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About Me
- Kirby Olson
- Upstate, NY
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28 comments:
A guy walks into a bar;
alcoholism is destroying his family.
Who's right is an enormous question. Among the left something absurd has cropped over the last thirty years that if you're from an oppressed group you're more likely to be right than if you're from a group that is functional.
Thus, Obama is right because he's black. Of course, he isn't really black. Or I should say, he's black, but not from the oppressed group that many blacks configure. Oppressed blacks are those from a slave background. Obama's heritage is upper middle class white on the one side, and upper class black intellectual from EAST Africa on the other side.
He never had any difficulties in school, went to Harvard, and has never really worked for a living.
He's good looking, plays sports well, and has a superior intellect.
Thus, he has never been oppressed.
However, the left is so stupid that they think he was simply on the basis of his color.
And so, they think he also can't be questioned.
This is the same thing that animates the Sotomayor discussion, or many others.
Who's right can't just be a demographic! Otherwise an aquacephalic of the right race and gender would be seen as "wise"!
I find this to be the most obviously wrong aspect of the Democratic party.
Humor of course in and of itself can also be wrong, but the prevalence of it especially when turned on itself or oneself is a good sign that the person is willing to listen to alternative voices or perspectives.
The left wants to find simple scenarios in which white on black violence is focused upon. Black on white violence is never focused upon, or black on black violence. Probably no one wants to know what happened in Rwanda among the left. This would screw up their simplistic coordinates.
They want us to remain within their almost mindless rubric of rgc. It is for this reason that they have to be scolded endlessly and rooted out of every institution, until they wake up. They have adopted a dangerously simplistic feel-good thought-pattern which is killing America.
Kirby,
Race, gender, class as rock, paper, scissors.
One might as well say, prejudice, privilege, and ignorance.
Among the left something absurd has cropped over the last thirty years that if you're from an oppressed group you're more likely to be right than if you're from a group that is functional.
...
[and about 50 more lines of similarly scented effluent.]
You claim that you want a meaningful discussion, and you claim to admire meaningful discussion when one occasionally breaks out on your blog. But you're doing nothing to advance such discourse, and a partisan tirade like the one above deserves only a partisan response.
Fortunately, sometimes you get more than you deserve.
So let's take on the notion of oppression. Your diatribe starts out by conceding the very point it intends to dispute, when it acknowledges the reality of oppressed groups, and tacitly accepts the notion that race, gender, and class are axes through which oppression acts (not that this should be taken for an exclusive list). Congratulations, you're making great progress!
Let me focus on those race and gender, and set aside class as a separate discussion. I believe that the vast majority of people, and this includes you and me, acknowledge that oppression has acted strongly down the axes of race and gender in the past, but this is far less true of the present. Progress has been made: slavery is dead, and women can vote (the LCMS excepted).
So let's try to identify where there is a residual difference of opinion.
Granted that the magnitude of oppression acting down racial and gender axes has been greatly reduced, we might ask now (a) whether significant oppression continues into the present, (b) whether effective action has retained the same sign (this is the place to argue about reverse discrimination), (c) the extent to which past and present oppression has shaped our current society, and (d) whether or not the government has either an interest or the right intervene in dealing with oppression and righting the wrongs that it has caused.
And even more fundamental questions lie just below these: What are the responsibilities of an individual to his/her society? What are the responsibilities of a society to the individuals who make it up? And how does our shared Christianity affect our answers?
those who work those who pray those who fight
warriors workers and worshippers
a rich black lesbian rules the media
i know who has the answer
but i'm not telling
class trumps gender and race
scissor cuts paper paper covers rock rock smashes scissors
the class rock is a paper gender which scissors through race like a darwinian greyhound
the hound of heaven walks into a bar
and says
i'm looking for somebody
how to build a polite society
who cares if it functions or not
as long as everyone is being polite and considerate of everyone else
i find that most comedians are resorting to foul rhetoric and audacity
in order for something to be funny it must be a little frightening too
a little hmnh what should we say ...strange
the fool on the hill
jack and jill
of course she gets to go first
and realizes that she is a member of a defeated and oppressed population and won't let jack forget it and jack says i think i know how black people feel and starts to play the blues on his guitar thinking that maybe if someone discovers him he may get rich they got it all mixed up jill fell down with great renown like britney or lindsay why can't they both be more like doris day and jack came tumbling after with a broken guitar
not with a bang but a whimper
it's hard to have class in a gender race - everyone gets to look foolish after awhile
jh
I grant that there has been tremendous oppression in terms of rgc, but it's not the only oppression. The very short take a beating, not only in terms of not getting yesses on date requests but in terms of overall income. Plus, they get shot from cannons for the general amusement.
And let's never forget Lyme Victims on this hot summer day!!!!
Lyme is something that about 2% of the population are suffering from. The documentary Under Our Skin has interviews with various Lyme doctors who claim the disease is a close cousin of syphilis and can be spread sexually.
The entire AMA is arrayed in a vast oppressive gag reflex to conceal the seriousness and widespread nature of the disease so as to spare insurance companies the onus of paying out for long-term coverage.
But a great number of people just can't seem to shake the disease. It's now about 4 million people. It has to be very aggressively treated over a period of years!
And do you care, Stu?
No, because it's not high on the PC agenda. You get your marching orders from very weird Marxists hiding in the pews of your church and standing on the vast green lawns at the U of C, belching smoke from some industrial furnace 150 years old.
Still, I appreciate your contributions, and your willingness to knock some cents into me, a penny saved is a penny earned.
Thanx.
I say we owe everything to our families, and then a crumb off a cookie to the ever-receding waves of stuffy immigrants who press in on us, oppressing us with their body odors, lack of passports, and willingness to vote for those who will empower them in exchange for waiving their illegality.
The very loss of a sense of humor amongst the left is oppressive enough. Just a lot of stuffed shirts, waving every flag but our own.
It's easier to change your class than it is to change your race or sex. However, opinions of race and gender have changed, whereas opinions of class have not changed much. People without class should go to finishing school, it was once thought, but now many see this as an erasure of one's class, a kind of genocidal destruction of a whole way of being. Others in the gender wars sought to make women more like men: short hair, pantsuits, the works. Within racial groups the idea was to straighten one's hair, and learn how to pass. All this is now increasingly questionable.
But the real problem for me is Lyme. I don't mean to be all sour about it, and whip lemons into the works, but how would you like to have Lyme and get no official encouragement from the media?
So far no major political figure has so much as mentioned Lyme insofar as I am aware. It's not an essential plank for either party.
We are facing an invasion not only from Mexico but within our borders from bizarre parasites. As the ecology breaks down, and our academics are fighting wars from the past that have largely been resolved, a quiet epidemic is plaguing our loved ones. It makes their tummies ache and heads hurt, but no one much cares in the left because it doesn't fit into the wars fought over rgc. Anything that doesn't fit into rgc is ignored.
I say we can no longer afford to ignore Lyme.
If it was a woman's disease, or an African-American disease, or a gay disease, the media would be all over it. But it strikes everyone, across the board. It's an American disease.
Let's let it unite us once more into a great nation, under God, with broad medical benefits for the PWLs.
If I run again (and I might, if my issues are not addressed!), then Lyme will be my central plank.
I hope no one misses JH's wonderful poem above. It's his best piece ever, I think.
A rabbi, priest, and imam walk into a bar;
they have a good time despite their religious differences.
At any rate, it's not that I deny rgc esp. in the 19th century, we now have a black president and women rule the roost in many places, plus have a secretary of state, and no one any longer has any class, so we might as well fuggetaboutit.
I'm quite concerned about the new microorganisms in Lyme, and how they are invading our forests. I've put out a call that the helicopter gunships and drones currently over Yemen and Afghanistan should instead be hovering over Connecticut and blowing deer to ribbons, but nobody listens since Bambi has been sentimentalized by Walt Disney even though Bambi is a careless killer of children.
I'm also concerned about gorillas in Rwanda. Sure, they have no class, and cross the genders, and have problems with their sexuality and appear to be somewhat black in color (except for the silverbacks) they are dwindling as are the panthers and the gibbons.
How do we prioritize?
Ladybugs are toxic.
Do not handle them! You can't handle their toxicity! They appear to be tiny versions of a Peter Max type car, so many hippies think they can handle that, but like the hippies themselves, ladybugs are toxic, and cause problems, first of all in terms of identification by gender, if not class and race.
Ladybugs are not VWs, and have nothing to do with them according to the DNA charts.
Kirby,
And do you care, Stu?
No, because it's not high on the PC agenda.
Actually, I've know Lyme victims, and consider the condition to be a serious one. But consider your position on the matter. Self-evidently, the invisible hand of Adam Smith has not yet seen fit to allocate resources to Lyme's cure through profit-seeking private enterprise. So, despite your occasional strange-bedfellow libertarian allies, you're no libertarian: you seek and indeed feel entitled to a governmental Lyme initiative, and you're resentful that larger resources are being allocated to AIDS, which you see (not entirely unreasonably) as being a disease of behavioral choice.
To take the CDC's side here, they have to allocate the limited dollars they have in such a way as to have maximal public health benefit. In the case of AIDS, the disease is a sexually-transmitted retrovirus. Sexually-transmitted diseases have their own epidemiology, and a big part of this is that the victims are also vectors (i.e., agents of disease propagation), and so (absent control) the disease can exhibit an exponential growth rate. Without treatment, HIV progresses to AIDS in 5-12 years, and to death in 1-2 after the onset of AIDS. At the beginning of the epidemic, there was no treatment. Even today, there is no cure -- it is a managed, chronic disease.
Lyme has a very different mortality/morbidity profile. Lyme disease sufferers are not contagious, so there's little danger of an explosive increase in the disease rate. Lyme is also a disease which is usually diagnosed early, and for which effective treatments exist in the great majority of cases. Yes, bad outcomes are possible, but they represent a very small fraction of those who contract Lyme.
And there are a number of reasonably effective ways to control (if not eliminate) Lyme. One is simply controlling deer populations, which all Lyme-affected states do already through regulated hunts. The argument could be made that sustaining the herd size as maximum sustainable harvest (the metric that is usually used) ignores a substantial epidemiological cost, and that smaller herd sizes would have larger social utility (the reduction in the value of the harvest being more than offset by the reduction in cost and human suffering due to Lyme). I'd be sympathetic to a well-made, well-sourced, evidence-based argument of this form, but good luck arguing it with the NRA crowd. They talk about freedom, but really, they're all about their entitlement to own and use firearms, which represent a far greater epidemiological risk than Borrelia burgdorferi. Another might be to interfere with the tick/bacteria life-cycle, as is done in malaria control. Another, certainly in wide use, is public education about mitigating Lyme risk, and about recognizing Lyme symptoms.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about a Lyme cure in the long run, and perversely enough, I half expect it to come out of research on STDs. Lyme, like syphilis, is a disease of spirochete bacteria, and current early treatments regimes for Lyme parallel early treatments for syphilis. Very likely, a cure for one is a cure for the other.
Stu is quite well informed on the Lyme problem. I don't know if I feel entitled to government support on the Lyme issue, but just saying that outside the rgc axis are innumerable problems that don't get funding because the political support groups for AIDS and for many other diseases are there, and can attract political coverage because of the constituency that gets the diseases (nobody cares much about drug zombies probably but gay people have managed to persuade most that their behavior demands the attention of the Democratic party -- Obama has specifically targeted that group and said he would give billions to their cause (he reneged and now they're just furious with him).
If you can form a political action group and present a sizable group of voters to the Democrats, they are all over it.
Babies of course that no one cares about they are only too happy to genocide out of the way to get the votes of their serial killer moms.
It's quite depraved, but that's what that party is all about. Nothing can be done, except to point it out.
For me, Lyme is the biggest problem on earth. I'm not sure why. I just hate it, because I can't stand seeing kids suffer just because of so many bamboozling Bambis about.
Great joke from GM further up the thread. Try to catch it.
Kirby,
Great joke from GM further up the thread. Try to catch it.
Actually, two. The first one really bites. I appreciate that, and commend him for it. But I liked the second one too. My intuition has always been that people of real faith understand one another, irrespective of the faith each confesses. It's the milquetoast of our own faiths that we find hardest to comprehend. We are given joy and power, and they're content with happiness and ritual.
Apropos our infinite discussion, and my apologies if this has been told before...
A pro-choice pastor and a Catholic priest are arguing over when life begins. So they turn to their common friend, the rabbi, to break the tie. He says, "when the dog dies, and the kids move out, then life begins." I know whereof he speaks, and bow at his wisdom. Our dog is still with us, but our kids have moved out. I can only commend the rabbi's wisdom.
My wife and I just spent five days in Door County, Wisconsin. Many thanks to Kirby for providing a bit of cover, but I have to say, given what happened the last time my wife and I decided on a brief get-away, that I half expect that Picklesworth and his wife and baby are there now. So it goes...
Pickles -- if you're there, make sure you check out Cave Point Park, and the Stepping Stone Winery :-). And I wish I'd spent more time checking out pottery places. If you get the chance, make sure to gp to Ellison Bay Pottery, and listen to the potter. He's a gentle, generous, wise soul, and his work is sublime.
Stu wrote: Apropos our infinite discussion, and my apologies if this has been told before...
A pro-choice pastor and a Catholic priest are arguing over when life begins. So they turn to their common friend, the rabbi, to break the tie. He says, "when the dog dies, and the kids move out, then life begins." I know whereof he speaks, and bow at his wisdom. Our dog is still with us, but our kids have moved out. I can only commend the rabbi's wisdom.
I like the joke Stu and don't recall hearing it before, thanks. Reminds me of this one, and yes, forgive me if you've heard it before:
A Protestant pastor, a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi in Northern Ireland were engaged in a lively conversation. Suddenly, an angel appears to them and says: "I'll grant each one of you a wish. However, be careful what you wish for."
So, the Protestant pastor says, "Please ban all Catholics from Northern Ireland. The Catholic priest says, "Please ban all Protestants from Northern Ireland." Then, there is silence, finally the angel says to the Jewish rabbi, "What about you? Don't you have a wish?" To which the wise rabbi replies: "Oh no, just grant them their wishes, and I'll be quite happy."
Shalom,
Dim Lamp
What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?
The Holocaust.
Also, there's no "free market" because multinational corporations are allowed to manipulate the government in ever-terrifying ways.
Our enemy is neither Obama nor Palin but Monsanto. Though it would be helpful if folk like Obama and Palin would speak out against such corprorations instead of taking their money.
edward scissor hands
rock with a vengeance
what does the rocknroll world mean by class
is there a class act in modern performance
i think not
maybe dylan
maybe emmy lou harris
they're both rich
one is a red dirt girl the other is a iron range jew
who sings gospel tunes
this engenders all kinds of problems
and then comes the rat race
a monk walks into the bar
says
do you serve dom benedictine here
oh yeah
we serve anybody
says the bartender
level playing field here
what can i get you?
the bell rings
there is very little by way of class or race issued in the halls of desperation on the streets of delirium
men are more often wastrels
but women do it with a certain class
0ne 2 three
jh
The paper said scissors had no class.
This rocked the nation.
Everybody changed genders in protest.
The new policy said everyone should change genders, and race, and class, by the morning. So, the politburo monitored this, and soon enough, everyone had also changed their politics accordingly. The administrators pronounced this a success. The following year, people were turned into vegetables to limit the food intake and to promote solar power, but some continued to walk in the moonlight.
"The very loss of a sense of humor amongst the left is oppressive enough"
This is one of your soapbox statements that is so demonstrably false as to make me question your sanity -
The funniest people in the world are all liberal.
The Republican who went into politics based on fame did so off of a persona of shooting people.
The Democrat who went into politics based on fame did so off of a persona of humor.
John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are the great political comedians of our time.
You have a few things you say that are somewhere near true - but this whole 'liberals have no sense of humor' thing is as stupid as extremist liberals running ads against blue-dog democrats.
" our academics are fighting wars from the past that have largely been resolved"
So here you're admitting that you're done with the whole Marxismderp?
Two Right-wingers walk into a bar and see that the bartender is black.
Right-winger #1 yells 'I hate N@#$%rs!!!'
The bartender says "please don't use that type of language. It is rather offensive."
Right-winger #2 says "leftists are overly PC and have no sense of humor."
Oversimplification is the fertile ground of propagandists.
Get people to accept negative labels and you can get them to do anything, including cursing, stoning, killing and bombing "the enemy."
I often think you deal in labels, here, Kirby.
Fielding Dawson said you could use language like a club, and beat people into dizziness. The silk hammer.
When speaking of your children, you sound like a mild-mannered patriarch attending to the needs of his family. But when you've been boning up on shock-jock patter, you turn into a spook.
Footnote: God forbid we get into the Lyme Disease argument again. Noooooooo.
Stewart and Colbert are chalk on the blackboard to me -- I can't even listen to an entire sentence from either one. They just scream "I'm so intelligent, and if you're not with me, you must have an IQ of 10" followed by a giggle. Humor is interesting in this regard. If you can't stand the viewpoint at the heart of a jokester, you tend to find their humor humorless. Which makes my dismissal of leftists as humorless into a kind of cybernetic loop. They have humor, but to be in that loop, you have to have similar beliefs. My beliefs are quite different, and so I find them humorless and annoying.
"I'm so intelligent, and if you're not with me, you must have an IQ of 10."
Hmm, that's not true.
Colbert's a pun-machine, if nothing else.
Sounds like you're projecting your insecurities...
It's true for me, but not for you. Therefore, it's still twoo.
You can't wipe out my subjective experience. It's how a lot of centrists experience the communists.
It may not even be Colbert's express intent. It may be some kind of attitude that he's not even aware of. Humor to a degree depends on a feeling of superiority. It comes through with leftist comedians (at least to me) with the subtlety of a bazooka shell.
Here's another example of how a problem won't be taken care of if it requires a clampdown on a minority group that is protected under the aegis of rgc. Mexican illegals are spilling into America at astronomical rates: many of them with a criminal background. The cartels have almost cmopletely decimated that Mexican legal system. But Obama can't do anything because he's afraid of backlash among Hispanic voters. Chris Matthews argues that he needn't worry: that the Hispanics will vote decidedly Democratic (except for Cubans) and that they will deliver California and New York to the Democratics without fail.
But elsewhere we may have a slow move to the right amongst all those adversely affected by the invasion of illegals. Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, up to Pennsylvania and even New Hampshire.
Obama visits Puerto Rico, and assures them he's on their side, no matter what. We want your votes even if it means criminality and kidnappings, and Sotomayor's wisdom in the SCOTUS.
But I think the demolition crats already have Hispanic votes.
(Except of course, for Cuban Americans, who are majority Republican and lead by decent folks like Marco Rubio.)
Obama's increased deportations, and has done a pretty good job of increasing the focus to be on illegals committing other crimes.
The right stalemates itself by wanting impractical solutions, or just by letting things be as they are so businesses can keep getting the cheap labor that they rely on.
I'd have to reread to be certain, but I remember Bush being pretty reasonable wrt immigration (being that he was from Texas, he had some understanding of the situation), but alack, the other repubs were too far to the right to get anything done.
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