The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State. The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral. The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.…
Category: Politics
People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing
I’m a tad upset. The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.
Why?
Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception. Jail. Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.
Again, why? This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives. Privacy. The ability to control your own person. The responsible management of your own life. But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality. …
Wake Up! We Are Not Parts!
I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here. There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head.
Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake?…
Dust Motes
Cleaning my office, which serves double duty as a guest room. We have company coming in this weekend and that’s always a good excuse to clean up.
So while I’m moving things around, listening to very loud music (Deep Purple, Who Do We Think We Are? which I think is one of the great underappreciated rock’n’roll albums of all time), thoughts are buzzing around my head.
Already this morning I posted a response to someone on a group discussing Science vs Religion—a topic fraught with the potential for all kinds of angsty in-your-face defensiveness—wherein I once more found myself in the position of turning an argument around on someone who had decided that I had insulted him by insisting on evidence and common sense and the practice of looking at alternative explanations that might undercut a cherished experience. …
Because Things Are Forgotten
This is a completely personal anecdote, so take it for what it’s worth. This is about a defining moment for me in my education as an egalitarian.
Equality is something we talk about, we assume to be the case for everyone, and never really question. Here, it’s the air we breathe. It’s not true. We are not all equal. And in spite of our all our lip service to the idea of equality under the law or the equality of opportunity, we all know, if we’re honest, that we’re still trying to get to that level. Probably it’s a function of how well we think our lives are at any given moment. …
Schools
I spotted this over at John Scalzi’s Whatever and it brought back some memories.
A woman in Ohio has received a felony conviction for deceptively sending her kids to a school in a district where she didn’t live. Her father colluded in this. The article linked doesn’t go into the reasons she did what she did, but I can imagine some of them, and it would have entirely to do with quality of school experience.
Fifty years ago, my schooling experience—and I phrase it that way because I’m talking about much more than just what you learn in the classroom; it’s a total package, going to socialization and self-image and the whole magilla that a lot of people condemning American public education, depending on their political slant, don’t want to think about—was in the process of being thoroughly fucked up. …
Ahistorical Nonsense
Representative Michelle Bachman is the national voice of The Tea Party. Recently, in speaking to a group of Iowans, she made some claims about American history that would be laughable if they had not come from someone who likes to style herself an authority of Constitutional matters. She claimed that the glory of our country is that color and language didn’t matter, nor did class or parentage, that once people got here, “we were all the same.”
Wishful thinking at best. Certainly that was the idea behind the Declaration of Independence, with its grand opening phrases, but like all such ambitions, it took reality a long, long time to catch up—and it still hasn’t. …
Challenge the B.S.
Let’s be clear:Â no one should advocate censorship.
That said, we need to understand the power of language. Images matter, words matter, what you say has an effect. Every propagandist in history has grasped this essential truth. Without oratory, Hitler and Goebbels would never have turned Germany into a killing machine.
The only antidote, however, is not less but more. Not more propaganda, just more words, more images, more information. More truth.
Ah, but, as the man said, What is truth?
Sarah Palin, or her speech writers, has decided to play with that a bit and compare the criticism against her rather fevered rhetoric to the Blood Libel. …
Taking Cues
I’d intended to give this a little more thought, but the events in Arizona have prompted a response now.
In the last post, I opined about the atmosphere in the country generated by overheated rhetoric and the irrationality that has resulted from seemingly intransigent positions. Some of the responses I received to that were of the “well, both sides do it” variety (which is true to an extent, but I think beside the point) and the “you can’t legislate civility or impose censorship” stripe.
As it is developing, the young man who attempted to murder Representative Gifford—and succeeded in killing six others—appears to be not of sound mind. …
If You Can’t Play Nicely With Your Toys…
We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate.
Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon. On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people and wounding eighteen others before bystanders tackled him. (There may be a second man involved, police are searching for him.)
The rhetoric is already ramping up on both sides over this. Loughner is a young man with, apparently, a history of mental difficulties. What is interesting in all this is the suggestion that Sarah Palin is partly responsible. …