Tag Archives: values

A Friendly Challenge to Conservative Voters

To my conservative friends and foes, first let me say, congratulations on your win. Unlike the Democrats, you managed to fill your heads with steam and ire and get out the vote. You also got a great deal of financial support from those good folks on Wall Street who really want to continue doing things the way they have been, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue than what I want to address now.

No, what I want to address now is your tendency to create your own reality, which just doesn’t jibe with anything actually like, you know, reality. You’re the most masterful wielders of confirmation bias I think anyone can see outside a psycho ward. In fact, over the past decade, your entire political and social SOP is what some, in the first half of the last century, termed the “Big Lie.”

(Which I’ve blogged on before, for the interested.)

Now, I realize I’m likely annoying you with my somewhat insulting, patronizing tone, but I humbly ask your forbearance. In my eyes, what happened Tuesday was almost uniformly a travesty for my beloved country and its people, and the bile hasn’t settled. Just think about how long it took yours to settle after Obama won. Oh right. It hasn’t yet.

I am, sincerely, interested in your thoughts on this stuff, though. Below is a clip from The Rachel Maddow show. Wait, wait, I know you’re programmed to stick your fingers in your ears and screech like an owl with its wing stuck in a car door when that hateful liberal dyke opens her trap, but for once, please, hear her out. I challenge you to actually watch this segment and respond to it with reason.

To me, she makes her case. And though I’m on the other side of the political divide from you, I’m not prone to simple acceptance of arguments which back up my side. As Rachel usually does, she provides actual evidence for her claims. And if she’s right, you’re living in a closed circuit echo chamber that creates its own “facts” and refuses to allow evidence into the loop that would disprove those “facts.”

Your reaction to this video could well prove her point further. I’m interested in that possibility. I’m also interested in knowing if, when faced with the possibility that the awe-inspiring righteous reportage of Fox News is actually misleading you all the time, you’re able to take a step back and see that perhaps they’re not so “fair and balanced” at all.

And don’t throw MSNBC’s partisanship at me, or rail about the liberal media, as deflections. Today we’re talking about this right wing echo chamber, and whether you can step outside it long enough to even see that it exists.

If it does exist, how can you continue to let it be your primary source of “fact?”

If it doesn’t, how do you explain Rachel’s individual points of evidence?

I hope you’ll watch the video and share your thoughts in the comments below.

MSNBC video: Echoing falsehoods still dont ring true.

A Man of Action, Guided By Reason, Motivated By Love

No one, not even me, ever knew my father’s first name.

Everyone always just referred to him by his last name, in classic tough guy style, and my dad was definitely a tough guy. Yet he was no thug, no bully, but a protector of those that needed protecting. A warrior, as defined by ninja Shihan Jack Hoban is “a man of action, guided by reason, and motivated by love,” and that was my father through and through.

My last name is Byrd. But that wasn’t my father’s last name. His was Spenser. And if you needed help, he was for hire.

Spenser wasn’t my real father, alas. He wasn’t even actually real. He was a character in thirty-nine novels by Boston novelist Robert B. Parker, who died of a heart attack while writing the morning of January 18th, 2010. He was 77.

So why do I claim Spenser as my dad? Continue reading →

Bumper Sticker Omens and The Lost Presidency

You’re not the president of me!

I had a custom bumper sticker of that statement printed during the first term of George W. Bush’s malodorous presidency, and the sentiment grew stronger day by day by day throughout his entire reign. That sticker, and my Re-elect Gore in 2008 sticker, decorated the back of my Trooper the whole time, and were joined by an Obama 2008 sticker only after Barack Obama sealed the deal as the Democratic candidate once and for all.

After Obama took office, I tried to remove the sticker, but the adhesive was too strong. I kept intending to take some sort of solvent to it, but didn’t get around to it. I did, however, take a black permanent marker to the word “not” as a temporary measure, making it read You’re the president of me. I didn’t want anyone seeing the sticker and thinking it was meant for Obama. He was not my first choice ( I still maintain that Gore should have run, and was the right man for the job), but I voted for him and hoped he’d do great things. He got automatic points for replacing the worst fucking president this country has ever had.

Obama’s been in office about a year now, so it’s worth appraising what he’s accomplished done so far.

  • Abandoned a leadership role in health care reform, except when he has worked to cripple it (as in taking single payer off the table before the debate even began, making secret deals with the very corporate powers we need to de-power, stating support for a public option while actually working against one behind the scenes, and allowing Joe Lieberman and a handful of other congressfolk to seize control of the issue from the elected majority).
  • Refused to allow proper investigation into probable criminal acts perpetrated by the Bush administration, obstructed release of incriminating information about same, and an embrace of  the same sort of misuse of executive power that Bush specialized in.
  • Treated the progressive constituency that elected him with condescension and disdain while seeking over and over to court right-wing cooperation in “bipartisanship” that never gets anywhere, and has netted him only unflinching and uncompromising obstruction from those he’s trying to reach, as well as a widespread personal demonization from the conservative rabble that often walks the line of encouraging violence.
  • Scuttled from making any changes to help his LGBT constituency in any ways at all, contrary to what he’d promised.
  • Failed to follow through on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay (and when it does happen, shows every sign of continuing similar policies toward prisoners wherever they happen to be held instead).
  • Poured untold billions of taxpayer dollars into bailouts of the corrupt entities that (unregulated during the Bush years) destroyed our economy, without bothering to make them accountable for the money or what they did with it, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, homes, and financial security without help.
  • Unceasingly favored corporate/financial interests over the interests of the American people at large.
  • Increased our commitment to pointless, expensive wars rather than beginning an intelligent process of withdrawing our troops.
  • Buckled over and over in the face of partisan opposition, failing to stand strong as a president elected by a strong majority.

God, I could go on and on, but it’s wearing me out just looking back at this man’s record thus far. There’s still time for him to step up and do some good things, but at the moment, I couldn’t vote for him again regardless of who he may be running against, because he’s taking my vote for granted in a way I just will not support. He and his staff obviously figure they can count on progressive votes because, after all, who else can we vote for?

The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is (a) anyone who gives him a primary challenge. or (b) no one. My best case scenario at the moment is a strong Democratic challenger bumping him from office next time around, and keeping Democratic majorities in Congress that that person would hopefully actually use for the good of our country. Second best, and this is something I never would have thought I’d say, would be a Republican defeating him while Congress stays Democratic enough to hopefully prevent the Republican from doing too much damage. No politician should hold themselves above accountability for their actions.

And that bumper sticker?

Well, unlike my Obama sticker, it’s still on my truck. Over the months the black ink over the word “not” has gradually washed away. Now I figure maybe I couldn’t remove it because I wasn’t meant to just yet. Listen up, Barack:

You’re not the president of me!

And you won’t be until you start doing the goddamned job you promised you were going to do.

Ali Wanted To Kill Americans, But Found Terrorism Way Too Tedious… (cartoon)

Great cartoon from Matt Bors:

Health Care Facts For The Actually Interested

Who decides if YOU get health care?

While our esteemed young POTUS gets all sincereish for the cameras about this wonderful Senate bill, let’s take a pause and look at what other countries are really doing with their national health care, as opposed to the scary stories woven throughout our shoddy national debate.

One of the essential arguments conservatives use against “socialized” care is that they shouldn’t be forced to pay for someone else. This principle trumps all, even down to the welfare of poor children. After all, they’re their parents’ responsibility. I guess if they die, that just gets lazy, unproductive genes out of the genetic pool.

Socialized systems vs. free market systems is a valid debate, though, well worth having. It all depends on what you think government is “for,” and how much duty American citizens owe their “greatest country on earth,” and how Darwinian you are in your concern about the welfare of other human beings.

Do Americans have a right to a good education?

Do Americans have a right to expect bridges they drive on to be well-built and maintained?

Do Americans have a right to emergency services maintained by their communities such as the fire department?

Some argue that we shouldn’t have those things, or that they should be part of the free market. That way, Paris Hilton gets the best schooling in private schools (lord knows she seems to need it), she can use a private helicopter to just fly over unsafe infrastructure, and she can use the money she would save on taxes to hire and manage her own fire department. Or maybe her condo association would handle that or something.

Meanwhile, poor people wind up with no or poor education, sometimes die in bridge collapses, and grab a bucket if their house catches on fire and they can afford a bucket.

The American way? Continue reading →

Frank Schaeffer: On Fundamentalism, Atheism, & American Life

A fascinating interview with Frank Schaeffer, one of the founding members of the modern religious right in America, who has since recognized the dangers inherent in the worldview he once espoused.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

Emotional Abuse

One of these days, I intend to write some about my childhood and relationship with my father, how I believe my struggles with depression are rooted there, and how I think I have become a very good father at least partly because I have such a flawed model behind me to veer as far away from as I possibly can.

For now, I just read a column that hit very close to home. It’s by Andrew Vachss, a mystery novelist and lawyer who is also a relentless advocate for abused children.

I’m a lawyer with an unusual specialty. My clients are all children—damaged, hurting children who have been sexually assaulted, physically abused, starved, ignored, abandoned and every other lousy thing one human can do to another. People who know what I do always ask: “What is the worst case you ever handled?” When you’re in a business where a baby who dies early may be the luckiest child in the family, there’s no easy answer. But I have thought about it—I think about it every day. My answer is that, of all the many forms of child abuse, emotional abuse may be the cruelest and longest-lasting of all…

The whole thing is here.

Hell Is For Children

From NBC Philadelphia:

Little_Soldier_Girl___Paige_in_Formation

Four-year-old Paige Bennethum really, really didn’t want her daddy to go to Iraq.

So much so, that when Army Reservist Staff Sgt. Brett Bennethum lined up in formation at his deployment this July, she couldn’t let go.

No one had the heart to pull her away.

I don’t believe in hell. But I sometimes find myself hoping it exists so that George W. Bush can fucking roast for all the children in the world who are growing up without their parents because of him.

child1

The Simple Health-Care Solution

In an editorial for the Washington Post, Sen. George S. McGovern (1972 presidential candidate who lost to Nixon, and boy that worked out, didn’t it?) offers up a simple, smart, elegant solution to our national health-care nightmare:

If we want comprehensive health care for all our citizens, we can achieve it with a single sentence: Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans. Those of us over 65 have been enjoying this program for years. I go to the doctor or hospital of my choice, and my taxes pay all the bills. It’s wonderful. But I would have appreciated it even more if my wife and children and I had had such health-care coverage when we were younger. I want every American, from birth to death, to get the kind of health care I now receive. Removing the payments now going to the insurance corporations would considerably offset the tax increase necessary to cover all Americans.

Medicare exists. It works. It’s beloved by its beneficiaries, who are such a large voting block that it’s beloved even by most conservative politicians, who ought to despise it as the dread “socialism” they fear so much. Why not just expand it?

We know that Medicare has worked well for half a century for those of us over 65. Why does it become “socialized medicine” when we extend it to younger Americans?

…We recently bailed out the finance houses and banks to the tune of $700 billion. A country that can afford such an outlay while paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can afford to do what every other advanced democracy has done: underwrite quality health care for all its citizens.

If Medicare needs a few modifications in order to serve all Americans, we can make such adjustments now or later. But let’s make sure Congress has an up or down vote on Medicare for all before it adjourns this year. Let’s not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. We all know what Medicare is. Do we want health care for all, or only for those over 65?

Those of us who care about our fellow citizens, rather than mostly ill-educated ideals of selfishness and short-sightedness, certainly do.

The whole piece is here. Thanks go to Betsy Burnam for making me aware of it.

A Political Reality (great cartoon)

Tom Tomorrow is by far one of the funniest and wisest editorialists drawing funny pictures…

tmw

Bush’s Third Term? You’re Soaking In It.

There’s an unfinished entry on my blog’s dashboard page called “Obama Lies!!!” in which I, a devoted progressive who despises Bush and Cheney with every fiber of my being, and who happily voted for Obama, was taking him to task for his spots of disingenuousness and his failure to stand up to the Right and do the things he said he would do and needs to do.

I wrote quite a bit, but burned out on the piece and never completed it. Now, happily, I have something to share that is much better than what I was crafting.

At TomDispatch.com, David Swanson (founder of AfterDowningStreet.org) has an essay that in great detail compares the Obama presidency thus far to what we might have expected had Bush been granted a third term. It’s sobering stuff.

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can’t you just picture it?…

The full piece is here. There is a short introduction by the site’s founder, Tom Engelhardt, and the actual essay by Swanson is a bit down the page.

Now don’t get me wrong. While I’m troubled (in some cases quite troubled) by much of what Swanson covers, I’m still glad to have a smart, sort-of liberal guy in office now instead of the war-mongering corporatist dullard we had. Obama may fuck up, but we’ll still be better off than we would have been with a literal continuation of Bush’s policies.

Putting Twitter & Facebook In Their Proper Places

I wrote a while back about the way social media is bringing us closer together (The New Telepathy of Social Networking), but of late I’ve been also pondering the ways that technology is boxing us in. And I’m not even talking about how World of Warcraft has reduced the actual world of thousands of people to an area about the size of their butt, with an orbiting satellite the size of the fridge.

When I went to see Bruce Springsteen a few months ago, people in the crowd were standing there texting while the sheer experience was roaring around them. Type type type…”At Bruce Springsteen show. Great stuff. Photos to follow…” Then they look up only to look at Springsteen through the device. The gadget is now a lens they need to even look at the world.

I always had that problem even with a camera, well before the advent of all these cool toys. I lived in Europe for three years, bought a pretty good SLR 35mm camera, took three or four rolls of film worth of pictures the whole time I was there. I just don’t like having a camera with me, urging me to use it, making me look for good shots rather than just seeing the world all around me.

Now, my cell phone is a great little camera, and if I use it twice in a year, call Guinness Book. But at least I’ll have it with me if I see Bigfoot.

And check out this poor soul:

These people just trekked for five days to reach the summit of Mount Toubkal in Morocco, the highest mountain in North Africa. Three of them are exhilarated, taking in the splendor. The other is playing her Nintendo DS. Maybe this’ll count as a high score.

Since getting into social media like Facebook and Twitter, I’ve had surges of activity broken up by periods I just didn’t want to bother to get online, and felt like I was failing to get to something I needed to do. Not in an addictive sense, but in the sense that I was letting folks down by not being “there” for them, wherever “there” is. And that I was losing ground in the professional sense because those inactive days I wasn’t working to increase my web presence and thus, hopefully, make more people aware of my book.

No more. I’m going to ease up on myself. I may not be one of the pithy geniuses who stitch their whole day together with witty tweets that are very engaging to read, but I’m not one of the folks who tells you I need a good shampooing and am eating a Nilla Wafer, either.

I’ll tweet when I have something to say. Which, really, is what everyone should do. I won’t go through my day looking for things to tweet about, or trying to figure out how to condense everything I do into 140 character summaries.

I’ll continue to blog as I’m inspired to do so, which has been my actual approach anyway, in spite of vague plans to blog on some kind of regular schedule.

And Facebook will be a place I check in a couple of times a day to see what my friends are up to, not a place I hang out in to make sure to catch the occasional status update that may tell me something useful or make me laugh.

I have books to write. Vistas to see. A splinter of a social life, a real social life, I desperately need to nurture back into something vital and whole. The social networking can help me with these things, but I have to make sure it doesn’t replace those things.

The Sweet Sadness of Parenthood

A friend posted this poem on her Facebook page and reading it brought tears to my eyes. Ah, parenthood…

“Her Door”

by Mary Leader

There was a time her door was never closed.
Her music box played “Fur Elise” in plinks.
Her crib new-bought–I drew her sleeping there.

The little drawing sits beside my chair.
These days, she ornaments her hands with rings.
She’s seventeen. Her door is one I knock.

There was a time I daily brushed her hair
By windowlight–I bathed her, in the sink
In sunny water, in the kitchen, there.

I’ve bought her several thousand things to wear,
And now this boy buys her silver rings.
He goes inside her room and shuts the door.

Those days, to rock her was to say a prayer.
She’d gaze at me, and blink, and I would sing
Of bees and horses, in the pasture, there.

The drawing sits as still as nap-time air–
Her curled-up hand–that precious line, her cheek. …
Next year her door will stand, again, ajar
But she herself will not be living there.

I Hear From Real America

And now “David Allen C.E.O.” will give the Republican response to my earlier political rant:

Your [sic] just another sanctimonius [sic] leftist asshole thats [sic] out there painting Real Americans with a broad brush. Trouble is you [sic] paint has been proved transparent. Forgive me for painting back.

We are out there working hard to keep your type from tossing whats [sic] left of our country off the bridge.

What can I say, really, that I haven’t already in the rant? I certainly can’t argue with his logic.

“Livin’ the Lie” (aka “The Republicans’ Pants Are On Fire”)

pantsonfire_2

A Rant. I say mean things about Republicans. If you’re a Republican friend of mine, rest assured I’m not talking about you. Or at least I hope not.

♦

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NY Times, quoting a senior Bush administration official in summer 2002)

We all know that politicians lie. Left, right, up, down, didn’t have sex with that woman, Iraq was involved in 9/11, God hates the gays (except, maybe, the ones getting head from self-righteous congressmen)…liars. All of ’em, to some extent. Continue reading →

Don’t Let The Fearmongers Screw You Out Of Improved Healthcare

[UPDATE: The original video went away, so I found another source. The link to it is below.]

You may not know who to listen to in the healthcare debate. But I’ll tell you who not to listen to: anyone who is obviously and cravenly feeding you bullshit in order to scare you.

LINK

How stupid do you have to be to buy into this nonsense?

It’s A Hard Knock Life (for Kev and Alice)

Now here’s something you really need to see.

A blog by Robin Burkinshaw relates the poignant ongoing tale of a homeless father and daughter trying to survive in a harsh world. But the harsh world in which they live is inside a computer, and the pair exist only in that virtual realm:

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes…

I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over.

Apparently The Sims has evolved to a point in which the artificial intelligence and social dynamics systems are damned near organic. The Sims have dreams, goals, and emotions and their behavior is driven by those qualities, resulting in complex relationships and interpersonal drama.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They’re living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour’s fridge.

When you create a person in The Sims 3, you can give them personality traits that determine their behaviour. Kev is mean-spirited, quick to anger, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he’s insane. He’s basically the worst Dad in the world…

His daughter Alice has a kind heart, but suffers from clumsiness and low self-esteem. With those traits, that Dad, and no money, she’s going to have a hard life.

Continue reading →

Do you smoke? If so, are you a dick? [updated]

And now, an actual RANT, with SCIENCE!®

Is this YOUR legacy?

Is this YOUR legacy?

One of my pet peeves is people who just toss their cigarette butts around with no consideration for the public weal, the environment, or their own basic human integrity.

I’ve been known to toss smoldering butts back into car windows, or to politely return a butt to a smoker afoot with a comment along the lines of, “Hey, you dropped this. Figured it was an accident ’cause you look like you have more class than those assholes who just toss butts on the ground.”

People respond either belligerently or sheepishly, depending on whether they give a damn about anything outside of themselves or whether they at least don’t want people to think they’re trashy.

I’m sure some of you reading this are smokers. Some of you are smokers and also friends, maybe even good friends. If you’re my friend and a smoker, rest assured that I’m very concerned about your health (though I’ll never broach the subject, since you’re not an idiot and know it’s bad for you). And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you toss your coffin nail remnants into an ashtray or bin where they belong, rather than treating the world as your goddamned ashtray. I think well of you, and just assume you’re better than that.

It’s not just a matter of litter, as ugly as the scattered constellations of dirty cigarette butts in the street, or in a park, or just along the highway, are. It’s actually bad for the environment. Really bad.

A doctor once told me that a single cigarette butt contains enough nicotine to kill an infant. And now this is in the news:

One of the most common forms of litter are cigarette butts.  Once these butts enter waterways, they become toxic to fish.  According to a new study by San Diego Sate University (SDSU), filter-tipped cigarette butts are deadly to marine and freshwater fish.  In fact, researchers would like to have the butts classified as hazardous waste.

Cigarette butts are not biodegradable. The filters are made up of 12,000 plastic-like cellulose acetate fibers that trap nicotine and tar.  There’s enough nicotine trapped in 200 used cigarette filters to kill a human!   An estimated 1.69 billion pounds of butts are littered each year worldwide, so you can imagine the negative effects these butts have on aquatic life when they wash into streams and oceans.

SDSU Public Health Professor Tom Novotny explains, “It is toxic at rather low concentrations. Even one butt in a liter of water can kill the fish in a period of 96 hours…”

Professor Novotny continues: “When they unconsciously throw their butts onto the ground, it’s not just litter, it’s a toxic hazardous waste product, and that’s what we’re trying to say. So that may be regulated at the local or state level. And we hope people will be more conscious about what they do with these cigarette butts.” [Source: “Cigarette Butts Kill Fish According to New Study,” Blue Living Ideas]

There’s also this article from KPBS at San Diego State University, and likely a bunch more.

So, if you smoke, keep this stuff in mind. You can smell bad if you like, but please don’t be a dick.

UPDATE: A very good friend who’s a vet tells me “One single cigarette butt consumed can kill a dog or a cat according to the National Animal Poison Control Center – nasty !!”

So just think, worst case scenario, a single butt you throw on the ground could kill a dog, a cat, or a baby. Nice work, kemosabe.

Conservative radio host gets waterboarded

Finally, a right-wing radio bozo walks the freaking talk and lets himself be waterboarded to prove it’s not torture. He changes his stance very quickly.

Okay, Hannity, your turn. You said you’d do it, walk like a man.

Vodpod videos no longer available.