Category: Culture Wars

Rude and Barbaric

Posted on December 15, 2010 in Culture Wars Hatred Propaganda

square687 Many of us are paralyzed into non-thinking when someone invokes “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion” as the reason why they believe as they do. When you translate this, it means “I can say what I want and you can’t criticize it.” It’s a common rejoinder from the Right — especially racists — and from extremist believers aka Fundamentalists among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. When the American public buys into this, it leads us to a place where only the corrupt and vile can speak.

The First Amendment was never meant to operate so. And I think free speech is closer to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about ethics: ethics aren’t there to excuse what we do but to make us reach for something better. When we let the racist or the fundamentalist go unchallenged because “it’s his opinion and he can think what he wants” we let society down. We allow it to fester in fraudulency and evil. It is our duty to say to people who voice ugliness that they are ugly. We have these rights to make a better America, a better world. And part of that means using our voices to confront wrong.

If a Muslim cleric says apostates must be executed, we have a right to say “Well, that is just barbaric.” If a skinhead says he has a right to hate foreigners, we have a right to say “That is backwards and bad.” They scream that it is their free speech right, but they cannot silence us with their insistences that they can say anything — and do anything — they want without us challenging them because of free speech. That alone deserves admonishment. They live in America and they cannot put a stopper on their fellow citizens.

They are rude and barbaric. And I think they realize it, but don’t want to admit it.

Full Steam Ahead with the Message

Posted on September 4, 2009 in Civic Responsibility Culture Wars Education

square603 The onslaught of negative media coverage regarding a simple public address to school children must be seen as part of a plan: to erase the message of Hope. How else can you explain the apparent opposition to the principle of working hard in school and making sure that you graduate?

In responding to this, I have seen liberals and progressives faltering into exactly what the reactionaries and hatebaggers want — forgetting the dream. It’s been said that conservatives vote their fears while liberals vote their dreams. We must remember our dreams just as we did during last year’s successful campaign to unseat Republican rule in this country.

The aim for our nation’s students is to be well-educated and smart, to have the intellectual tools they need to think for themselves. It may be that they come up with means of living together that transcend our current politics. Let those minds develop and grow with one another.

Their parents aren’t doing so well.

UPDATE (9/9/2009): Now George W. Bush is planning to give his own talk to Texas schoolchildren. Dubya seems determined to make his place in history as the man who divided the country. Maybe he will surprise us, but I doubt it.

Anti-Health Care Thugs

Posted on August 4, 2009 in Culture Wars Hatred Insurance

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

square591 The name of the game is intimidation. The evidence is in: lobbyists for the health care industry are promoting disruption in an attempt to stop us from enjoying the same quality of health care insurance as is enjoyed by millions in other civiilized countries. Their goal is to prevent any kind of conversation from occurring because they know that they are losing the arguments!

What can we do? One thing is to track the lobbyists back to their lairs and hector them at every turn. Shake them up like they are shaking up elected officials. The scenes you have seen from around the country are not spontaneous: they are organized and their leaders PAID. Expose them at every turn. Demand that the media stop covering their protests. Turn the cameras back to us.

Second, use disorderly conduct laws to throw a few of these loons into jail. Let their friends in the lobbying firms pay to have them released. Enough fines might be incentive for them to stop.

And stand up for health care at every turn. Shout back. Point out that they are the victims of RACISM: the corporatists think they are a bunch of gullible hacks who will do anything they ask for nothing. When they go to the country clubs, the race-baiters and disruptors LAUGH at these white people. Remind them of that.

Remember that these people aren’t just out to stop health care: they are out to steal America after decisively losing an election. Appeal to the silent majority of whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, men, and women to not let these hypocrites — the ones who gloated when Bush stole the 2000 election — destroy our commons, the commons of free speech and intelligent debate.

Top

Crazy Eileen

Posted on July 30, 2009 in Bipolar Disorder Culture Wars Paranoids

square590 The hand shakes as it waves. “Call on me! Call on me!” When the congressmen gives her a chance, she spouts out a long derangement about how Obama is a citizen of Kenya and she screams that she wants “her country back”. There are cheers from the contingent who cannot yet accept the fact that they lost the 2008 election — one wonders what they would be claiming if Hillary Clinton were president instead. Representative Mike Castle(R) lets her have her moment — which includes the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance — then returns the talk to health care.

It’s a pity that we don’t see her face and we don’t hear the rest of the meeting. The Reactionary Right doesn’t want to talk about health care. Its goal is to obstruct discussion. So when the woman known as “Crazy Eileen” stands up, they cheer her. If only they knew who they were cheering.

“Eileen” styles herself as a psychic. She claims that aliens will reveal themselves in October and they will bring an age of peace for humankind that will last for 95 years at which time the planet will disintegrate. She also predicts that Hillary Clinton will become president.

I don’t know what to make of her, except she reminds me of the fellow I used to be when I had a mission. I saw conspiracies in many places and it was important to tell people about them. How rich was the life of the mind I led and how terrifying at times. Touching my phone filled me with trepidation at times because I knew that there were spies listening on the other end. They didn’t want to arrest me, merely torment me with their presence, steal my mind, make people think I was crazy when I really wasn’t.

The point I am making here is that my bipolar disoder had me firmly bound in paranoia. Leftists as well as rightists suffer from it. The other day, I spent about an hour on Twitter explaing what it felt like to be on mood stabilizers. I assured the person that I had not stopped being a peace activist because the meds changed my mind but because jumping into that kind of life served as a trigger for my illness. Peace activism wasn’t a crazy pursuit except for some of us who went too far. Obsession is always a problem, regardless of your politics.

If I were told that the woman they are calling “Crazy Eileen” suffered from a mood disorder, it would not surprise me. I’m told that plenty of sane people believe in birtherism as well as aliens and the possibility that Hillary Clinton will be president, but Eileen appears to be doing too much. Why does she hide from the cameras and decline interviews?

When I was crazy, I had mixed feelings about exposing myself. On one hand, the word had to get out. But I also felt that I was unusually sensitive and that putting myself before journalists too much would end with me having a meltdown. Even in my denial, I understood that all was not well. Could the same be true of “Eileen”?

There’s a huge stigma against mental illness. And there’s also pressure on people who turn into mouthpieces for political movements to avoid exploring that possibility. Already people have picked up on Eileen’s previous utterances to propose that she is a kook. The tragedy I feel is that she will now be less likely to seek help. She will not want to look bad in the face of her opponents. Her followers will not want her discredited.

The one who suffers is the mouthpiece. It takes a great deal of courage to end the charade that grandiosity thrusts us in. Eileen, I see myself in you. Don’t let your fears of people’s opinions prevent you from seeking relief. You won’t change your politics, just ground them better in reality. There’s no conspiracy out there keeping you in pain, just a confederacy of people who are more concerned with their own beliefs than your well-being. Choose the latter. Seek help.

This article provides information about Eileen and the birther movement.

Top

A Fallacy of Neo-Confederatism

Posted on July 28, 2009 in Culture Wars

square588 Students of the Civil War are often confused by the assertion that because the North fought to preserve the Union, the South could not have been fighting to preserve slavery. The assertion is half correct: the North did begin by fighting to preserve the Union. But even single act of secession by the Southern states named preservation of slavery as the reason. It is true that a few states named other reasons, but Slavery was the one reason that united them all. To preserve slavery, they felt, they had to resist any attempts to be reincorporated into the Union.

But, you may protest, you’re saying the North had one reason and the South another reason for fighting. Yes. How can this be? Happens all the time.

Let’s saying you are sitting in a bar. A drunk decides that he doesn’t like your nose and he picks a fight with you. You defend yourself by fighting back. Why is he fighting? Because he hates your nose. Why are you fighting? Because you are trying not to be hurt by the lout. So his reason is prejudice and yours is self-preservation. The fight doesn’t start with both of you standing for self-preservation ((It can end quite differently, however, with both of you striving not to be hurt anymore.)) : he wants to hurt you because of your nose and you don’t want to be hurt.

I’m sure you can think of other examples. The moral here is to be careful of how some people try to revise history by shell games of false logic. A and B can have quite different reasons for fighting: what matters is that there is violence.

Top

Steps and Leaps

Posted on July 8, 2009 in Class Culture Wars Equality Gender

Too many leftists elect officials and then do nothing other than express their views in opinion polls and fail to show up for elections to remind them that their issues, their power is important.

Top

Ems and Dubyas

Posted on September 9, 2007 in Culture Wars Fact-Dropping Liberals & Progressives

A new brain study suggests that liberals have a better grasp on the truth than conservatives:

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when they saw W.

Could it be that in the first case, the conservatives linked M to Money and were after it so intently that they hit the keyboard in kneejerk fashion? And in the second case, they saw the W as Bush?

Now for the conclusion:

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times more likely than conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts and were 2.2 times more likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrates a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, was accused of being a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

So we can expect that conservatives will have a hard time seeing that they are WRONG. No matter what, they blithely go forth, wreaking destruction.

Perhaps, as a service to humanity, conservatives could train themselves to distinguish the dubyas from the ems? We’ll all be thankful.

[tags]liberals,conservatives,facts,brain,neurology[/tags]

Top