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- Published on Thursday, 10 May 2012 01:14
"North Carolina voters ban gay marriage, civil unions"
You people should be simply, categorically ashamed of yourselves.
In a state that featured so often, so prominently, and so shamefully in the history of government-sanctioned and codified racism that we've left a half-century in the past and still struggle to heal... we now have committed an equally horrifying, equally bigoted, equally, obviously unethical legal action to inextricably intertwine religion and state, in the form of a religious-founded bigotry.
This is a shame. An embarrassment for our state, an embarrassment for our education system, an embarrassment for our universities, our corporations, our government, and worst of all, the despicably base, simplistic and backwards mindset (worldview? mental capacity?) of the average citizen.
North Carolina is supposed to be a state on the way up. It is supposed to be a beacon of advancement among more limited, unabashedly backwards states who are remorselessly opposed to high-quality education, intellect, industry, technology, and most of all, social advancement. States like South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Virginia are like toddlers in the company of far more developed, far more capable, if perhaps not well-adjusted adults. Driven by excellent higher education and an influx of high-technology service industry businesses, North Carolina should be in its adolescence. North Carolina should have been capable of more, better. It is not. Its people are still broadly incapable of understanding how or why this nation was founded; why they are even permitted to vote on issues like this atrocity, Amendment One.
For those who voted for Amendment One, please consider the following:
You are ostensibly a socially conservative Christian, regardless of race or class. You ostensibly consider yourself Republican, in as much as you believe the raison d'etre of the Republican party is its opposition to big government, it's "genuine" protection of AMERICAN freedoms. In other words, the Republican party, as you see it, represents thinly-veiled Christian politicians seeking to codify Christian dogma in American laws. The profound irony is, you just voted for something your party told you to: to strip citizens of obviously well-deserved rights.
So which is it? Does the Republican party stand for small government, for government "staying out of our business", for government leaving us alone to do as we see fit, to exercise the wonderful freedoms afforded us?
Or does our government exist to systematically strip rights away from any and all American citizens who do not fit the profile of a "socially-conservative Christian Republican"?
I am an atheist. Is it within my rights to expect my government NOT to force me or my children to live by rules that you and your fellow cult members believe a magic creature delivered to you via a few interesting hallucinations suffered by dehydrated desert-dwellers two thousand years ago? I also expect not to be forced to sing songs of praise to Allah, or to see altars to Buddha present in public buildings. I do not expect the government to force me to be vegetarian for the simple reason that Hindu religion demands it. Do you expect these same rights? These same protections from state-enforced religion?
I would imagine that you do.
Which is it? They cannot both be true. You either support a government that does not rigidly circumscribe the ways in which its citizens can pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... or you do. You either oppose Big Brother, 1984-esque government, or you support it.
This vote supported just such a thing. A government that has decided to remove rights where it frankly has no purview. You just voted to make a STRONGER nanny state that strips rights from its citizens. And this right happens to be, all things considered, a benign, love-filled, wholesome right. This isn't a right to build truck bombs and kill people. This is a right to create families out of loving, caring couples, good citizens.
And you, unfortunately, weren't quick enough to tell the difference.
Shame on you, is all I have to say. Voting isn't a joke. Taking away good peoples, good citizens well-deserved rights, is not a joke. It is not a thing taken lightly. Like so many other responsibilities, you people cast shame on our entire state and our entire nation. You should be ashamed of yourselves and the confused, weak-minded individual you've allowed yourself to be.
If you can't put even this most basic level of thought into these kinds of issues, you ought to do the world a favor and STAY AWAY FROM VOTING POLLS. Voting is a responsibility and you have failed catastrophically at upholding your responsibility.
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- Published on Tuesday, 20 March 2012 23:09
Our good conservative voters believe in freedom of religion, as long as you believe in their religion. They believe in freedom of choice, as long as you make choices consistent with their worldview. They believe in economic freedom, as long as you're willing to pay lots of taxes to cover an enormous military machine. They believe in political freedom, as long as every other country's political system is similar to America's, AND friendly towards America. Because it's too hard to reconcile the existence of large organized religions with dramatically different moral codes, the conservative voter will revert to moral relativism - "what's right to us isn't necessarily right to them" - when their own religion specifies that there is only ONE right, which is, whatever their god or superhero or what-have-you as said/written to be right.
That, my friends has a name, and it's not actually "a conservative's version of freedom". It's called COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. There are a lot of good articles. Look it up. You can find unmistakable cognitive dissonance very near the surface of virtually every aspect of the social conservative's worldview. "Social Conservative" ends up being an effective synonym for "poorly contemplated", or, in some cases, "bigoted". Social conservative is just the socially-accepted label.
There's also another word for it: IRONY. Depending upon who you are, you might also need to look that word up. Why ironic? Because the conservative's favorite accusation of "ivory tower" social liberals is that they must all be, for lack of a more delicate way to put it, closet Communists. The horrible, insidious liberals are FORCING everybody to be tolerant, FORCING them to be accepting of various economic and religious views. When the conservative's own worldview is, by its very nature, the more restrictive, rigidly-circumscribed, authoritarian and intolerant one. Shrouding themselves in FREEDOM has to be one of the greater ironies, if not downright deceptions, perpetrated on the American general population... well, maybe ever. I guess we're just collectively more gullible and easily-led than we were 250 years ago, before there was any formal, centrally-managed school system, any mandate for education standards, or any laws requiring equal educational opportunities for all American citizens, any established public school system at the primary, secondary or post-secondary levels, or any of our other brilliant modern educational amenities.
So... you know. Vote for crazy-ass Rick. Or Mitt Mormon. Who cares which. Vote for freedom... the freedom to be EXACTLY, and in all ways, like a Caucasian, socially-conservative, fundamentalist-religious, intolerant, xenophobic American right-wing voter. The less education the better. Do what the rich white man tells you: vote for HIM. He REALLY is looking out for YOUR freedom.
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- Published on Thursday, 09 February 2012 15:58
I read in a news article this morning that the employment disparity between young and old is larger than ever. Young people are actually having a harder time starting or advancing careers and suffering a disproportionate burden of the recession, relative to folks who are professionally established. Then it speculates that this might be part of the angst that is feeding the Occupy movement.
<record scratch sound effect>
Wait a minute. MOVEMENT? OCCUPY? Are we even still TALKING about this? Here it is what, 4 months later, and people are still speculating what the point of this "movement" even is/was?
I mean, generally, to have a MOVEMENT, there has to be some kind of battle cry, some kind of rallying point - the participants have to be MOVING IN SOME DIRECTION. Even in chaotic situations like the French Revolution, certain social strata were specifically bucking against a specific source of authority, with the intent to disable/remove it. There was a fundamental shift towards democratic society. There was some kind of principle, some kind of objective, not just a grievance.
This Occupy thing is making me crazy. It's a grievance without a purpose. It's like hormonally-inspired teen angst. Just raging against the machine. We don't know what we really want or who should act or what anyone should actually DO... but we have complaints, we're cantankerous and discombobulated!
It seems like a lot of effort to go through without really having any specific point.
And I don't really think you could call it a MOVEMENT, because... nobody's moving. There's no objective. In fact, they all remain quite stationary. That appears to be a somewhat ironic component of their modus operandi. Society is where it is - which these folks are unhappy about for a variety of reasons - but we aren't actually... GOING anywhere. We're not trying anything. We're not changing anything. We didn't take the time to write our manifesto. We simply took to the streets to whine about it all.
Is it a veiled cry for socialism - sans the positive assertion, sans the word "socialism", so that we don't scare too many squares? Or is it simply saying, the people who make a lot of money should make a little less than a lot? Should there be a national wealth cap of $100 million, beyond which you are no longer allowed to earn any more salary or capital gains - perhaps the proceeds of any overages can be distributed in small, equal distributions to all of the reefer-smoking white college kids taking time off from their classes at NYU or Berkeley to raise such a whiny cacophony over this whole issue.
Wait... what's the issue again? What's the claim? What's the assertion?
Oh yes. In a market economy, there is an uneven distribution of wealth. The horror. The horror.
A friend suggested that this is rather indicative of the level of apathy and purposelessness of the esteemed participation in this clown parade.
Well, that would at least add up... to zero... which does sort of explain things. Sort of. At least, you can decompose the listlessness and purposeless nature of the movement(sic) to its component parts. There is no supervenient attribute. There are a bunch of people who really actually don't know how to rally around anything more than... oh... smart phones. Texting. Pot is good too. Camping in tents. And perhaps, the occasional punk or alt rock band they liked since before the band was cool.
In a way it's symbolic of American society but in a very different way than the media has portrayed it while trying, in vain, to place some kind of label on it to explain what the point is even supposed to be. "Why?" we ask with no one really able to provide a satisfying or meaningful answer. The "we are the 99%" concept didn't even emerge until two months into the thing, and is the most articulate statement to be made anywhere in this little swell, but still doesn't actually... say much of anything. Whether you have super high concentrations of wealth or low concentrations of wealth, there will STILL be a line drawn somewhere, above which are 1% of the population, who will own a disproportionately large portion of the assets and wealth of the society. That's a pretty basic fact of market economies.
It's symbolic in that they are simply consuming. Consuming attention, consuming time, air waves. Consuming space. Without contributing ANYTHING, they are existing, taking up space, whining indiscriminately. It's actually a good analogy for the vast majority of people in America today. There's no definitive sense of purpose or contribution to society, it's a simple act of consumption and whining about your lot in life, rather than taking any specific action to modify their lot in life. It's not for having defined a goal, tried, and failed (perhaps as a result of an injustice?)... it's socially acceptable not to really try anything or do anything at all, to expend no effort, and yet still expect your outcomes to be constantly improving.
In THAT way, I think it might be explained away. These really are Americans. This is just how Americans think and act. Even the malcontents are apathetic and whiny.
But I still can't abide by calling it a "movement". We're not moving anywhere. We're staying put. Whining about the fact that the world isn't moving for us, despite ourselves.
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- Published on Monday, 04 July 2011 02:43
"And the Lord Sayeth unto them, 'Thou Shalt bloweth shit up on the second, third, fourth and fifth days of July.' And so they did... and it was good. Amen."
-Psalms, 93:522
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- Published on Saturday, 21 May 2011 03:00
you may not believe it, but this is my magnum opus
supo mungam ym si siht tub ,ti eveileb ton yam uoy
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- Published on Saturday, 30 April 2011 22:17
white bunnies taste better
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- Published on Wednesday, 27 April 2011 22:06
Donald Trump is truly, unequivocally, a clown. Can somebody please give him his pacifier?