If he's right in saying that many small groups can, often with the assistance of the fair and balanced media achieve a level of influence that belies their small membership, I'd prefer that he'd do so without the cheap stereotypes.
"From the NRA to “One Million Moms, powerful conservative lobbies that don’t reflect the values of the American people can somehow dictate what politicians on both sides are willing to stand for."Well yes, but so can lobbies in general, that's what they're for -- and so can lobbies that don't "kick shit" but can and do kick the facts around just a bit. I don't think we can assume for instance, that because the NRA has only four million members it doesn't reflect something similar to what a great deal more than four million voters believe to an extent -- rightly or wrongly.
I have severe misgivings for instance, about the facts behind many of the pet straw men of the right and left and sorry, there's no shit on my boat shoes -- besides, the greater issue is far too non-funny to treat in this way. There are fewer opportunities for burlesque when describing what may be a larger plurality in America -- the moderates, the centrists, the pragmatic and the analytical. And so we either ignore them or try to force them into a category we know how to mock, because too often mockery, hyperbole and stereotypes are all we have.
If there's humor in the street theater we get instead of news, I'd have to bring up the crowds waving angry signs and shouting slogans like "no weapons on airplanes" in response to the TSA's decision to allow golf clubs and tiny knives so small that a diminutive Gerbil could carry an 'arsenal' in one cheek. One "fact kicker" activist found it worthwhile to wave around a large and lethal hunting knife for the cameras recently in hope that the sort of liberal Maher characterizes as never having met a regulation they didn't like, would identify one with the other and fail to ask how someone would take command of a jetliner with a putter or lacrosse stick much less a "weapon" hardly big enough to sharpen a pencil. Are these people a majority or would they all fit into a VW beetle? They'd like to make you angry enough so that you won't ask. Does it help to dismiss the right wing faithful as "shit kickers" while we bang on the ban drum about making soft drinks illegal and prosecute parents for photographing their kids in the bathtub? They don't miss a chance to stereotype us and we make it easy for them.
Will it take some sort of Buddha to remind us that there is a middle path, that Agnew was wrong and extremism is pretty much a vice all the time, that mockery is as much the tool of the bigot and racist and liar and crook as well as of anyone, that cynicism and sarcasm and the throwing of stones are dangerous techniques for those not beyond reproach? Maybe, maybe not and perhaps that Buddha would risk crucifixion -- it happens.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteWe should expect media people to maintain or improve the standard of discourse; when they don't, they're being destructive. I don't care for the stereotypes about so-called "rednecks" either -- some very nice, honest people might well be called such.
I find the whole "soda size ban" thing ridiculous: yes, people who slurp that sugar-laced crap are killing themselves with a straw, but it isn't government's place to tell them what size soft drink they can have. That's patronizing.
I think it's a case of the abyss looking into us, but it certainly gives the opponents a handle to grab when seeking to defame us. I just hate to play their game and I hate to appear to be nothing more than Republicans with a minus sign. Extremism certainly is a vice and when it reduces us to petty regulations, poorly thought out, it reminds me of how often we're our own enemy.
ReplyDeleteEvery time we win an election and don't have any immediate dragons to slay, it seems we start snarling at each other -- or worse, snarling at the straw men we create for the purpose, just like the bigots on the other side. We make it so easy for them to come back stronger.
Over a half-century ago, when I was a mere polyp instead of a full-grown 8pus, soft drinks came in smaller bottles. On a hot day if you were still thirsty, you ordered a second drink. These days, drinks are so gargantuan - half ends up in the waste receptacle. It is the way businesses that package this stuff force more consumption on consumers – and the way corporate America creates an unhealthy practice that eludes all common sense.
ReplyDeleteBloomberg may have overplayed his hand; yet businesses that promote this junk escape blame. Ours has become a society that trades on excess consumption and waste with no restraint. And it has become a vicious cycle: We equate freedom with excess and excess with freedom – as we hurtle downhill towards obesity and diabetes. Today’s fast-food chains remind me of yesterday’s tobacco lobby: Both kill their customers slowly for profit and without forethought.
Hell, don't let a surly cephalopod dissuade humanoids from committing suicide. Lemmings, I tell yah ...
If we blamed Corporate America for selling to lazy pigs we'd have to blame farmers and truck drivers and grocery clerks as well. If you just loved the food offered in your High School lunchroom, I'm sure you'll appreciate what the nutrition experts would restrict us to, given the chance. Obesity worldwide seems to follow prosperity even though it's true that in our country poverty produces similar results. Twinkies are cheap and chicken fried steak with a quart of gravy is cheaper than fillet mignon or sushi but then so are salad greens.
DeleteBut you know, the public isn't going to accept government regulated menus and if the Democrats try to treat us like children once again, we're going to loose elections once again.
It all goes to what I've been trying to say -- we've been defining ourselves as opposing tyranny without noticing that we're just Republicans with our hats on backwards too much of the time: the stereotyping, the making up of fictions or the marshaling of anectodes to support policy, the lack of concern for what can and cannot be accomplished. . .
The government should not be in the business of deciding the size of my burger or soft drink I choose. It should be in the business of educating our youth from K through 12 in nutrition and providing healthful physical activity so future generations make informed and healthy decisions.
ReplyDeleteTime to have a robust salad, some salmon, with healthful water and later engage in some moderate to vigorous exercise for this conformed informed libertarian with a small "L"...
Notwithstanding your antipathy towards nanny government, look at it this way: One way or another, we are all going to pay ... either in terms of higher health insurance premiums, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, or local taxes in support of emergency rooms and hospitals.
DeleteIt would be preferable not to have government always intervene on such issues, but all too many people are just too damn irresponsible (or outright stupid). Yup! One way or the other, we are all going to pay ... unless Bloomberg gets his way.
Lemmings, I tell yah ...
One way or another we're all going to pay taxes and die, but what bothers me is the presumption that some prissy activists are going to make personal choices, or at least are self impressed enough to think they have the capacity to get us to behave by writing rules and regulations. Remember the 55mph speed limit? Remember Prohibition? Sorry, the public will drink what it wants to drink and may drink even more it the Mothers Against Everything get involved. I'm asking the one thing most of the Liberals I know don't ask -- will it change anything? and I don't think it will other than to add more pieces of paper to our lives.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone look behind the presumption that you or I can't drink these megaton sugar bombs without getting fat or sick? There are people who can burn up many thousands of calories every day and others who because of genetics or lack of activity cannot. I'd as soon put up with banning milk because some people are lactose intolerant or banning wheat because of the one percent who can't eat it -- and believe me, those self-appointed dictators are trying to do just that.
I read an interesting study of mummies - Egyptian,
Peruvian and Arctic and it seems that the same rates of heart disease and other major life ending diseases don't correlate particularly with diet or lifestyle and because we really don't know much more or at least the public doesn't know about nutrition and longevity that the snake-oil sellers don't tell them, I say nuts to these nuts -- and no I'm not allergic to peanuts.
Captain,
ReplyDeleteOver a half-century ago, when I was a mere polyp instead of a full-grown 8pus, the humanoid population was below 2 billion people. Today, the humanoid population is over 6 billion and rising - a more than 3-fold increase within my lifetime. Where will all those mega-size soft drinks of the future come from? Dyspepsi-Cola?
Within 100,000 years, long after humanoids have become extinct, the Earth will be overrun with ants and cockroaches. It will be a veritable feeding frenzy for Green Eagle and his flock.
Lemmings, I tell yah ...
Green Eagle feeds on wingnuts. However, I am very suspicious that a lot of the content of wingnut blogs is written by cockroaches, so Green Eagle will probably not go hungry.
ReplyDeleteOcto:
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt that overpopulation is deadly to freedom and though people may laugh at me, I think Malthus will have the last giggle.
Our manifest destiny is to eat ourselves out of existence.
" it isn't government's place to tell them what size soft drink they can have."
Amen.
I have lost all confidence that we will ever cure the Democrats' hubristic Utopian fantasies about peace, safety and tranquility through universal regulation and universal obedience. But let's please, please please re-read all the hydrophobic but convincing hyperbole that gave us the Volstead act, the disastrous stupidity of which still lingers. Great intentions and a bloody outcome.
You are not going to reduce the New York waistline this way. You are going to make the Republicans more powerful.
"you know what's gonna happen to you?...You're gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company."
-Colonel Bat Guano-
Republicans will argue, and I will agree with Saurian wisdom that the government has no such documented right and if they do have it, they must then have the right - for the public good - to regulate every single damn remnant of personal freedom and independence we might have - in the interest of saving money. This is so antithetical to every liberal thing I hold dear, I can't believe I'm hearing it from Liberals. We're buying into the health care industry's unwillingness to pay claims and restrict coverage to those least likely to need it.
Was Bill Maher right? Are we really unable to resist any regulation our tribe offers? Do we dream of spending our lives in a nutrient bath of good intentions, protected and immobilized; soothed and preserved by the power of good intentions and with no need for us to question or regulate the regulators?
But why ban soft drinks by size? Some have no calories at all and vendors will simply provide smaller cups with free refills anyway. What about beer, milkshakes, banana smoothies, Starbucks 1275 calorie frappalappadingdongs. . . The average American eats about 77 pounds of french fries a year. What about those? Let's ban apple pie. There is no biological need for pie.
But noooooo - it's not about pie or 1800 calorie double bacon cheeseburgers or the 2200 calorie cheese fries, it's about the Coke says the expert. Focus on the coke alone. Yours is not to argue anyway. Experto Crede it says over the gate, and if Dr. Experto says this is what our problems are about; this is what we must focus on, you'll damn well shut up and obey -- for are we not Liberals?
ReplyDeleteWill we issue special Federal Diet Act exemption cards for athletes or underweight people - people on Chemotherapy? Will overweight people have to wear yellow stars? Will underweight people have to sacrifice because someone else isn't at some esthetically perfect weight or has raised his odds of diabetes?
I don't want to live in a country where some half-educated "experts" tell me what I can eat and how much of it in one sitting. I don't want to and hardly anyone else wants to either; other than those whose wet dreams include obedience. Hardly anyone has confidence in Nutrition as a real science anyway and I suspect that any more playing into the hands of the Far Right will be the heat death of the Democratic party.
Entropy increases and so do waistlines as time goes by, but to eat or not to eat, that's my question. That our too too flabby flesh would melt is not within their power or right to regulate and they haven't the answer to how it can be accomplished anyway. Obesity is not well understood, despite what the diet profiteers and the purveyors of books and magic berries and various pills, gadgets and fancy dances insist.
I think the Democratic Nurse Ratcheds are going to have to tolerate just a bit of risk -- allow us to assess our own risk tolerance or we're going to have to tolerate being raised in cages like Col. Sander's Chickens -- for the good of all, that is.
Imagine:
Sorry sir, I can't supersize your fries, you're too fat according to the USDA standard body mass index. Sorry sir, no dessert unless you eat your vegetables. Krispy Kreme stocks? Sell NOW! Sorry sir, we can't let you sit in the library, you need exercise. Get out there and run because American can't afford your lazy ass and the business of government is business, not preserving your damn freedom.
Sorry Nurse, I'm a free-range human and I'd rather be Republican than put up with that shit. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of culinary happiness! There will come a time when we'll all be eating roaches, you know, and glad of it. Eat drink and be merry while ya can.
If one supports this kind of soft-drink ban, one might as well go all the way and ban all beverages that contain anything but "rain water and grain alcohol." Anything else is part of the commie plot to turn us all into slaves with fluoride. We have that on General Jack D. Ripper's authority.
ReplyDeleteMany Right-wingers seem to think they have every right in the world to use religion and fake patriotism to turn us all into obedient little children; we "damn libruls" need to resist any urge to do something similar for our dear brothers and sisters the unhealthy and obese "for their own good."
This is the kind of thing -- nutrition -- that can only be taught by good example. Parents need to raise their kids with an appreciation for the ethics of eating: decency towards one's fellow creatures, and staying healthy -- and maybe with a private contempt for unethical practices and stupid eating habits.
Finally, one thing that can at least be done is to legislate that corporations be clear about what they're putting in our food and drink. We already have some laws for that, but maybe they could be a lot better. They have no business complaining about such a demand.
Thank you Capt. and bloggingdino, reasonable and rational arguments. Reminds me of the Classical Liberalism I studied all those many years ago when such things were studied
ReplyDeleteRN,
ReplyDeleteI'm naive enough to think that to be Liberal is to oppose unnecessary authority. Silly me.
Dino,
You wouldn't believe how many locals strongly oppose fluoride. We still don't have it and to look at many of them is to wonder if there any dentists in this county. You're right about the Right, but when I see "liberals" trying to make us obedient little children, sometimes for the sheer love of obedience, I begin to wonder.
Don't forget that the Recht side of the aisle still thinks Upton Sinclair was out of line and the "market forces" will weed out bad and dangerous food and drugs ( after enough people die) even though experience denies it. Yes they can indeed fool almost everyone all the time.
Seriously, I'd trade my hide for scales if I could. Dinosaurs don't torture animals. They just eat them.