You would think that one the internet would do would be separate the knuckle draggers from the somewhat more evolved. After all, one has to be literate and moderately coordinated to type words into a browser. However, a simple perusal of the comments section of the Washington Post articles will disabuse you of that notion rather quickly.
Racism, long vanquished in many quarters to private homes and (homogenous) neighborhood bars, is in full throat in the comments section. It's one thing to have to explain to your integrated co-workers and other parents at your kids' school events and extracurricular activities why you keep a dog-eared copy of The Turner Diaries in your car and a photo of Hitler in your wallet, let alone your swastika tattoo; it's quite another to copy and paste blog posts from Stormfront on some public news forum under an assumed name (hey, I'm not dogging assumed names...I'm just suggesting that it's a bit more comfy being a racist when no one can call you out in person).
Of course, it isn't only racism. If only it were that simple. Conspiracy kooks of the first order hang out on these sites. Look, anything can be true when the burden of proof is that someone saw a youtube video showing how to knock down a building using magnesium shavings filed from a bicycle frame.
You people are morons.
And I'm sick of it.
I'm sick of having to explain the difference between registration and confiscation, and how slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies.
I'm sick of having to demonstrate that you can't compare a Watergate scandal that took two years to develop to impeachment level, with clear paw prints leading straight to the Oval Office, to last week's news, especially when it doesn't lead anywhere yet, and maybe never will. In other words, talk of impeachment is rather premature. Yes, I'm looking at you, George Will.
And I'm damn sick of people posting links to nutcase sites and claiming they "prove" anything other than that the person who posted the link is information illiterate. I spend a good chunk of my time trying to teach students the difference between scholarly sources and junk sources. If you have a link to a site purporting to have the inside scoop on Benghazi, and the site you've linked also has a story about how the moon landing was a hoax and crap about Hitler actually being a leftist, then you've failed the information literacy test.
And while I'm at it, let me talk to my besties on facebook. You may think it's clever to share pictures that match images of Obama with Nixon and claim Nixon was impeached for using the IRS for political ends, but then again you probably think the Civil War was actually a battle over states rights.
And seriously, stop posting twenty picture-slogans in a row. It's damn tedious.
Showing posts with label useful idiots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label useful idiots. Show all posts
04 August 2011
In which I imply yet another way to lower federal spending on unproductive areas...
The Post has an article today on Texas Governor Rick Perry's desire to destroy what remains of education in the state of Texas. Perry's argument, which is really couched in economic terms, is more of the same lament coming from cultural conservatives for at least the last thirty years and going back even further if you really care to dig around.
The complaint, in cultural terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who hate America.
The complaint, in more economic terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who don't agree with global corporations' priorities.
However, it's always useful if you can make this a purely economic issue, and therefore claim that ideology has nothing to do with it. So Rick Perry has determined that universities cost too much because they're filled with unproductive majors and programs (e.g. humanities and social sciences) and really the place needs to be run like a business.
Perry, who at Texas A&M was a "yell leader," which is what the insecure-in-their-masculinity powers that be at Texas A&M call what most people in the country call a cheer leader (if, albeit, a specialized one), is taking direct aim at one of the few institutions in Texas with any credibility, the University of Texas.
Look, I can understand his envy. He went to a third-rate school and, like many Americans, doesn't like "high falutin' thinking." So what better way to exact revenge than to turn Texas higher education into glorified trade school? The University of Texas is in fact the only thing that makes Texas bearable. It is, if you will, a flower growing in an otherwise barren and inhospitable landscape.
Take away the University of Texas and most Americans wouldn't give a rat's ass if Texas left the Union, aside of course from those people trying to get from Louisiana to New Mexico who would now have to go around the third world country.
The complaint, in cultural terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who hate America.
The complaint, in more economic terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who don't agree with global corporations' priorities.
However, it's always useful if you can make this a purely economic issue, and therefore claim that ideology has nothing to do with it. So Rick Perry has determined that universities cost too much because they're filled with unproductive majors and programs (e.g. humanities and social sciences) and really the place needs to be run like a business.
Perry, who at Texas A&M was a "yell leader," which is what the insecure-in-their-masculinity powers that be at Texas A&M call what most people in the country call a cheer leader (if, albeit, a specialized one), is taking direct aim at one of the few institutions in Texas with any credibility, the University of Texas.
Look, I can understand his envy. He went to a third-rate school and, like many Americans, doesn't like "high falutin' thinking." So what better way to exact revenge than to turn Texas higher education into glorified trade school? The University of Texas is in fact the only thing that makes Texas bearable. It is, if you will, a flower growing in an otherwise barren and inhospitable landscape.
Take away the University of Texas and most Americans wouldn't give a rat's ass if Texas left the Union, aside of course from those people trying to get from Louisiana to New Mexico who would now have to go around the third world country.
25 April 2009
No contest.
According to the Guardian website, American conservatives are all agog over the latest celebrity bigot, some runner-up in a beauty contest. The story is banal as far as I'm concerned. First, you've got the beauty contest...a sad anachronism that has tried to keep up with the times by instituting a whiff of an "intelligence" component through a question and answer period. Then you have the questioner, Perez Hilton, whose credentials demonstrate what a decidedly low-rent affair this event actually is. This contest usually is a throw-away blurb in the smaller papers that carry news about beauty contests, so you might say that both Prejean and Hilton did their parts by injecting a little afterlife into an inherently dead genre.
So the question was something along the lines of gay marriage and whether the erstwhile beauty queen supported or opposed it. She opposed it, it turned out, but her answer was so inarticulate that it took a while to figure it out. Here's the transcript:
Um, so she's for choice (leaving out the fact that choice is only available in 4 of 50 states, so she needs to qualify that American's are able to choose in only 8% of the United States). She reinforces that statement with another misconception that federal law covers same-sex marriage and something she calls "opposite marriage." But then she says that in her country she thinks that she believes -- so uncertainty enters in: she isn't actually sure of what she believes, but she thinks she believes something -- and then she finally comes out contradicting (slightly -- it's not a direct contradiction) her initial support for marriage choice with opposition to marriage choice.
To be generous to Ms. Prejean, one could argue that while she supports the ability of every individual to "choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage," she thinks she believes that it should only be between a man and a woman. In that iteration, it's not unlike some politicians' support for abortion rights while believing personally that it's not for them.
But, hey, she's not exactly trying to land a Rhodes Scholarship...she's trying to win a tiara and a sash, so let's forgive her confused answer to attention-hog Hilton's question. The interesting although entirely predictable thing is that blowhards like Sean Hannity and other bigots feel that she's a cause worth rallying around. It's true that their forebearers made hay and won a few elections for a while with bigotry directed against women and then, following the 19th Amendment's demolition of that strategy (at least as a national platform plank), bigotry directed against Blacks, but the larger lesson they should learn -- but apparently can't -- is that they are on the losing side of history all the time. Every time. They couldn't stop the march of women's rights; they couldn't stop the march of Black rights (and every other flower of the Civil Rights movement); they won't eventually be able to stop the march of gay rights. They've already lost so many of these battles, and soon the war.
Carrie Prejean is nothing more than a deckchair on the Conservative's Titanic.
So the question was something along the lines of gay marriage and whether the erstwhile beauty queen supported or opposed it. She opposed it, it turned out, but her answer was so inarticulate that it took a while to figure it out. Here's the transcript:
I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be between a man and a woman.
Um, so she's for choice (leaving out the fact that choice is only available in 4 of 50 states, so she needs to qualify that American's are able to choose in only 8% of the United States). She reinforces that statement with another misconception that federal law covers same-sex marriage and something she calls "opposite marriage." But then she says that in her country she thinks that she believes -- so uncertainty enters in: she isn't actually sure of what she believes, but she thinks she believes something -- and then she finally comes out contradicting (slightly -- it's not a direct contradiction) her initial support for marriage choice with opposition to marriage choice.
To be generous to Ms. Prejean, one could argue that while she supports the ability of every individual to "choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage," she thinks she believes that it should only be between a man and a woman. In that iteration, it's not unlike some politicians' support for abortion rights while believing personally that it's not for them.
But, hey, she's not exactly trying to land a Rhodes Scholarship...she's trying to win a tiara and a sash, so let's forgive her confused answer to attention-hog Hilton's question. The interesting although entirely predictable thing is that blowhards like Sean Hannity and other bigots feel that she's a cause worth rallying around. It's true that their forebearers made hay and won a few elections for a while with bigotry directed against women and then, following the 19th Amendment's demolition of that strategy (at least as a national platform plank), bigotry directed against Blacks, but the larger lesson they should learn -- but apparently can't -- is that they are on the losing side of history all the time. Every time. They couldn't stop the march of women's rights; they couldn't stop the march of Black rights (and every other flower of the Civil Rights movement); they won't eventually be able to stop the march of gay rights. They've already lost so many of these battles, and soon the war.
Carrie Prejean is nothing more than a deckchair on the Conservative's Titanic.
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