I keep trying to read the Huffington Post...

... but to see things from their point of view, I'd have to have my head pretty far up my ass.


You see, I don't live in an ideological/political echo chamber.  I try to watch Keith Olbermann.  I try to read the Huffington Post.  When liberal commenters leave their "home" blog URL as part of their comments on a conservative blog post I read, I visit the site to see if there's an insight, a new, rational viewpoint.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, what do I see?  Conservatives are evil.  Republicans are stupid.  Rethuglicans.  Silly Bible-thumpers who reject science.  Global warming deniers who'll look to their imaginary friend in the sky to protect them.  Crooked Wall Street types.  They only care about money!

Seriously?  Do these people live in Fantasy Land?  In my experience, nobody is that one-dimensional.  Except, of course, the conservative Christians whom are often cast as heinous villians or dunder-headed comic relief.  I've concluded that the people who leave such comments are the type who'd say they don't have any conservative friends.

That could be true in the following ways:

• Their conservative friends decline to reveal their political leanings because they do not wish to expend energy defending themselves from juvenile attacks.
• Their conservative friends wish to keep their political leanings secret out of the interest of preserving their friendships.
• These people are living in an environment hostile to the very notion of dissent and non-conformity of thought.  Certain districts of San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland spring to mind.
• Some combination of the above.

I know I've kept my religious beliefs and political leanings to myself because of the above.  I've got a friend who's hardly spoken me since he learned I didn't buy into the global warming alarmism.  My friend is a civil engineer who did his grad work at MIT, yet he called me a denier instead of a skeptic.  I blame his chip-on-her-shoulder wife.  I've got another friend who ripped on Catholics just the other night.  She's ripped on Republicans and people with small-town values (often one in the same) in the past, characterizing them as unintelligent, close-minded, etc.  She has since learned I am one of those people she has belittled and continues to belittle.  Curious how she has reconciled the contradiction.

Anonymous slander as a debate tactic

I don't know why I bothered:  Reading a newspaper, is, to me at least, a waste of my time.  The "news" is so often filtered through a columnist, copy writer, editor, executive editor, to the point where it's quite the work-out to go through and pick out facts from the writers' perception of the facts.

Case in point.  Anthropogenic climate change (ACC).  The notion that the global climate is changing, and that we're responsible.  To some degree.  Is it possible there could be debate on how responsible we are, or how much the climate is changing?


Subscribers to the ACC theory (in Sam Kinison mode):  NO!!!!!!!  HERETICS!!!!!!!!  THE DEBATE IS OVER, YOU WORTHLESS BITCH!!!!!!!





So, I browsed the on-line version of the Minneapolis Star & Sickle-- er, Star-Tribune.  It had a story discussing how some people are no longer debating if ACC is significant, but how to adapt to it.

That was what the story was about.  But commentators from both sides of the political spectrum chimed in.

Then I saw what one comment said:

The Joy of Ignorance

The gist of what several commenters to this story have to say so far is: "We don't need no stinkin' science!" Yes, I'm sure that despite the fact that researchers across the globe are taking careful measurements of weather, sea levels, core ice layers, receding glaciers, deep ocean temperatures, and the changing plant and animal ecology--the climate change deniers know better. The deniers probably come from a long line of 'intellectuals' stretching back to the Flat Earthers. Changes to one's life is fearful for many. For the rest of us, it's prudent to study what's happening with the earth's climate and to understand how humans are influencing it. I'm glad that scientists are meeting--both to discuss prevention of climate change late in the game---as well as how to adapt to it.

posted by inlandsea on Sep. 15, 10 at 11:46 PM | 

53 of 83 people liked this comment.

Nothing turns me off to debate like a term like "denier".  My best friend, a very intelligent man whom got his Master's from MIT, referred to me as a denier in the course of what until that point had been a cordial debate.  To me, calling some one a climate-change "denier" is the debate equivalent of calling them a "Nazi".  With such an emotionally-charged label, you've just forfeited the debate.

Calling someone a denier actually shows the inflexibility of your own position.  Very few things in science are actual universal laws.  Most things in science, especially life sciences, are theoretical in some part.  So when someone expresses skepticism over something like ACC because of an incomplete or corrupted set of temperature data, or the tarnished reputations of some of its leading adherents to the theory, and they are labeled a "denier", as opposed to the less-emotional, more factual term "skeptic", it betrays the ACC theory adherents' rigid and uncompromising beliefs.  How many times have they told us The debate is over?

The comment by inlandsea shows what too many on the other side think of dissent.  Deniers, flat-Earthers.  Then ascribe a psychological reason for the dissent.  Disregard things like temperature monitoring stations operating next to an A/C exhaust fan adjacent to an asphalt parking lot in July.  Disregard e-mails speaking of massaging data to get the desired results, or seeking to discredit or silence people with data that does not support your theories.  Disregard scientists who publish an infamous "hockey stick" graph that has become the Gadsen Flag for the ACC advocates and refuse to share their flawed data model for years, even though the research was publically funded.  Sadly, inlandsea is not alone in his/her thinking:  64% were OK with an analysis that demeans and then attempts to psycho-analyze someone who looks at a set of data and just doesn't draw the same conclusion from it.

I'm reminded of a recent episode of Ice Road Truckers that I was watching:  One of the truckers, Hugh Rowland, was trying to climb an icy pass and momentarily went into the opposing lane to get the needed traction, causing an oncoming truck to go into the wrong lane in turn.  The other trucker unleashed a litany of crap at Rowland over the radio.  To be fair, Rowland should have said he was going into the oncoming lane to get traction.  But the other trucker didn't even think this might be a reason.  He just started cursing Rowland out over the radio.  Rowland, of course, is brash and unapologetic, simply saying, "You're a real tough guy on the radio, but meet in the parking lot and I'll knock your teeth in."

Commenters like inlandsea are the same way:  In possession of the courage of lions when safely behind a keyboard and the anonymity of a handle.

I know it's incredibly sexist of me...

...but has Ms. Janeane Garofalo ever considered wearing a dress, getting a pair of contacts, not to mention a shower and a shave?

Methinks that forcing Ms. Garofalo to adhere to such societal norms, including marrying a nice white investment banker, staying home and raising his kids and ironing his shirts would be living Hell on Earth for her.  I could produce a ratings-winner reality-TV program, to boot.

Ah, one can dream.

Then someone share this pic:

Come on folks.  It's only fair that the rest join in me in seeing what we had for dinner last night.

Hooray for engineers

Guess what, folks?  It wasn't government that stopped the oil spill.  It was a team of engineers at BP.  A cap is in place.  For the moment, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

For the moment.  Then we've got to get back to cleaning up what leaked out.

So what are we doing?

Bobby Jindal was using barges to collect the oil from the water.  Until the U.S. Coast Guard briefly shut them down for not having proof that they had enough life preservers!

Bureaucrats.  Enough said.

Jindal has also pushed for constructing sand berms to protect the Louisiana coastal wetlands from the oil coming on-shore.  The federal government response?  "Let's conduct an environmental impact study first!"

Like I said, bureaucrats.

Then I saw Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night.  Olbermann and his guest, Len Bahr, criticized Jindal's building of the sand berms.  Bahr was an advisor to Jindal until being asked to retire last year.  Bahr's got a 9-point argument against the berms here.  From what I've seen, the man is a coastal science expert.  But what he's got is a theory, not evidence that the berms will compound the problem.  In the midst of a crisis, we can ill afford to be academic about things.  Jindal knows that, and "trained academics" like Bahr strike me to be much like our current Chief Executive:  Incapable of making imperfect decisions based on limited facts in a limited amount of time.

Contrast Bahr's theory with the experience the Dutch bring:  They've excelled at reclaiming land from the North Sea.  And they've held it back.  If anybody knows how to build berms and levees, it's the Dutch.

Experience vs. academic theory.  If you're a leader and everybody's looking to you to lead, what do you do?  Take action that might be wrong in the long term, or paralyze yourself with fear and do nothing?

Bahr wants us to continue to use straw to soak up the oil from the water instead of building berms.  OK, why can't we do BOTH!  A good leader hedges his bets, especially in the absence of the facts.  Does Bahr not understand this?

Unemployment

You know, I try to see things from different perspectives.  As I've aged, I like to think I've become just a little bit wiser and more willing to accept a different point of view.

That being said, when I read the Huffington Post, I realize that to see things from their authors' point-of-view, I would have to stick my head far up my ass.

Unemployment.  I've been there, and it's not fun.  I count myself lucky that I was effectively out of work for only five months, my job essentially terminated by Mr. Hope and Change.  Still glad I didn't vote for him.

There's a story about the Republican challenger to Harry Reid characterized those collecting unemployment as lazy.

To be fair, in Minnesota, you qualify for unemployment only as long as show that you're actively seeking a job.  So that part of the article is accurate.

Where the author and the chorus of group-thinkers get it wrong is that all of these jobs have disappeared.

The article cites there are 15 million unemployed people, and that only one-third of them are collecting unemployment insurance.  The group-think chorus spouts the "conventional wisdom" that the jobs are gone.

Wait a minute.  I believe there are at least 10 million jobs available for American citizens.  Know where I'm going with this?  Enforce our immigration laws.  Herd the illegal immigrants back across the border and tell the governments of Mexico, the nations of Central America, and various little shit-holes around this world to solve their economic problems themselves.  And if they've got too many people, tell them the solution is not to smuggle them into our country, but to do 2 things:

• Eliminate corruption and foster a business-friendly environment
• Educate their populations to not breed like wild rabbits

And those citizens' original jobs?  They'd come back if the government would get out of the way and let us recover from this recession.  Instead, this litany of stimulus spending has been nothing but digging us into a deeper hole.  We were promised unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%.  Yeah, shame on anybody that bought that line of crap.  Reagan once famously said that you cannot spend your way into prosperity.

And I realize it's anecdotal evidence, but I recall attending a 2008 election party with an unemployed software engineer.  She'd been unemployed for 3 years at that time.  I couldn't comprehend that.  I still can't.  Three years?  She ain't trying hard enough.

During my unpaid "vacation", a former colleague observed that, amongst us engineers, any of us could get a job in a couple of weeks if we looked outside Minnesota.  To many, that's outside a personal comfort zone.  I have some advice for the habitual whiners who can't find work where they live:  Move.  I did.

Whose side are they on?

So now we hear that the Obama administration is going to sue the state of Arizona.  Fine, as some conservative pundits have observed, maybe the administration's legal officials will finally READ THE $@!% law!

Then again, someone might purchase a winning lottery ticket and slip it under my door this evening.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in her now-infamous interview in Ecuador that the federal government in the U.S. should be the ones making immigration law.

Sure, no argument from me.  But how about you enforce the existing immigration laws?  Because S.B.1070 is just a state-based version of the federal laws.

I read today about how sections of Organ Pipe National Monument are now off-limits to the American citizens because we have citizens of a foreign country invading our sovereign territory with impunity, bringing violence against anyone who opposes them.  Citizens who pay taxes that support the upkeep of the park cannot enjoy the fruits of their taxpayer dollars.  Why aren't more people enraged?

I am sick of the tear-jerker line about how these people are simply coming here for the economic opportunities we take for granted.  You know what?  After spending the last five months of 2009 out of work and ineligible to receive unemployment, I surely don't take the dwindling economic opportunities for granted.  During my unemployment, I suppose I could have robbed a bank or cheated on my taxes or committed insurance fraud to get out from underneath my mortgage.  But I didn't, because those things are illegal, just like non-citizens working under the table.  Laws, when enforced, are meant to restrain our individual liberties to the point that they do not infringe on another's liberties.

It's interesting to me, in this "post-racial America" as it's been called, that the news media wouldn't side with U.S. citizens in the lower economic classes, especially blacks and hispanics.  To be fair, some illegal immigrants work hard for chump change, but some of them come to this country and leech off public services intended for citizens.  Others join gangs and commit violence, often resulting in the deaths of American citizens.  This year, we've had a rancher murdered on his own property by a invading force.  It doesn't matter that the invading force was a bunch of smugglers as opposed to the Mexican army (which routinely violates the border as well).  A hostile act was still committed by a foreign national against a citizen of the United States.  Has the federal government done anything?  Has it applied pressure on the Mexican government to bring the rancher's killer or killers to justice?  Has it done anything to protect others who live in border states?

And someone please tell these sniveling Latinos and Latinas that the U.S. didn't steal their land.  It won it through armed conflict in many cases.  It also bought land from Mexico!  What are we supposed to do, take worthless desert, build up economic prosperity in it, and then give it back?  Well, then, let's sell it back, accounting for interest and the economic infrastructure created from scratch.  It'll resolve this whole issue, and we'll have some extra cash to pay down that debt the last few presidents and members of Congress have run up.



At the same time, we've got the Gulf oil spill and the criminal incompetence of the federal government.  I'm no expert on oil, but it seems to me that the sooner you clean up a spill, the better.  The sooner you deploy booms, the sooner you separate that oil from the water, the better .  What escapes me is the priority that seems to have been given to identifying who to blame.  Joe Biden's prediction was a little off, since it was  sixteen months into the Obama presidency and not six months, but we are seeing Obama's leadership skills being put to the test.  Guess what?  He failed.  He demonstrated why a community organizer is not the same as a leader.  The community organizer in Obama knows how to get the folks riled up, but a leader is someone who motivates others to get the job done.  Some lefty in the media, who's starting to see the light, recently described Obama as some type of ineffective middle-manager.  No, he's not any kind of manager at all.  I've worked for bosses both good and bad.  The worst of my bosses wanted to be my friend.  The best of them never sought my friendship, but they did earn my respect.  In the past, my last boss told me what needed to be done and when it needed to be done by.  But that was only half his job. The other half was to make sure I had what I needed to complete the job efficiently and correctly:  Adequate time, any tools, and whatever obstacles could be removed from my path.

Let's see:  Could Mr. Obama have removed obstacles such as the Coast Guard requirements of having an adequate number of life preservers on oil-sucking barges?  Or the ban preventing the use of Dutch oil booms?

What's worse, the administration has punished all the other oil drilling platforms that have operated accident-free for about a half-century.

He's not alone in this.  The media villified BP for drying to sell some of the crude they've collected from the Gulf.  Umm, what else is BP supposed to do with it, stick it in some giant holding facility somewhere?  OR could they sell it and use the profits to fund their clean-up?  No. No.  No, that makes too much sense.

Don't get me wrong, BP and Transocean screwed up.  But the administration isn't exactly smelling like roses here, either.

De-friended for political reasons...

A friend of mine on Facebook ceased to be yesterday evening.  He also ceased to be the friend of some of our mutual friends at the same time.  Coincidentally, mine and their political viewpoints align on a great many fronts.  Were we de-friended because we don't think Barack Obama is the greatest thing since sliced bread?  Quite possibly.

I recently glanced at the info page of this friend and former co-worker.  He explains why he is a Democrat:

Why I am a Democrat.

When I was born the Republican party stood for individual responsibility, states’ rights and financial conservatism. After many years of being in the minority in Congress, the Republicans decided that they needed to find a new set of voters. They found their calling in being anti-communist. Anti-communism united the free marketers and the religious conservatives under the Republican banner. Being anti-communist worked for the Republicans, they did everything they could think of to bring down the Soviet Union and it worked. That is where things started going wrong.

National Debt:
President Bush promised "Read my lips, no new taxes" on the campaign trail in 1988. In 1991, he was the most popular President in history, and then his economic advisers came to him and said that taxes needed to be raised if we were going to get the deficits under control. George Bush remembered what he said, but decided to do the right thing and raise taxes, resulting in the longest economic expansion in US history. The American people burned him for it, and he lost the election. Since that election, the financial conservatives in the Republican Party have basically been silenced. We used to have "tax and spend Democrats". Now we have "borrow and spend Republicans". China now owns half a Trillion dollars of the US federal debt. The whole world owns 2.6 trillion dollars of the US federal debt. The impacts of this massive debt on the US economy are going to be felt for years to come.



How dare the American people punish the man for going back on his word!  This is the same mindset that villifies Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty for signing a no new taxes pledge.  What my friend glosses over here with regards to George H.W. Bush is that the country was hit by recession in 1991.  Bush was not on-board with Reagananomics, calling it "Voodoo Economics" when running against Reagan in 1980.  Eight years later, he uttered the infamous "no new taxes" phrase.  Some people think he was paying supply-side economic theory lip service just to secure the nomination.  And the reason why Bush lost the election in 1992?  Try the same reason Bob Dole lost in 1996.  A billionaire name H. Ross Perot who understood 25 years ago that tax-and-spend and borrow-and-spend weren't the only options when it comes to fiscal policy.  In a nutshell, Perot espoused "tax-less-and-spend-less" as a means of getting the countries finances back in order.  Perot was the reason why Bill Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote, merely a plurality.  Speaking of Clinton, my friend claims we used to have "tax and spend Democrats".  Uh no, they're still here.  They didn't go anywhere.  And my friend ignores the close relationship between the Clinton administration and Red China.  Remember Al Gore at the fundraiser at the Buddhist temple, who later claimed he didn't know he was at a fundraiser?

Spreading Freedom:
When we were fighting the communists, the most successful strategy we had was convincing the world that the United States was a force of good, by spreading freedom to areas that had been denied it, predominantly in Eastern Europe. With the end of Soviet Communism, this policy abruptly stopped. While the goal of spreading freedom is shared by both Republicans and Democrats, it appears that for Republicans it was just a tactic to beat Communism rather than a strategy for a better world. The current President Bush paid lip service to democracy in Palestine, but when the Palestinians elected people we don't like, we did everything in our power to force them out of power.






Ironic that Democrats were always against this so-called "nation-building."  And with the end of Soviet communism, stopping the spread of communism ceased to be as much in our national interest, not to mention politicians would have a hard time justifying "priming the pump" when the pressure was off.  This led to the aforementioned economic prosperity:  The USSR came in second place in the Cold War.  The US could start paying more attention to domestic issues.


Culture of Fear:
When Communism was the big problem, Republicans stood for strength. Now all that I seem to hear from Republicans is to be afraid. No matter what the problem is, the Republicans are selling fear of it. Fear the Islamists; they are trying to destroy our government. I don't think Ronald Reagan was afraid of a few thousand guys, no matter who they are. The best thing the US can do is project an atmosphere of strength and calm throughout the world. Fear the Muslims, they want to make you wear a veil and pray 5 times a day. Fear the Democrats; they want to take away your guns. Fear the homosexuals, they want to convert you.




This is his viewpoint.  I agree that paralyzing fear isn't useful, but fear that motivates vigilance is quite useful.  Only a fool fears nothing.  What a person does in response to their fears is what matters.  If they allow themselves to be controlled by fear, then yes, he's right.  But I prefer to control my fear and act with vigilance.  Muslims?  I got a couple of acquaintances who are Muslim, and I doubt they're going to slit my throat anytime soon.  But there have been over 10,000 terrorist attacks committed by radical Muslims since 9/11, and countless attacks before then.  And let's not forget that Osama bin Laden, in an open letter to the USA, declared that the attacks against Americans and American interests around the world would continue until we convert.  These dirt-bags envision a global Islamic Caliphate.  They've said so.

I won't dignify the Fear the Democrats meme with a lengthy analysis.  I'll just point out the Democrat meme of Fear the Republicans; they want to see blacks back in slavery and women out of the workplace and back in the kitchen!

I don't fear homosexuals, but I am wary of the guilt trip they try to lay on us straights in order to further their agenda.  Were it not for "straight guilt", they wouldn't wield nearly as much power as a minority.  My former colleague also neglects the evidence regarding the blacks and latinos who voted for Prop 8 in California, two groups that vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.  I have no problem with gays joining in a civil union and getting all the tax benefits as a straight couple.  But marriage is a religious sacrament, and I feel there's a legitimate concern about a religious or religiously-motivated group being forced to acknowledge a couple's secularly-ordained status.  We've already seen this, with Catholic Charities being harassed by the state of California because they refused to allow an employee designate her lesbian partner as a health insurance dependent.  Where are all the "Separation of Church and State" folks when stuff like this happens?

Black and White:
Under communism, all shades of gray were available to the Republicans ( think Nixon going to China). R

Um, no, an oppressive Communist regime is an oppressive Communist regime.  That doesn't mean we can't establish diplomatic and trade relations with them.  When it comes to terrorism, to fanatical devotion to a belief system, be it religious, ideological, or some combination thereof, there is no middle ground.  Such enemies already see things in black and white.  Remember Obama's comment about the moderate members of Taliban?


 To summarize, my friend, while a nice guy, sees some things not as how they are, but as he would like them to be.  It's sad that if I and fellow conservatives have been de-friended simply for disagreeing with him, then he's not really as open-minded as he likes to think he is.  By the way, in all the above paragraphs, he only tells us why he's not a Republican, yet it's supposed to be about why he's a Democrat.  Well, perhaps he can delve into that some other time...