Do people not even read anything about history anymore? It seems that as a nation we have become so ignorant of our past that we seem justified in making shit up. Yesterday a ranking Pentagon officer said that Martin Luther King Jr. would approve of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Exsqueeze me?
Martin Luther King Jr. was an adamant peace-nik. He could have called for armed uprising but he never did, marching peacefully and changing the minds of people across the planet. He vocally opposed the war in Vietnam. He came under the ire of J. Edger Hoover for that very reason. He gave a passionate speech in 1967 about it that you can hear here. Hell, I was not quite 3 years old when he gave the speech and I remember it.
But this is just the latest example in people being intentionally stupid. Republicants of all stripes hold up Ronald Reagan as their hero and benchmark without understanding that he undertook the biggest tax increase in the last 30 years. They tear down working segregated schools in the Carolinas without understand the lengthy battles that lead to these schools being models for the nation in what still works in our education system. They're telling school boards in Tennessee that nothing that could ever paint our founding fathers in a bad light should be taught.
They're saying that Jesus rode into Bethlehem on the back of a dinosaur. They criticize the Obama administration for policies that they praised under Bush II. They want to get rid of any foreign influences on our legal system without realizing that our legal system was founded by taking the best of other people's systems and integrating it into something new - including Papal, Sharia, and other legal systems.
Hell, they still think Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
They use phrasing like blood-libel and pogrom without understanding the context or the offensiveness of the terms.
I fail to understand and will never understand the idea of willful stupidity. You can never make the facts fit into something that they're not without turning yourself into a liar, so what these people are doing is misunderstanding the facts in order to fit their world-view. Hey, if you're comfortable with that I'm cool but don't inflict it on the rest of us.
Somewhere along the line it became accepted practice to misunderstand reality in order to fit one's worldview. You see it every day on every program run on Faux news. Almost every Rebuplicant talking point boils down to willful ignorance of either the facts or the history of a situation. Perhaps that's what makes me so mad when I deal with these people. Ignorance is understandable - it happens to us all. Willful ignorance is stupid.
Inflicting it upon others is criminal.
Cheap shots (get your drink on):
Gun insurance? This is fucking brilliant.
Child Labor? What the FUCK is wrong with you?
Wasn't there a movie a few years back where a politician was screaming "where is my fucking honeymoon!" ?
Have you ever been to an Irish wake? Although there was no swearing, you should have one for this item anyway. It's what we do at Irish wakes.
Heavens to Mergatroid! He went voluntarily!
Yeah, they're going to cry foul, but he was there and the pundits weren't. He gets to call it as he sees it.
If you don’t' think the banks are a good part of the housing problem, then maybe you need to read this. It seems to me that the arguments in favor of squatters gets stronger every day.
And because I love you, Porno for Pyros (2 drinks):
The problem with the gun insurance idea is that if the shooting is an accident, chances are its already covered under homeowners insurance. If the shooting is intentional (even if you got the wrong person shot), there's not a policy in existence that provides coverage for intentional type acts. So what would gun insurance cover that's not already covered and/or not going to be covered?
ReplyDeleteI still say ban auto/semi-auto weapons and their magazines/bullets. One's right to have the ability to kill 30 people in seconds does not outweigh the right of those 30 people to live. Isn't being able to kill 6 people in a minute before you have to reload good enough?