged the rest of the sentence at the outset, we could have avoided all of those words above.
They could try rational debate with the right? Social propriety and the rules of Sciforums prevent me from responding to that indignity in any reasonable scale.
But that's just disgusting, Tyler. The right doesn't want to talk. Not unless they have the whole argument handed to them at the outset.
You have a little daughter now Tiassa, when some bullies start picking on her are you going to tell her the best approach is to call them names and get all her friends to throw sand at them?
I will teach my daughter to stand up to evil wherever she finds it. In the meantime, if calling names and throwing sand is the less offensive option, it's worth considering. After all, the right finds the truth much more offensive than a little bit of sand.
Really, I would have thought you decent and smart enough to understand that. But hey, what do you know? I never said I can't be wrong. People just presume I have.
I don't see you doing that, so I'm amazed you continue to defend this useless, self-defacing bullshit approach to politics.
Appeals to logic and fact are rebuked as "liberal elitism".
Seriously, the right doesn't want to have a discussion unless they're given the argument at the outset.
That the only options are bad jokes or violence in your mind is one of the most far from truth things I've ever heard you say. Please, tell me how learning and debate and reading and talking are not options.
The right simply doesn't want to talk. You know, one of the things Michael Moore got wrong in F911 is the idea of why we didn't see the news footage of Bush's motorcade being egged. Frankly, I'm surprised we didn't because it would have been great fodder for the GOP. You simply don't do that shit in American politics.
But as sick as you are of hearing the same jokes over and over, the liberals are sick and tired of hearing the same lame excuses for argument over and over and over. How many times do we have to argue about whether another's right must be violated before the conservative's right is fulfilled? Seriously, I want an answer on that. How many times do we have to argue about it? How many times do liberals have to be despised as "elitist" for wanting to know why a conservative's First Amendment right is violated unless another's is thrown out? Answer me that, because if you haven't figured it out, the answer is
For the rest of the human endeavor. Seriously, it transcends Democrats and Republicans. When Democrats were the conservatives, part of the conservative argument asserted that a man's rights were violated if he was not allowed to own another in complete bondage and servitude. It's a hundred forty years later and the conservative device is still in play.
States' rights? The states don't have the right to contradict the U.S. Constitution. Yet the people repeatedly try. And then they complain about "judicial activism" denying the will of the people. How many times do liberals have to be condemned for the elitism of pointing out that it's the Constitution, and not the judges? What am I supposed to think of a faction that won't have discussion until liberals acknowledge that the Constitution is a suppressor of the very rights it guarantees?
There's a chorus by Toad the Wet Sprocket that comes to mind:
You can take me down
To show me your home
Not the place where you live
But the place where you belong
You can bend my ear
We can talk all day
Just make sure i'm around
When you've finally got something to say
"
Something to Say"
So does calling them "idiots" and "fucking criminals" and "blood-mongers" and showing them as the type to kill Santa. But you obviously don't give a shit about that eh.
The truth hurts. I can't change that. The severity of the expression is admittedly a reflection of an obstinate audience. It's the terms that get their attention at all.
In effect Tiassa it looks you're defending self-mutilation
Given your insensate perception of the situation, that judgment doesn't disturb me.
What I'm curious about is why you would defend intolerance, dishonesty, and greed.
Those Radical Republicans; how intolerant and elitist that they wouldn't allow someone to own a slave, eh? Or those elitist women, insisting on the right to vote. And those damned multiculturalists: how awful of them to protest the lynching of a black man for having consensual sex with a white woman.
Of course, you obviously don't give a shit about that, eh?
