Sunday, October 31, 2010

Critique of Stewart

I'm indifferent about the speech Jon Stewart gave at the end of the rally on Saturday. Here it is if you didn't see it.



Summed up, he basically just wants the media and political parties to stop bickering, and come together to accomplish things, because we're all Americans dammit.

I have a problem with this message because first, it's the exact same message Obama came into office with. Obama's done some amazing shit in the short time he's been president, but you simply can't deny that what failures he had came about because of this attitude. Every single time he tried playing ball, Republicans took advantage of him. And second, his speech implied that the left is equally at fault for the partisan dick waving. The left isn't innocent, but implying that they're just as bad as Republicans is simply wrong. Democrats weren't the ones screaming at the president and calling him a liar in the middle of his address to the fucking country. Democrats aren't the ones race baiting and making white people fear minorities with campaign ads. It's not the left who's jumped into bed with corporations and special interests (at least not entirely). Democrats don't have a television station. Democrats aren't throwing Republicans to the ground and stomping on their heads. They are not equally at fault for the political climate in the country right now. That is a fact.

Additionally, if an idea is flatout wrong, then you shouldn't compromise with it. There are two types of things we debate about. The first is where compromise is on the table. These are the issues where truth is murky, and both sides have legitimate concerns. I'm talking about health care, or economic issues.

The second type of thing we debate about is over things that can be logically proven as true or untrue. There should be absolutely no room for compromise with these. Creationism should not be taught alongside evolution because creationism is wrong. Gay people should not have to settle for civil unions because they are human beings, and they are not separate but equal. These are debates that are over before they begin.

Just like how Republicans lump every issue into the second category, the problem I see with Stewart's speech is that he lumps every issue into the first one. I love Jon Stewart. His message is nice, and I really wish I could agree with it. If you would've asked me two years ago what I'd think of a speech like this, I would've been on board 100%. I was a bit more moderate back then for one, and I also fell in love with Obama's dreamy rhetoric just like everyone else. I did think the country could come together, and I thought compromise could happen. But that is completely impossible now, and the right is entirely to blame. Their idea of compromise isn't compromise at all, it's "tear up your idea and do what we say." You can't act like a civil person around children and expect them to act civilly back. You know why? Because they're fucking children.

Sunday Youtube Post

Homeless guy plays Ripple for asshole who doesn't know anything about music.

"The hardest thing you can play."

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

In Capitalist America, victim apologizes to you!



The man who stomped on Lauren Valle's head wants Lauren Valle to apologize to him.

"I don't think it's that big of a deal. I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you. She's a professional at what she does, and I think when all the facts come out, I think people will see that she was the one that initiated the whole thing."

Baby, why do you make me hit you?

The reactions from conservatives have been very mixed, but all of it has one thing in common: it was her fault. As one redditer put it, "Tea Partiers were up in arms yesterday when it was suggested the stomper was a Rand Paul supporter. They demanded proof that he supported Paul and wasn't a liberal trying to make the Tea Partiers look bad. Turns out he was not only a Paul supporter, but an employee of the campaign. Oops."

Another responded: Then, once that was proven, they moved on to "Well how do we know she doesnt have a knife in her hand? You cant see it" then once it was proven she didnt have a knife they moved on to "Oh yeah? Well she's been arrested before" and when it was shown that it was because of a non-violent PR stunt with Greenpeace they moved on to "WHY ARE YOU HARASSING A POOR OLD MAN WITH A BAD BACK? APOLOGIZE TO HIM"

Rush Limbaugh called her a "professional agitator," seemingly unaware that this country was founded by professional agitators. He also said "her head was not stomped on, her shoulders were." See? That makes it okay now!

The most sympathy I've seen from the right came from Red State, which is weird, because Red State is psychotic. It starts off sane enough:

Let us begin with what should be obvious and unnecessary to discuss: don’t stomp on anyone’s head. There are no mitigating circumstances to be presented in this article or video. You don’t stomp on a person’s head. Tim Profitt was wrong and should not have resorted to violence. If a police officer subduing a suspect were caught on video doing exactly what Profitt did, that officer would be in hot water. Because you don’t stomp on a person’s head. Head-stomping is not what this article is about.

However, someone sent Red State a video of what happened immediately before Valle's assault. It shows that she actually did make it to Paul's vehicle, and put her sign in his window. That's when she was pulled away. That's all the meat Red State needs.

Again, as the video clearly demonstrates, Valle was there to do more than simply 'hold a sign'..."

Actually no, the video clearly demonstrates that she held a sign.

"As we noted at the beginning of the article, none of that is any excuse, nor even mitigating circumstances, when it comes to Profitt stomping on Valle’s head.

However, what it does demonstrate is that the idea that Valle was the victim of an angry mob who simply “didn’t like her message” is demonstrably false. The idea that Rand Paul’s supporters are a rabid single-minded, conspiratorial crew is also demonstrably false.

So please, condemn head-stomping. Condemn violence. But don’t let the media and the left create a fiction of violent mobs of right-wingers. They’ve been pitching that line since the health care town hall meetings last summer. It has yet to be true.
Well yeah, violence is bad and you shouldn't stomp on peoples' heads and Profitt may have gone overboard BUT LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS LIBRULS



Nobody's arguing that she's not a silly hippie who came to see Paul for an attention-seeking PR stunt. But to focus on that rather than the fact that her fucking head was stomped on is just plain evil. It's so interesting to me watching all these mental gymnastics conservatives have to go through to convince themselves that they're not bad people. They always have to turn it around and make themselves the victims. You know, a lot like an adult who never grew out of the mind of a child.

Interview with Lauren Valle

Keith Olbermann interviewed Lauren Valle, the woman who was assaulted by Rand Paul supporters. As Keith shows, both Paul and the man who stomped on her both seem to imply that it was partially her own fault. Just like with every woman.



And this has nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was pretty neat. Olbermann had someone come on at the end of the show to play a three-hundred year old stradivarius violin once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte. Keith's enthusiasm after it's over makes me giddy.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Republican Party is the party of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, propaganda, and fascism.

We're one week away from the midterm election. Illinois is a tossup, so if you don't vote, you should be ashamed of yourself.




Perhaps with the exception of the years shortly before the Civil War, this is easily the most extreme group of people that have ever ran for Congress. They're motivated, they're angry, and they're brainwashed, and that's a disaster waiting to happen. Sharron Angle and Ken Buck would force you to have your rapist's baby. Or your father's baby. Sharron Angle thinks that if Republicans don't win, we should start shooting Democrats. Stephen Broden believes violent revolution is "on the table" if Democracy doesn't achieve the results he wants. Rich Iott thinks dressing up like a Nazi is all in good fun. The Tea Party is going around suppressing the votes of minorities and the poor. Ken Buck "disagree[s] strongly with the separation of church and state," better known as the first amendment of the Constitution. Last night at a Rand Paul rally, a Moveon.org reporter got thrown to the ground and her head stomped on. She has a concussion.



But hey, who can blame that honest American when the Tea Party is writing propaganda about how liberalism is literally the "antithesis of freedom," and how "we must destroy" it? Click to read it.



Republican ads are exploiting the inherent racism of its supporters.







Isolated incidents stop being isolated incidents when they happen nonstop for a year and a half. I don't know what else we can do. If this is what America wants, and if this is who we vote into office, then we deserve everything that's coming to us. If Americans support a party that ridicules everyone who disagrees with them to the point that they're no longer human, and if they want a party who uses violence and intimidation to accomplish it's goals, then America wants a fascist nation. And honest to god, I wish I was exaggerating, but the 2010 Tea Party is the very definition of fascism.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Juan Williams and all of his supporters are bigots



By now you've heard of the comments NPR contributer Juan Williams made on Fox News. He said this:

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. ...You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. ... But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

When someone begins his sentence with "I'm not a bigot, but...", you know he's probably about say something pretty fucking bigoted. NPR did what any media organization should do when an employee says inflammatory remarks against a minority, and fired Williams. Fox then proceeded to hire him full time, and give him an even bigger salary. So he was actually rewarded for this.

This isn't the first time Williams has said shit like this. Last year, Williams, who is black, said "Michelle Obama, you know. ... She's got this Stokely Carmichael [of the Black Panthers] in a designer dress thing going..." For years, Williams sexually harassed female staffers at the Washington Post. The guy's a fucking asshole.

He said that he was "fired for telling the truth." Awww, poor wittle victim want his bah bah?

"This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims."

First of all, Juan Williams has made it this far in life without realizing that you shouldn't make blanket statements about minorities based on "feelings" or "fears". Think about that for a second. And second, a statement being based solely on "feelings" and "fears" does not exclude it from being bigoted. In fact, that's more than likely going to make it bigoted.

Let's take a look at the "Muslim garb" the highjackers were wearing on 9/11 that has this dumb fuck so riled up.



Look out, I hear they hide their tentacles under those scary turbans!

It scares the living shit out of me that Williams is getting so much support for what he said. What if he said people in Jewish garb make him nervous because he doesn't want his money stolen? Every conservative voice in the media right now is yelling about how Williams' first amendment rights are being trampled, that this is a violation of his freedom of speech, but where the fuck where they when Helen Thomas was fired? Or Rick Sanchez? Or Octavia Nasr, or Easen Jordan, or Phil Donahue, or Bill Maher? The only reason they're defending this guy is because they hate Muslims too.

And what's scarier, now conservatives have found a new witch to hunt. Already, a Republican senator has said he's going to introduce a bill to defund NPR. Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends officially locked his portrait beneath the word "hypocrite" in the dictionary yesterday when he said NPR has “a history of biased and offensive coverage." Gretchen Carlson then accused George Soros of bribing NPR to fire Williams. Steve Doocy chimed in, "Wait a minute. All he was doing was saying what he felt. How can feelings be dangerous to a democracy?" Gee, I don't know, why don't you ask the Weimer Republic? Oh wait, you can't, because the Weimar Republic was destroyed when the Nazi Party rose to power, which did so by using fear and intimidation to manipulate the feelings of an entire nation. I almost forgot.



Let's make a deal: if liberals were forced to spend tax dollars funding an illegitimate war for nearly a decade, conservatives shouldn't have a problem with funding the only real news source in the country. And besides, it's not like the amount they receive is even significant. Only 5.8% of NPR's funding comes from the government. So stop acting like a bunch of fucking children.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Quotations

For the past few years, I've been keeping a Word document saved with a fucking massive list of all the best quotes I've ever come across. Here's a few of my favorites. Okay, it's more like three-fourths of them. Have fun.



"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
-Kurt Vonnegut, fictional gravestone epitaph from Slaughterhouse-Five

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"
-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers."
-Kurt Vonnegut



“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
-Bertrand Russell

“Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”
-Bertrand Russell

“None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.”
-Bertrand Russell



"While I breathe, I hope."
-Cicero



“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”
-Thomas Paine

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
-Thomas Paine



"If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization."
-Robert G. Ingersoll



"Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open."
-Emma Goldman



"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
-Albert Einstein

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
-Albert Einstein



“You see it's awfully hard to talk or write about your own stuff because if it is any good you yourself know about how good it is — but if you say so yourself you feel like a shit.”
-Ernest Hemingway



"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
-Carl Sagan

"Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it."
-Carl Sagan

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
-Carl Sagan



"Three cheers for the flight of thought, three cheers for the perils of life in service to the idea, three cheers for the hardships of battle, three cheers for the festive jubilation of victory, three cheers for the dance in the vortex of the infinite, three cheers for the cresting waves that hide me in the abyss, three cheers for the cresting waves that fling me above the stars!"
-Soren Kierkegaard



"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-George Orwell



“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
-Galileo Galilei



“There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils only exist in its abuses.”
-Andrew Jackson



"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

“I don't like to hear cut, canned, dried sermons. When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act like he was fighting bees.”
-Abraham Lincoln

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."
-Abraham Lincoln



“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own: for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling



“You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.”
-Malcolm X

“When one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings, I say he's a sinner.”
-Malcolm X

“Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
-Malcolm X



"Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways. There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?"
-Joseph Heller, in the mouth of Yossarian in Catch 22



"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian



“Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.



"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."
-Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek



“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche



"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-Eleanor Roosevelt



“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
-Charles Bukowski



"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous; he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-Mark Twain



"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
-Oscar Wilde



"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
-Mohandas Gandhi



"A man is a god in ruins."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson



"Death is nothing to us. When we exist death is not, and when death exists we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, there is neither pleasure or pain. The fear of death arises from the false belief that in death there is awareness."
-Epicurus



"In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along admitted, the design on my part to free the slaves... That (refering to the bible in the court room) teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them."... I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"
-Final statement of radical abolitionist John Brown at his trial



“Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. . . Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!”
-Leon Trotsky



“I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding another smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.”
-Sir Isaac Newton



“I realize that in my downward spiral of hopelessness, I was actually falling into the huge hole created by my absence of basic human graces. Most obvious was forgiveness. If I was wronged by anyone, in or out of the club, I had to be compensated—money or blood. There is no turning the other cheek. When relationships become a ledger of profit and loss, you have no friends, no loved ones, just pluses and minuses. You are absolutely alone.”
-John Teller, Sons of Anarchy



“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
-Edward Murrow



“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
-Plato



"Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back."
-Al Swearengin, Deadwood



"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge



“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte

“Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte



“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”
-Winston Churchill



“When we lack belief in gods, we're free to recognize that we alone fill our world with love and compassion, or fear and violence, and that the solutions to our problems lie in no hands but yours and mine.”
-Youtuber QualiaSoup



“I know we're not saints, or virgins, or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes; we can catch buses and count change. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
-Dylan Thomas



“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
-Robert A. Heinlein



Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-William Ernest Henley