Archive for the ‘liberal-conservative’ Category
Swinging Past the Other End of the Ideological Spectrum on the Way to the Intellectual Gray
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010posted by Sam Richards
I’ve been discussing freedom and determinism in a serious way for about twenty years and I’ve delivered yesterday’s class one hundred times if I’ve done it once. And Tuesday…for some strange reason I was in the zone in a way that I’ve never been with that particular class. I’d like to think that I stirred some things up in people with regards to how they…you…see the world of causality. I know that I rocked my own world in those 75 minutes and I suppose that that is all that really matters.
So why don’t you watch the video below just to jog your thinking and then kick out some thoughts. Perhaps now is a good time to consider reading the ideas of some other people and respond to them and not directly to the class. I’m quite curious about how you manage other people’s interpretations of the ideas.
Voters and Their “Senseless” Stories
Saturday, January 30th, 2010posted by Sam Richards
It’s unfortunate that this story is written only with examples of liberals not being able to convince conservatives because the latter are not thinking straight. There are an equal number of examples of conservatives not being able to get through to the “misguided liberals” because such purportedly progressive thinkers can’t get outside their locked mental cages of short-sighted intellect.
Here would be an example: Think about how so-called “liberals” spend so much time questioning the defense-security-war-aggression policies of the United States, policies that lead their government into actions and interventions in other countries that are harmful and sometimes criminal. Here I’m not just talking about “illegal” wars but also the sale and distribution of weapons that kill innocent people (like landmines), subsidizing our farmers so that we can dump cheap rice in places like Haiti (and thereby impoverish Haitian farmers in the process), and so on. Most activists at peace and protest rallies are liberal-minded and most of them never give a thought to the myriad ways in which their day-to-day actions help keep this unjust system in place or how they personally would protest loudly and vigorously if their leaders suddenly decided to rectify some of the unjust policies that they march on Washington, DC to change. When the price of rice doubles, for example, or thousands of family farms go under in the southeastern United States, the protest chants would simply change to call out the U.S. government for not caring about its own people—even though Haitian farmers would be dancing in the streets.
Read the article: “Why Do People Often Vote Against Their Interests?”
Really…how is this possible?
Saturday, October 17th, 2009posted by the Gremlin
After watching this short video of a recent incident of racism in a high school where kids were being openly racist, it seems as though I have discovered why it is that we are all just a little bit racist…. still. Race is an open topic in many places here in America and racism must be seeping into our psyches.
In the video students were openly hating black students and there was literally nothing being done about it This is what made me think “WTF?” the most. I certainly remember there being strict rules about racism back when I was in school. But why not this school, how can these kids run wild degrading everyone that looks a little different than them into rubble? Who is to say that we don’t do the same behind our own eyes?
So why are we all racist…. still? Because parents aren’t educating their kids, or choose not to? The schools aren’t doing much to prevent this behavior either. One administrator admitted that their staff wasn’t properly trained in this area. But how much training do you need to undergo to spot such blatant racism and then to speak up?
If you were among this group of so called “administrators,” what would you do? Would you dial up your own little way to report things to the staff? Or something a more extreme?
And then I encounter this video. Another “WTF?” How about these administrators? What are they thinking. The woman won a case in court, afterall, and so her story, which sounds entirely far-fetched, must be true. How can it be? I guess the inmates really do sometimes take over and run the asylum.
Those Mexicans Will Have Us All Speaking Spanish
Monday, September 28th, 2009posted by Sam Richards
Do you have any idea how many times you’ve been lied to and didn’t know it? Really…think about it. How often does your silly, gullible self accept something as true because…well…because you believed the source? And how often have you passed on the lie to others? It’s painful for me to even think about it in my own case.
So I recently received an email from a friend that contained a video of a story that Fox News broadcast a while back. The tag line said that I needed to watch it to understand a terrible injustice brought about by liberals, illegal immigration, and political correctness — not necessarily in that order. It was one of those emails that I receive once or twice per week. Take a look at the video for yourself (it’s only a 36 second clip):
If your first response is to tilt your head to the side and scratch the back of your skull while having a dazed and confused look on your face, then you know exactly how it affected me. The thought that went along with said reaction, however, was the same one that I had when I was a kid and someone offered me the opportunity to see some freak such as a “bearded lady” at the local carnival — “this simply sounds too crazy to be true.”
Being the skeptic that I am, I decided to conduct an investigation to see if I could get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened. I started by reading some of the comments that were being made on YouTube. They were pretty scathing: “Round ‘em up and send ‘em home,” said one patriot. Another brain surgeon in the making chimed in, “This is what happens when we elect a black man as president.” (The politically correct violation that is referenced in the video occurred a couple of years ago, by the way, long before Obama entered our national spotlight.) Clearly, these blockheads were not searching for the real story and so I would not find it there.
So I plugged some combination of words such as “Oregon Mexican firefighter fired” and quickly found what I wanted: a statement from the State of Oregon’s Department of Forestry that explained the matter in considerable detail. It took me all of about 45 seconds to read, but what it revealed was very depressing (given the number of people who watched and believed the original story). I’ll summarize it for you here:
Oregon’s Department of Forestry contracts private fire crews. (Remember conservatives, privatization = cost savings = free market capitalism.) If these companies choose to hire non-English-speaking firefighters for a crew, then they must have bilingual crew leaders because while English is the official language of firefighting in the U.S., crew leaders MUST be able to communicate with their crews for purposes of safety. If a private company hires Mexican firefighters, then English only speaking crew leaders can’t lead that team. If they hire only English-speaking firefighters, then the crew leaders need only have the ability to speak English.
It makes sense that so many people hate liberals and Mexicans and political correctness with stories like this floating around on the WWW. Who wouldn’t be clamoring for the microphone to add to the shouting chorus of red-blooded citizens who want to preserve the United States for the “real Americans” (not to be confused with Native Americans, of course).
So how many times have you been duped by such an email or a rumor? How often do you find yourself saying, “No way. This can’t possibly be true. I have to tell everyone I know so this outrage will stop.” And how often do you follow that up with, “This sounds fishy and so I’d better explore it before I pass it on down the rumor mill.”?
This stuff cuts both ways, mind you, because misinformation enters the public discourse from both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. (This story originally aired on Fox News, but left-wing blogs and web sites picked it up and carried it as though it was true, by the way.) My gut inclination tells me that the right is slightly better at putting out misinformation than the left, but only because they have more money to do so. I think that both are equal in terms of their scruples about lying–but the right-wing is better at it and more flagrant about it than the left-wing. My personal opinion, folks. Perhaps that’s just because more of their political operatives have written tell all books about their strategies and misdeeds. (If you haven’t read any of these and you fancy yourself a conservative, then perhaps you ought to take a look.)
An addendum: One respondent who is a firefighter noted the utmost importance of communication while fighting fires and pointed out that non-English speaking firefighters would be problematic on English speaking crews. I absolutely agree and would maintain that Mexicans who do not speak English should NOT be on crews with U.S. firefighters who only speak English. To which I respond…no kidding.
Is President Obama Racist?
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009posted by Bryson Nobles
Probably. The 2009 definition of racist seems to be:
a person who carelessly says or does anything race-related within earshot of a race member other than their own that at least one person with an active imagination could take exception to, irregardless of the merits of the statement.
So maybe Glenn Beck is right; maybe Obama IS a racist. But then so is he just by saying it.
And now so am I. See how that works? It’s all a bit ridiculous actually. What is even more ridiculous is Glenn Beck is now popular for his aggressive opinions (while Kanye is crucified – damn, more racism), in the same country that put people in jail for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts just 4 years ago. But…somehow this is cool (damn, more racism).
Isn’t it also a stretch to call Obama “racist” because of his past, and maybe privately maintained, connection with radical Reverend Wright. Well, let’s consider this: George Bush is a white guy from Texas, an Ivy League alum, who likes to hunt and comes from a family with a very high social status because of his grandfather’s dealings and his father’s career. For my money, the odds of him having a “Reverend Wright” in his life, a relationship that he’d feel publicly obliged to denounce if it came into the public arena, is extremely likely. Is that a racist conclusion? But hey…what are you gonna do?
What’s more interesting is WHY Obama is a being called a racist. I had an odd suspicion that Obama could be the beginning of the end of racism. But not like most people think. I saw Obama’s presidential win as an ethnic “win” for white people. As my imagination would have it, white intellectuals have never quite been able to overcome the “black people can’t be racist because they don’t have power and authority to oppress or exclude white people” response in the race dialogue. Enter Obama. Black, check! Power and authority, check! Oppression of republicans in the predominately white Congress and exclusion of tax benefits for the wealthy (whites), double check!! We have a winner.
Add to that that everything is about race with him, even when it’s not, and the conversation is bound to happen. I think that it could be a blessing is disguise however because the day we find white people calling black people racist at the same rate the blacks say it about whites, it is probably losing its impact. There was once power in the exclusive rights to label people racist. But, as sure as white people abandon the suburbs when black people arrive, so too will black people abandon labeling folks racist for ironically the same reason – they both lose their value.
ACORN nuts for all.
Saturday, September 19th, 2009posted by Chenjerai Kumanyika
What’s good? This is crazy. DON’T WATCH THIS WHOLE VIDEO (unless you’re hooked on politics like me) but skim through it quickly to get the details on this ACORN investigation. You can get the main idea by watching the first 3:00 minutes and then watch from 5:30 -6:15.
A little background: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a community-based organization in the United States that advocates for low and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, voter registration, health care, affordable housing, and other social issues. They’ve got some problems though because some of their employees are more than happy to engage in shady activity…
Wait!! Before you go off with predictable shock and awe comments at ACORN’s actions-stop. Breathe. Briefly inform yourself about ACORN.
Then consider a couple of things.
1. Some of the main things that ACORN does are to help people find housing through direct actions and lobbying for fair housing legislation.
2. According to the Washington Examiner, ACORN received $53 million dollars from federal tax coffers since 1994 (note that most of it goes to housing for poor people – click HERE if you’re interested) That’s a lot of money. And…
3. Wall street has received over $500 billion dollars in federal aid for to heal their wounds from gaming the housing system.
4. Private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan such as KBR and Blackwater have cost taxpayers billions in excessive, padded billing costs.
So the political media circus is taking full advantage of this. Folks on the right are gleefully holding this up as an example of everything that we fear about the Obama Administration – excessive social programs, corruption, tax payer money going to thieves, and black people. (By the way, ACORN has fired the employees on this video and called the incidents “an attempt at ‘gotcha journalism.’”) Folks on the left are going to try to defend ACORN’s larger purpose without looking like hypocrites. Obama says he has bigger things on his mind. Yeah…like what?
Now go off. I did.