Tea Party prototypes

15. October 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: blowing off steam · Tags: , ,

Tea Party Prototypes, or TPPs, through the ages.

Neolithic TPP:

  • Basket? No way. I’ve got hands. Keep the change.
  • Horse? Are you crazy? If we were meant to get around on four legs we’d have been born that way. Keep the change.

Bronze age TPP:

  • Stone tools are way better. I can make them myself. Keep the change.

Iron age TPP:

  • Bronze tools were good enough for my grandfather and they’re plenty good for me. Keep the change.
  • If that long-haired preacher and his pack of losers think I’m going to change my religion, they’ve got another think coming. They can keep the change.

Renaissance TPP:

  • The sun goes around the earth. God said so. Galileo, you’re in deep sewage.

Industrial Revolution TPP:

  • I can make those things better by hand. Get that factory out of my town. Keep the change.
  • I am not riding on that infernal machine. I’ve got my own two feet. Keep the change.
Revolutionary TPP:
  • That Patrick Henry is nothing but a wild-eyed community organizer. God Save the King!
  • Our Colonial government is just fine the way it is. God Save the King!
Civil War TPP:
  • States rights!
Mid 19th century TPP:
  • Charles Darwin is crazy. The Bible tells me ALL I need to know, and that settles it.
  • No, women do not need to vote, and anyone who says they do is a harridan. Keep the change.
Gilded Age TPP:
  • The public be damned!
  • Birth control is against the law and that’s that. Keep the change.
2oth century TPP:
  • I’m voting for Hoover!
  • I’m voting for Landon!
  • I’m voting for Willkie!
  • I’m voting for Dewey!
  • There are communists in the State Department and fluoride in the water!
  • Love it or leave it!
  • Nixon’s the One!
  • Whitewater! Travelgate! Impeach!
….yeah, there’s an age old pattern. Keep the change.
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Shout it out

07. September 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , ,

CIMG3244Watching the right-wing screamers on the news makes me sad.  Perhaps it’s because I have a good memory and I’ve seen their like before.

People screaming at and spitting on African Americans who dared to enroll in all-white schools.  People screaming at and spitting on “hippies” or “longhairs” who opposed the war in Vietnam (and despite all the mythology to the contrary, it was more likely an antiwar demonstrator who’d be spat upon than a returning soldier).  The people who were active in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement were advocates for change.  Positive change, in both cases.  The people who wanted the status quo or even a regression to some kind of mythological Golden Age were enraged.

But this kind of fury against progress and change has a long history in the USA.  Many of the people who were early settlers came here so they could maintain their own status quo rather than deal with progress and change in their countries of origin.  There were plenty of people who lived in the American Colonies who wanted no part of those rascally upstarts who wrote that treasonous Declaration of Independence.  The Know-Nothing party had plenty of adherents in the 19th century.  The people who rabidly opposed allowing women to vote spewed plenty of rhetoric across the pages of newspapers, and any internet search will turn up plenty–and the sentiments expressed against giving women the vote are nearly identical to the ones expressed against gay marriage in this century.

And now we have our own generation of militant ignoramuses, who are bound and determined not to allow their children to be anything but militantly ignorant in their turn.

It makes me sad, and it makes me sick.  Yes, the country got past all those other status-quo screamers, and human progress was not stalled forever, but it shouldn’t be that way.

Our children need to know more than we know.  And we can never assert we already know all we need to know.  About anything. There are always facts to be checked and new things to be learned.

At the end of 2007, I wrote a series called “Ten Ways to Take a Stand Against Ignorance.” Little did I know at the time that it would become ever more relevant as the focus on militant ignorance increased. I’m proud of what I wrote then, and I think it’s worth repeating now. Take a look. Tell me what you think.

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Pick one from sentence A…

14. July 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , ,
The Union: blue, yellow, gray; The Confederacy...

Image via Wikipedia

I often frequent forums where political discussions take place (whether that’s the ostensible purpose of the forum or not).  And over the past few years I have noticed something interesting.

It seems that a lot of people espousing the right-wing point of view have a noticeably limited knowledge of American history.  I don’t know whether this is due to lack of education, or an over-reliance on broadcast bloviators, or some other common problem, but as I said, it’s noticeable.

So when someone espousing the right-wing point of view writes a message that demonstrates such a lack, and someone else answers the message politely, with facts that show the shortcomings in the limited, right-wing point of view, more often than not, the original poster responds the same way–instead of dealing with the contents of the reply in their entirety, or even dealing with most of the points that have been raised, the right-winger will seize upon one word, or phrase, and go after that with a chain saw.  Just that one word or phrase, mind you.

I have often thought of reposting the original message with that bogus bone of contention edited out, and when the right-winger ducks the issue again by picking another word or phrase, I’d re-post again with that edited out, and so on and so on and so on till they’ve had to deal with at least one of the real issues.

Alas, that’d take weeks and bore everyone else in the forum to death.

It’s a shame that the right-wing bloviators condition their followers to think that all they have to do is repeat the talking points and everyone around them will agree.  After all, it works that way with the carefully chosen audiences the devotees see or hear.  Pity real-life people who don’t care for right-wing talking points don’t work that way, isn’t it?

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Yo, Dubya! Bail THIS!

29. September 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: blowing off steam · Tags: , ,

Over the years, my position on many social issues (that of someone who does know American and world history) has often been sneered at for being “liberal.”  Of course, the fact that someone would sneer in that Day100, Once a Dorkfashion simply marks that person as uneducated to the extent that he or she accepts without question the liberal-bashing of various media blowhards.  (A thorough education in history is the best antidote for right-wing claptrap.)  It doesn’t bother me.  Thomas Jefferson was a liberal.  Benjamin Franklin was a liberal.  Teddy Roosevelt was a liberal.  Dick Cheney is a conservative.  ’nuff said.

On fiscal matters, however, I line up with the real conservatives, not the neocon poseurs.  The conservatives who are against deficit spending and in favor of zero-based budgeting for all government agencies.  The conservatives who believe that CEOs who mess up should suffer the consequences, in spades.  The conservatives who believe that just because the feeble nobody in the White House got bailed out of every single thing he ever failed at (and that IS everything he ever tried) doesn’t mean he should expect we-the-people to bail him and his cronies out this time.

Jon Stewart played back-to-back clips of Shrub saying “we need to pound Iraq” in 2003 and “we need to bail out these incompetent managers” in 2008.  They’re the same speech.  Today in Congress, according to CNN, Lloyd Doggett from Texas said “Like the Iraq war and patriot act, this bill is fueled by fear and haste.”  He’s right.  Act in haste, repent at leisure!

Hooray for Congress for voting down the bailout.  The deregulated greedheads got their companies into this mess, let them start fixing it by giving up their salaries and perks.  No golden handshake for people who have earned nothing better than a golden shower.

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The ultimate stand against ignorance

31. December 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

You may have noticed a common thread running through this series of messages.  That’s not accidental.  Because I firmly believe that the best way to take a stand against ignorance is very simple.

Read.

Read as though your life depended on it, because in a very real sense, it does.  Read the news in depth.  Find a good history book and read that, because if you know your history you’re immunized against claptrap from all sides of the political spectrum.  Nobody can tell you that this, or that, present-day politician is “the best” or “the worst” in history, if you already know what those 19th-century guys were up to.  Nobody can say, as Pat Buchanan did not so long ago, that 1968 was “the most divisive year in United States history,” and get away with it if his audience knows what happened in 1861.

If you have a library card, use it.  If you don’t have a library card, get one.  Make a resolution to visit the library often, and to ask the librarians what’s good to read.  And once you bring your reading material home, of course, read it.

More than 30 years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called “The Ancient and the Ultimate.”  In it, he presents a carefully-thought-out case for the ultimate multimedia device, which even in the wilds of 1973 was not some exotic electronc gizmo or a product of way-out science-fictional thinking.  It was a safe, familiar object, easily obtainable.

A book.

I can’t possibly summarize Asimov’s reasoning on this, but I think he was right.  And I think anyone who reads that essay will understand why he was right.   The essay was collected in a book called The Tragedy of the Moon, which is a collection of essays on various subjects.  You can find it at any public library.  Or, if you really want to be daring, you can order your own copy from Amazon for as little as 89¢ plus shipping.

The great thing about a book of short essays is that if one doesn’t interest you, you can skip to the next one.  And within that same book are two other essays of an eye-opening nature, having to do with social conventions rather than scientific method.  Once you’ve read “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” then read “By the Numbers” to see what Asimov thought about computers and how he predicted they’d affect our world.  And then “Lost in Non Translation” to get a clearer viewpoint about the biases we all share.

Tomorrow starts a new year.  Resolve to take a stand against ignorance.  Individually and collectively, the future we shape will be better if we do.

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The ultimate question, the ultimate answer

30. December 2007 · 2 comments · Categories: commentary · Tags: , , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

One of the best ways to take a stand against ignorance is at the same time the most difficult. We all believe what we believe, and know what we know. And yet, we become more and more ignorant the longer we stick with the status quo. To take a stand against ignorance, one has to be willing to ask one simple question:

But what if that’s not true?

Think of all the advances human knowledge has made because someone was willing to take what “everybody knows” or “everybody believes” and start asking questions. Where would we be, for example, if Copernicus and Galileo hadn’t considered the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe and hadn’t asked “But what if it that’s not true?” What if doctors had kept thinking that dirty hands were just fine? What if Martin Luther had never looked in the Bible and started thinking about Church doctrine in a whole new way?

Ask the question. Think about the answer. You might just learn something.

And we should likewise ask questions about our own talents and life paths. What may be “true” for us might not be so for our children. We should never force our children into our own mold. Our children have to know more than we know, or human progress stops. What if Bishop Milton Wright had insisted that his sons Wilbur and Orville follow in his footsteps? What if Abraham Lincoln’s parents had made sure their son was also an illiterate hick? What if Benazir Bhutto’s family had forced her into purdah? Think, again, about all the people in the world who achieved something their parents never dreamed of. It may be an apocryphal story, but Leonard Bernstein’s father is supposed to have groused, “How was I supposed to know he’d grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?”

The minute you find yourself thinking that you know all there is, or that what was good enough for your parents is good enough for your children–that’s where ignorance begins. Take a stand. Ask questions. Take a stand against ignorance.

(note: I have disabled comments on this post because for some unknown reason it’s drawn what my daughter would call a cubic ass-load of spam. If you’d like to send me a comment, please use the comment form. Thanks!)

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Who’s pulling your chain?

29. December 2007 · 2 comments · Categories: commentary · Tags: , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

It’s been a really long time since I graduated from high school. My 40th reunion is coming up in 2008. Yes, I’m old. :)

I don’t know if it’s true any more (my kids have been out of high school for years, too) but in those days nearly every high school had a required course in civics. At my school it was called “Modern Problems.” The unfortunate thing about civics classes is that they were almost always taught by coaches, because there just weren’t enough gym classes for coaches to teach, and besides, the administration had to make it look like they weren’t just hiring the guy to coach football.

And thus, since a lot of coaches were marginal at best as teachers (with apologies to Mr. G. who coached wrestling and was a top-notch physics teacher, too) nearly everyone snoozed through the classes and ignored pretty much everything once they’d regurgitated it on a test.

Which, in retrospect, is kind of a shame. Because there really were a few nuggets of valuable information to be had. One of the most important things we studied in civics class was the topic of propaganda techniques.

Of course, in 1967-68, propaganda was something those godless Commies did to “indoctrinate” their hapless masses. We were supposed to be able to see communist doublespeak for what it was. We weren’t asked to analyze what our own “indoctrinators” were spitting out. Which is also a shame. We could have learned a lot by paying attention to the politicians of the day.

In this day and age, one of the most important ways you can take a stand against ignorance is to recognize when you’re being manipulated. The techniques of propaganda are alive and well, even if they’re called “spin doctoring” or some other phrase today. Once you understand the method, it’s a lot more difficult for the spin-meisters to bamboozle you.

A complete discussion of propaganda techniques is beyond the scope of this short essay, but there is an excellent discussion here. Be patient; sometimes the site takes a while to load. Which is a good sign–people are learning what to look for.

Print that list of techniques out and read over it. Then, the next time you hear Warren Windbag, Barton Blowhard, Peter Politician or whoever “bloviating” on a subject, see how many of those propaganda techniques are being used. The more such analyses you do, the more you insulate yourself from claptrap.

This video is par for the course for my high school years, but if you can get past the laugh-out-loud factor, it actually does present propaganda techniques in a format that’s easy to understand. After all, it was being played in civics class.

Edit: Well, apparently the video doesn’t play nice with my theme… gonna have to take my own advice and learn something new today so I can fix that!

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Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching

28. December 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

When you think about it, we learn least when we listen only to those we agree with. Isolating ourselves in such a comfortable, agreeable environment is natural–but if everyone’s in total agreement and nobody’s willing to start asking inconvenient questions, we isolate ourselves more and more from learning and from the expansion of human knowledge.

Begin paying real attention to the commentary of “the other side.” Don’t just dismiss them with the cuss word du jour and assume you’re not interested in hearing what they have to say. If you won’t go directly to the source, whatever information you might have will be secondhand at best, and filtered through someone else’s prejudices. Don’t you want to make up your mind for yourself? How are you going to do that if you won’t go straight to the source and get the facts for yourself?

I suppose it’s futile to say that one way to take a stand against ignorance is to quit listening to “commentators” in the first place. There’s not a one of them, no matter what they might say, who reports without bias. The whole point behind commentary is making pointed comments. And the commentators stay on the air because flocks of people who don’t know any better are sitting there listening and saying “Yeah!”

So, if you’re a fan of Keith Olbermann, give Bill O’Reilly honest equal time (and vice versa). If your favorite newspaper columnists are Rich Lowry, Mona Charen and Thomas Sowell, give equal reading time to Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen. You may well be astonished by what you learn. Years ago, I learned that particular lesson by reading Pat Buchanan’s commentary on the first Gulf War and finding out that he and I were in almost total agreement. If I’d refused to read “the other side,” quite a lesson would have been lost.

There’s a much wider world out there beyond our own little internal “villages” and if we refuse to explore it, we’re no better than ignorant villagers out to do the newcomers in with pitchforks and torches. Take a stand against ignorance–find out for yourself what the other guys are saying.

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Go to the source

27. December 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

One of the most important ways to take a stand against ignorance is to never accept secondhand information. Especially when it comes from someone with an axe to grind, and most especially when it comes from someone with whom we agree.

That seems counterintuitive. But think about it. It’s “the other guy” about whom we are naturally skeptical. If he says something, we say “Prove it.” Our own guy, well, what he says is true, isn’t it? And thus our-own-guy can slip us total hogwash again and again and again, and we never bat an eyelash, never check it out. That’s where ignorance begins.

If your favorite commentator Warren Windbag tells you that his arch-rival Barton Blowhard eats dog food for breakfast, don’t take Warren’s word for it. It’s a certainty that Barton has a web site, and if you take time to check it out, what he actually said was “My girlfriend is on a health food kick, and she gave me this new hippie cereal, and now I know what Dog Chow tastes like.”

If Barton Blowhard says that Warren Windbag buys his underwear at Victoria’s Secret, you can bet Warren’s told a tale about taking his wife on a shopping expedition. Commentators who are opinionated enough, and polarized enough to have polar opposites, are going to be the least reliable sources of information about their arch rivals. And consider–if they’re willing to make stuff up when the other guy’s real story is so easily checked, what might they be handing us out of thin air on other issues of the day?

Skepticism shouldn’t just apply to the claims of people we don’t agree with. We should question the people on our own side just as vigorously. It’s amazing what one can learn by saying “Hey, wait a minute” now and again.

Tomorrow I’ll talk more about the ways we can take a stand against ignorance that is spread by “the media.” (Oh, and here’s a factoid that a lot of people don’t know: “Media” is a plural noun. Media are, not is. And people in “the media” are among the worst offenders when it comes to being grammatically correct.)

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Check it out. Check everything out.

26. December 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: commentary · Tags: , , ,

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

One of the best times to take a stand against ignorance by looking things up, is when we see or hear something that sounds plausible from a reporter, a columnist or a commentator.

The “Mythbusters” guys have a lot of fun with those things that sound oh-so-plausible but turn out to be nothing but hot air. Don’t let them have all the fun. Start busting myths on your own.

If you regularly listen to people holding forth on current events on the radio, for example, listen to what they tell you, write it down, and look it up. Did your main man Warren Windbag just tell you that it’s snowing in Cleveland? Pull up the Weather Channel and take a look. Did he tell you that Phineas T. Politician just won by a landslide? First thing you ask is “What percentage of the voters in his district actually bothered to vote?” If the “landslide” involves about 10% voter turnout, you’re listening to a grand case of what another guy named Warren called “bloviating.”

The main idea here is, as the song once said, to believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Don’t take a commentator’s word for anything. Those people stay on the air by playing to people’s fears and ignorance. If you’re going to take a stand against ignorance, the first thing to do is start being massively skeptical of anything anyone pushes in the name of “entertainment.” There is no better armor against claptrap than the simple fact that you know better.

Don’t make Google searches your primary source of information, either. Anyone can publish anything on the internet, and if enough other people are ignorant enough, guess what turns up high on the page in a Google search? If you’re going to start looking for the truth on the internet, start with The Straight Dope. As their slogan says, they’ve been fighting ignorance since 1973. Take notes as you listen–write down a few so-called “facts” and ask questions.

Another good source for myth-busting is Snopes. This site busts rumors, urban legends, and all that nonsense that shows up in those emails your friends insist on sending you. Before you blindly follow directions to forward some alarmist email to everyone on your list–see if it’s anything even close to the truth.

Make a New Year’s resolution to stop believing everything you hear–especially if it comes from someone you agree with. I’ll discuss this in more detail in an upcoming post.

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