Straw Man

If we are going to start to be civil in our discourse, I really really have to STOP seeing articles like these:

A List Of Barely Socratic Questions To American Progressives

and

7 Nonpolitical Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives.

Click the links if you wish your head to explode. Entitling the first link "barely Socratic" is an understatement. It is exactly and specifically un-Socratic. And the 7 non-political differences are, as you can probably guess without clicking the link at all, completely and totally political in every way.

I really want to post every "question" from the list and answer each one. It's easy. Instead I'll pick a few of my personal faves.

Why do those demanding "equal pay for equal work" never protest against "equal pay for little or no work"? A: Um, because that is universally recognized as a really stupid idea. Nobody would do that. Straw Man.

Why has no politician ever run on men's issues or promised to improve the lives of males? A: Because we are still, for better or worse, the top of the work world's and social world's food chain.

How did the "war on poverty" end? Has there been a peace treaty or a ceasefire? Who is the occupying force and who are the insurgents? A: It will end at the same time as the "War on Drugs." And probably cost less.

If capitalism makes some people rich without making others poor, who will benefit when capitalism is destroyed? A: Nobody will! Hey! We agree on a point here! Since nobody here wants to destroy capitalism, we can shake hands on this one!

If cutting out the middleman lowers the price, why are we paying the government to stand between us and the markets? A: Yawn. Straw Man. Like above, since nobody wishes government to stand in the way, I guess we'll be seeing things like lower insurance rates now, won't we??

If racial profiling is an abomination, what do you make of the last presidential election? A: I think you missed the definition of racial profiling here...

If diversity training benefits everyone, why do those classes mostly consist of white heterosexual males? A: Because...we are still the statistically largest group in employment?

Why is a huge poisonous cloud over a volcano considered magnificent - but a smokestack over an American factory is ugly and harmful? A: Wait...who said a poisonous volcano cloud is magnificent? I don't recall that ever being said.

How many Kyoto Protocols are rendered pointless by one medium-sized volcanic eruption? A: Oo! Oo! I know! ZERO!! The Kyoto protocols don't stop the earth from doing what it does naturally because we can't! Just what we humans add to it.

Why is burning gas in my car hurting the planet, but setting fire to housing developments in California is saving it? A: We...purposefully set fires to housing development in California??

How come Hollywood can always find a good side in thugs, but never in businesspeople? What was the last movie that pictured a self-reliant, industrious man as a role model? A: Umm, the movie Tucker comes to mind...

Why do those who decry modern civilization never live far from shopping centers and why don't they grind their coffee with a stone ax? A: I am at a loss to whom you are referencing. Oh, wait...it's a Straw Man!

If describing terrorists as freedom fighters is justified by the journalistic principle of neutrality, what is the name of the principle that justifies describing U.S. troops as rapists and murderers? A: Ah, the old left-over Vietnam stuff. Nobody recently has described a terrorist as a Freedom Fighter, unless it is to quote what one of the terrorists say about themselves. And I haven't seen any news reports in decades that have described American troops as rapists and murderers.

How come industrial logging is a crime against nature, but the destruction of forests by wildfires is a natural cycle of life? A: See above, regarding volcanos.

If Al Gore is right and our consumption of the planet's resources is a moral issue, doesn't that make genocide an ethical solution? How about an artificial famine? What would Al Gore choose? A: Ahhh, the false choice. I love the smell of Fail in the morning.

Why is there never a media story praising capitalism for the booming economy? A: There are plenty. Just ask The Google.

Whew. That's a bucket of dumb.

But even worse are the "7 Differences." These are so horridly misaligned and completely devoid of actual fact that I hope, for the human race, that the publisher either meant these as ironic humor or felt a tinge, however small, of shame when he hit the "publish" button:

1) Conservatives are more patriotic than liberals
2) It's socially acceptable for liberals to lie about conservatives
3) Conservatives are results-oriented. Liberals are not
4) Conservatives care about the Constitution. Liberals don't
5) Liberals are much more misogynistic than conservatives
6) Conservatives are happier people than liberals (Editor's Note: after reading especially this blog article, the author may be on to something here...)
7) Conservatives are better Christians than liberals

I think our good buddy Streak has been doing a banner job of late pointing-out the fallacy in #7. But in the end, a refutation of any of these 7 points is an exercise in futility; they're all opinion-based, and this guy's effort smacks of blind dogma and base incitement rather than an honest attempt to engage in information or debate.

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Monday Righteous Indignation and Retort

My parents are hosting some vegans tonight for dinner.

This is very foreign to my parents. Despite the fact that each of them are very tiny people**, they are died-in-the-wool omnivores who cherish their grill and smoker, each tool thoroughly stained and seasoned with the drippings and spatterings of various and myriad carcasses.

My mom, whom we will henceforth call Matriarch Smitty, visited Web MD to find out exactly what the rules are for this strange type of diet; what is forbidden and what is allowed. On her search, she found a review of the book Skinny Bitch, which Web MD describes thusly:

If you've always dreamed of having a model-thin body and are willing to adhere to a hard-core, low-calorie vegan diet, you may want to join the legions of women following the sassy, smart-mouth advice doled out in the book with the unprintable name: Skinny B****.

A drawing of a pencil-thin model type in a skintight dress graces the cover of "Skinny," which -- with a tone that's part girlfriend and part foul-mouthed truck driver -- is not for the faint of heart.

OK, says Matriarch Smitty, I dig it. Girl power, blah blah, been there done that from the beginning in the 60s, but I'm game.

The idea of this book and of the whole vegan diet quickly fell apart for Matriarch Smitty when she stumbled across this phrase in the article:

The long list of forbidden foods includes all animal products (meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, fish), soda, beer ("for frat boys"), alcohol, caffeine, foods with chemical additives like artificial sweeteners, and anything with refined flour or sugar.

Woa. Woa. Wait a minute....beer is forbidden in this diet? Because it is for frat boys??.

Matriarch immediately called me on my cell with this emergency news that vegan diets are unacceptable, especially in light of the rip on beer. Bad enough, she reasoned, that beer - which is an organic product - is off the list; the reason they chose is crap.

I went to the Skinny Bitch website (link above), but couldn't find a comments page so I could flame it. Thus: the blog.

A few seconds' worth of searching Teh Google brings us to:

• A list of breweries serving vegan beer
• A really nicely-done list of vegan beer options
• A little blurb about what makes beer vegan or not

There you have it, Skinny Bitch.  Aptly named.  Typical elitist bullshit and a lack of understanding of the beer industry, unfairly lumping all of us into the "beer swiller" category.

I am hoping to find a way to email Skinny Bitch. If I can find her contact info, I may send her to this YouTube Channel, which, by the way, is so fucking great it actually inspires me. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the vegan's nightmare: Epic Meal Time.


**My mom is 5 feet tall exactly, and I believe she is less than 100 pounds, or right around it. My dad is 5'7 on a good day with big shoes on, and hovers around the 140-50 ballpark. By comparison, my brother and I are just a tad shy of 6-feet, and each of us 200 pounds or more. See folks? You can be small and have a healthy weight and not be a self-righteous vegan. Or you can also be me, with slightly-out-of-whack cholesterol and a need to drop 10-15 pounds...but hey, I'm pretty happy.

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In Case You Needed Clarification...

I found this article on the WaPo's new "On Faith" column. Normally, I read this column because I hate it and it makes me insane. For some reason, I need that in my day; that anger, that cleansing self-flagellation of reading things that make me furious. But this article this time? I agreed.

It's written by a Jesuit, and is extremely critical of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The article is clear on their partisanship:

This year, as president of the bishops' conference, he [Cardinal Francis George] led the attack on President Obama's healthcare bill, which he claims will fund abortions even though the Catholic Health Association disagrees.
...
The conservative tilt of the bishops' conference was shown even more clearly by the election for vice president. After two votes, the final runoff was between the two most conservative candidates of the eight bishops on the ballot: Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, who wants to ban pro-choice politicians from Communion, and Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, chair of the bishops' committee on the defense of marriage--the committee assigned to fight gay marriage. [emphasis added by me]

Now, none of this is particularly remarkable; gee, go figure, the Catholic Church is weighing heavily into our trumped-up "culture wars." Nothing really new there. But the article ends with the real point by this Jesuit, and it's the one that really got me going:

What is most remarkable about this meeting is that it took place in the middle of the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the bishops said nothing about it. It was as if they did not know that almost 10 percent of their parishioners are unemployed, that the new Congress is going to take aim at programs helping the poor and that now is the time to speak out for social justice. Their silence was deafening.

There. It. Is. When it comes time for the Catholic Church's leadership to show their true colors on social justice issues, they don't. They stick with gays and abortion.

Tone deaf as ever, it saddens me that Catholic enrollment is up 1.94%. I'm not sad for the church (I rarely attend) per se, I'm sad because that means that this is a reflection of the priorities of parishoners. With 1% of the U.S. holding not only 34% of the U.S.'s wealth but also a wealth that is more than the bottom 90% of our population as an aggregate, with the gap between rich and poor widening, and with more people being forced from their homes and in need of services...ma and pa Hackett still only care about gays and abortions.

Or is it just that they find a spiritual home in the Catholic Church, whose leaders are simply tone-deaf to their parishoners' real needs?

Or...are the poor not going to mass because, amidst homilies on abortion, biblical literalism and gays, does the church really offer them nothing?

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Let Them Eat Cake

Bill Maher, though an occasional asshole, is spot-on in his criticism of greedy bastards. Plus, I love how he does snark; it's a passing subtle comment more than the dripping hate that clouds my own brand.

At any rate, here's what Bill has to say about people who whine about a 3% tax increase:

New Rule: The next rich person who publicly complains about being vilified by the Obama administration must be publicly vilified by the Obama administration. It's so hard for one person to tell another person what constitutes being "rich", or what tax rate is "too much." But I've done some math that indicates that, considering the hole this country is in, if you are earning more than a million dollars a year and are complaining about a 3.6% tax increase, then you are by definition a greedy asshole.

And let's be clear: that's 3.6% only on income above 250 grand -- your first 250, that's still on the house. Now, this week we got some horrible news: that one in seven Americans are now living below the poverty line. But I want to point you to an American who is truly suffering: Ben Stein. You know Ben Stein, the guy who got rich because when he talks it sounds so boring it's actually funny. He had a game show on Comedy Central, does eye drop commercials, doesn't believe in evolution? Yeah, that asshole. I kid Ben -- so, the other day Ben wrote an article about his struggle. His struggle as a wealthy person facing the prospect of a slightly higher marginal tax rate. Specifically, Ben said that when he was finished paying taxes and his agents, he was left with only 35 cents for every dollar he earned. Which is shocking, Ben Stein has an agent? I didn't know Broadway Danny Rose was still working.

Cake?  Yeah...not so much...

Ben whines in his article about how he's worked for every dollar he has -- if by work you mean saying the word "Bueller" in a movie 25 years ago. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest, it's just that at a time when people in America are desperate and you're raking in the bucks promoting some sleazy Free Credit Score dot-com... maybe you shouldn't be asking us for sympathy. Instead, you should be down on your knees thanking God and/or Ronald Reagan that you were lucky enough to be born in a country where a useless schmuck who contributes absolutely nothing to society can somehow manage to find himself in the top marginal tax bracket.

And you're welcome to come on the show anytime.

Now I can hear you out there saying, "Come on Bill, don't be so hard on Ben Stein, he does a lot of voiceover work, and that's hard work." Ok, it's true, Ben is hardly the only rich person these days crying like a baby who's fallen off his bouncy seat. Last week Mayor Bloomberg of New York complained that all his wealthy friends are very upset with mean ol' President Poopy-Pants: He said they all say the same thing: "I knew I was going to have to pay more taxes. But I didn't expect to be vilified." Poor billionaires -- they just can't catch a break.

First off, far from being vilified, we bailed you out -- you mean we were supposed to give you all that money and kiss your ass, too? That's Hollywood you're thinking of. FDR, he knew how to vilify; this guy, not so much. And second, you should have been vilified -- because you're the vill-ains! I'm sure a lot of you are very nice people. And I'm sure a lot of you are jerks. In other words, you're people. But you are the villains. Who do you think outsourced all the jobs, destroyed the unions, and replaced workers with desperate immigrants and teenagers in China. Joe the Plumber?

And right now, while we run trillion dollar deficits, Republicans are holding America hostage to the cause of preserving the Bush tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest 1% of people, many of them dead. They say that we need to keep taxes on the rich low because they're the job creators. They're not. They're much more likely to save money through mergers and outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor, and pass the unemployment along to you.

Americans think rich people must be brilliant; no -- just ruthless. Meg Whitman is running for Governor out here, and her claim to fame is, she started e-Bay. Yes, Meg tapped into the Zeitgeist, the zeitgeist being the desperate need of millions of Americans to scrape a few dollars together by selling the useless crap in their garage. What is e-Bay but a big cyber lawn sale that you can visit without putting your clothes on?

Another of my favorites, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said, "I don't know where they're going to get all this money, because we're running out of rich people in this country." Actually, we have more billionaires here in the U.S. than all the other countries in the top ten combined, and their wealth grew 27% in the last year. Did yours? Truth is, there are only two things that the United States is not running out of: Rich people and bullshit. Here's the truth: When you raise taxes slightly on the wealthy, it obviously doesn't destroy the economy -- we know this, because we just did it -- remember the '90's? It wasn't that long ago. You were probably listening to grunge music, or dabbling in witchcraft. Clinton moved the top marginal rate from 36 to 39% -- and far from tanking, the economy did so well he had time to get his dick washed.

Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Obama just wants to kick it back to 39 -- just three more points for the very rich. Not back to 91, or 70. Three points. And they go insane. Steve Forbes said that Obama, quote "believes from his inner core that people... above a certain income have more than they should have and that many probably have gotten it from ill-gotten ways." Which they have. Steve Forbes, of course, came by his fortune honestly: he inherited it from his gay egg-collecting, Elizabeth Taylor fag-hagging father, who inherited it from his father. Of course then they moan about the inheritance tax, how the government took 55% percent when Daddy died -- which means you still got 45% for doing nothing more than starting out life as your father's pecker-snot.

We don't hate rich people, but have a little humility about how you got it and stop complaining. Maybe the worst whiner of all: Stephen Schwarzman, #69 on Forbes' list of richest Americans, compared Obama's tax hike to "when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939." Wow. If Obama were Hitler, Mr. Schwarzman, I think your tax rate would be the least of your worries.

Now I'm fired up. Where'd I put that guillotine...

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Egregious

Sometimes, this blog is simply a method of catharsis for me. So if I sometimes get unreasonable, it is most likely because I am venting.

I took Thursday and Friday off from work last week to relax and have some time to myself to recharge my batteries a bit. Friday ended up not working so well. Part of the reason was because my sump pump went out and I didn't notice it until a large portion of my storage area in my basement was flooded. But thanks to some quick thinking, the fact that everything of value is stored in plastic totes on plastic shelves, and the good people at Hedlund Plumbing in Lansing. I was back in working order. A few fans and a couple of dehumidifiers later, my basement is again bone dry. But that was still several hours out of my day off that I had to use to clean up my damn basement.

But that's not my big bitch.

My big bitch was that earlier that day, I went to my local book store to browse and relax and look for some new stuff...and I came across this piece of shit called How Evil Works by David Kupelian. At first, it looked interesting. Then I read the back cover of those who lent their support and thought it was the greatest book evah: Malkin, Hannity, etc.

I spent more than a goodly amount of time reading Kupelian's treatise. Here's what it boils down to: people on the left, and Kupelian's ideas about what they stand for, are evil. There is only one way for America, and those who disagree with that Way (primarily liberals and people whom they sympathize with) aren't just wrong, they're evil.

That makes me NUTS.

This is what it all boils down to: that if one disagrees with the talking heads on the Right, they aren't just "wrong" or "misguided" or even "have a different view." They're actually evil.

This could not be worse for America. I believe that this is why we see bricks through windows. Why Bart Stupak feels like he can't even connect his home phone any more and that he has to retire. Why Pelosi gets death threats. People like Kupelian have whipped people into a froth...and have paionted their political opposites as evil. And what do we good Christians do with evil? Apparently throw bricks through their windows, phone-in threats and the like.

The even bigger problem is that Kupelian doesn't speak for some fringe. Malkin, Beck and Hannity each pull viewers and readers in the millions. Malkin's venomous book spent weeks at the TOP of the NYT Bestseller list for "Culture of Corrpution." That's the real danger; this sentiment is shared among those considered the "mainstream" of conservative thought. This is unconscionable.

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