My dad -- a cantankerous small business owner who was an old-school conservative, which means back in the day when you could be thoughtful and intellectual without being excommunicated for "not being conservative enough" -- always had a great take on the immigration debate.
He used to say, "my opinion is, let everybody into the country that wants to work...and deport everybody that doesn't." He then went on to extoll the virtues of immigrants as laborers and the overall laziness of native-born Americans.
There's much in that viewpoint to piss off right and left alike, but even though I don't endorse his opinion, I sure find it refreshing. Because it's so...intellectually honest, and personally arrived at. Imagine that. I certainly can't imagine my dad, if he were alive, showing up at a Tea Party meeting and finding much of an audience for that sentiment.
I miss my dad's conservatism. But then, he grew up in a time when taking responsibility didn't just stop at the end of your driveway, and when people didn't have thousands of media outlets telling them exactly what to think.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Daily Snark
Ever post a comment that sums up how you feel so well, that you want to mark it down for future reference?
Here's mine for the day:
To arrive at a fact, you have to attempt to weigh information objectively and fairly. This is a concept that's now completely devalued and ridiculed in our society, which I find absolutely insane.
But I suppose it's BIASED of me to say so.
Here's mine for the day:
To arrive at a fact, you have to attempt to weigh information objectively and fairly. This is a concept that's now completely devalued and ridiculed in our society, which I find absolutely insane.
But I suppose it's BIASED of me to say so.
Friday, August 6, 2010
It's Hard Work
After another supremely irritating encounter with a few dittoheads on Facebook, I've decided I'd like to completely reorder the political divide in this country to what it truly is.
Instead of having a battle against liberals vs. conservatives, I propose a debate against:
1. People who realize the world is a complicated place, with many competing interests and ideas, and that actually solving problems requires real thought, commitment, and decisions that are always going to make some people unhappy; and
2. People who want to piss and moan, and offer simplistic solutions to everything, if they offer solutions at all. (One of the people I went off on actually said something like, "so I suppose if we all raised taxes and regulated everything, it would solve the job problem". I told the guy, accurately, that if I was writing a parody of someone with his viewpoint, that's about what I would have said)
This is what drives me absolutely, completely batshit insane about this country and I will come out and say it: why I still support Obama, for all the mistakes he's made (and I think the biggest one is not communicating better). Because Obama falls in to the #1 category. And from what I can see, all of his most vehement detractors fall into the #2 category. When you actually sit down and look through the situation in the country fairly, and look at how we got here without idealogical bias, it's a lot harder to beat up on the guy. In fact, from what I can see, what he has done has been...pretty much exactly what he said he would do, and he won the last election handily. Funny in all this "discussion" of socialism how no one ever talks about that. It seems like that's sorta relevant to me.
And until someone else steps up that really seems like he or she wants to understand the problems facing the country and not just yell and wave articles of faith at them that, in the real world haven't worked out so simply or easily (lower taxes! Freedom! Rah! OK, how low is low enough? What about ballooning the deficit? What about Clinton's tax hike that was partly responsible for balancing the budget? What about the fact that the Laffer curve has not worked out in actual practice? Reaction: Blank stare, or blanket denial. Because, ahem...low taxes!!! Freedom!!!!), that's the way it's going to stay. Because I don't see anybody stepping up on the horizon to replace Obama that I can take seriously. In fact, the mainstream now is people saying things that 10 years ago would have sounded certifiably insane and/or seditious. It's people who want to sit down and think things through that are the big joke. Or worse, people like me are now the ENEMIES OF THE COUNTRY. Right? RIGHT?
What I find absolutely maddening about the state of politics these days is that people don't even have real discussion anymore. The folks I argued with this morning just threw up straw men and argued with THEM. For my part, I pointed out that they obviously hadn't exposed themselves to any sources of information that didn't tell them what they already wanted to hear.
There are, I hope, millions of people in America that are like me: basically moderate, and fed up with the fact that doing things, you know, rationally and pragmatically, doing things not because we believe in them real hard but because they verifiably WORK in practice, is out of fashion now and extremists are taking up all the air. I tend to take the liberal position in arguments just because most of the time, people are so full up with talking points from Fox News that they've never even heard anything else, but really what I want to hear is the ideas bump up against each other and let the best one win. I started seeking out alternate news sources years ago not because I wanted to be convinced I was right, but because I wanted to hear the debate, and I realized I was being prevented from hearing it!
Nearly everything I saw or heard in the media where two sides squared off against each other was carefully choreographed so that I basically learned...nothing. To actually figure out what was going on, I had to dig very hard to find real logical, rational point-counterpoint that withstood critical thought. And when I did that I realized a lot of things I had accepted because "everyone knew" they were true -- from the "liberal media" thing all the way down...was a pile of unadulterated crap designed to keep us all at each others' throats. And after 7 or 8 years of this, with the evidence of it piling up all around us, I cannot understand why more people still fall for it. The only explanation I can think of is people cannot stand to be wrong (myself, I would desperately love to be wrong about this, but nearly all the evidence so far points the other way, unfortunately). And all I can say to that is, I wish more people spent some time alone thinking trying to disprove their own point to themselves, before trying to prove it to someone else.
I know, what? Who does that?
Now we're a nation of people that bemoan how polarized we've become, while at the same time trashing the very ideal that enabled us to come together in the first place; the idea that diversity and tolerance are good, and that the other guy might have a point, and by considering that person's unique perspective, we make the country stronger. That's how we GOT here, people. It wasn't from all getting in our little idealogical teepees and closing our ears and crying, like Eddie Murphy in TRADING PLACES, "yah, yah, yah, I'm not listening to you!"
Instead of having a battle against liberals vs. conservatives, I propose a debate against:
1. People who realize the world is a complicated place, with many competing interests and ideas, and that actually solving problems requires real thought, commitment, and decisions that are always going to make some people unhappy; and
2. People who want to piss and moan, and offer simplistic solutions to everything, if they offer solutions at all. (One of the people I went off on actually said something like, "so I suppose if we all raised taxes and regulated everything, it would solve the job problem". I told the guy, accurately, that if I was writing a parody of someone with his viewpoint, that's about what I would have said)
This is what drives me absolutely, completely batshit insane about this country and I will come out and say it: why I still support Obama, for all the mistakes he's made (and I think the biggest one is not communicating better). Because Obama falls in to the #1 category. And from what I can see, all of his most vehement detractors fall into the #2 category. When you actually sit down and look through the situation in the country fairly, and look at how we got here without idealogical bias, it's a lot harder to beat up on the guy. In fact, from what I can see, what he has done has been...pretty much exactly what he said he would do, and he won the last election handily. Funny in all this "discussion" of socialism how no one ever talks about that. It seems like that's sorta relevant to me.
And until someone else steps up that really seems like he or she wants to understand the problems facing the country and not just yell and wave articles of faith at them that, in the real world haven't worked out so simply or easily (lower taxes! Freedom! Rah! OK, how low is low enough? What about ballooning the deficit? What about Clinton's tax hike that was partly responsible for balancing the budget? What about the fact that the Laffer curve has not worked out in actual practice? Reaction: Blank stare, or blanket denial. Because, ahem...low taxes!!! Freedom!!!!), that's the way it's going to stay. Because I don't see anybody stepping up on the horizon to replace Obama that I can take seriously. In fact, the mainstream now is people saying things that 10 years ago would have sounded certifiably insane and/or seditious. It's people who want to sit down and think things through that are the big joke. Or worse, people like me are now the ENEMIES OF THE COUNTRY. Right? RIGHT?
What I find absolutely maddening about the state of politics these days is that people don't even have real discussion anymore. The folks I argued with this morning just threw up straw men and argued with THEM. For my part, I pointed out that they obviously hadn't exposed themselves to any sources of information that didn't tell them what they already wanted to hear.
There are, I hope, millions of people in America that are like me: basically moderate, and fed up with the fact that doing things, you know, rationally and pragmatically, doing things not because we believe in them real hard but because they verifiably WORK in practice, is out of fashion now and extremists are taking up all the air. I tend to take the liberal position in arguments just because most of the time, people are so full up with talking points from Fox News that they've never even heard anything else, but really what I want to hear is the ideas bump up against each other and let the best one win. I started seeking out alternate news sources years ago not because I wanted to be convinced I was right, but because I wanted to hear the debate, and I realized I was being prevented from hearing it!
Nearly everything I saw or heard in the media where two sides squared off against each other was carefully choreographed so that I basically learned...nothing. To actually figure out what was going on, I had to dig very hard to find real logical, rational point-counterpoint that withstood critical thought. And when I did that I realized a lot of things I had accepted because "everyone knew" they were true -- from the "liberal media" thing all the way down...was a pile of unadulterated crap designed to keep us all at each others' throats. And after 7 or 8 years of this, with the evidence of it piling up all around us, I cannot understand why more people still fall for it. The only explanation I can think of is people cannot stand to be wrong (myself, I would desperately love to be wrong about this, but nearly all the evidence so far points the other way, unfortunately). And all I can say to that is, I wish more people spent some time alone thinking trying to disprove their own point to themselves, before trying to prove it to someone else.
I know, what? Who does that?
Now we're a nation of people that bemoan how polarized we've become, while at the same time trashing the very ideal that enabled us to come together in the first place; the idea that diversity and tolerance are good, and that the other guy might have a point, and by considering that person's unique perspective, we make the country stronger. That's how we GOT here, people. It wasn't from all getting in our little idealogical teepees and closing our ears and crying, like Eddie Murphy in TRADING PLACES, "yah, yah, yah, I'm not listening to you!"
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