MTheads

A Few Quick Thoughts on the OWS

OWS participants are addicted to outrage; especially to the self-serving, self-righteous kind that assumes their demands should trump everything - tradition, culture, laws, reality.  It's a surplus of self-regard powered by an unrealistic assessment of one's importance married to emotions unchecked by practiced reasoning.  How else to explain the people's mike? Wake up!  You look ridiculous!  And it's incredibly inefficient!

This week it's the bankers and Wall Street, last week it was global warming and the Palestinian right of return.  Remember when it was our illegal war in Iraq before President Obama?  No?  But now student loans are coming due and someone must pay for our current economic woes.  Let's all agree that if Bush was still in office, this would be an Occupy the White House movement instead.  But as your team is in, you chose the bankers instead. 

I understand you were promised so much by so many admirers - parents, teachers, peers, yourself - only to find out you too have to make your way in an unsure world, like the rest of us.  And now you resent the college debts and the lack of prestigious jobs.  You wanted to profit from a system built by others that had so far favored your kind, and when you learned that it wasn't going to be so easy, you blame the system.  And now you demand we change the system to suit you, or else...and there is an "or else".  You have nothing to offer the world but the sturm und drang of your recycled slogans and arrogant demands. 

It's at the end of the you-are-so-special rainbow.  Go get it!

I think we can safely assume this shining star is unfettered with college debt.  She must be protesting some other debt, like of logic or something.

I talked to your parents.  You got the sentiment mixed up.  Guess what (or who) your parents really don't want...

 

 

OWS Truth Placards

Again, two brave souls against the pitiless State machine.  Even the Syrians are with us:

More OWS Truth Placards

For a second there, I thought this was a scene from Syria...so brave.

The People's Smirk - Pass it Down

Somehow I suspect these people aren't missed by those they left at home.  Upside to everything.

Tough Times Must be Relative

I can barely wait until we nationalize our movie industry and I can watch all of her movies for free!

OWS Protest Signs

Why, no, I don't have Photoshop, why?

There Are No Idiots.

I've been chastised for calling Amy Winehouse an idiot.   I'm heartless.  I don't know her.  She had problems.  I'll admit she was pathetic in a forgivable way, mainly due to how much I've enjoyed her music.  And perhaps she wasn't properly succored by those around her.  Regardless, I wouldn't put her on any list of clever people in any category.

If she was not an idiot, what was she, I ask?  Depressed, addicted, and exploited.  I don't think the dead famous can be anything else.  Why do we excuse famous people for their actions?  Are they so different from the rest of us?  Apparently, yes.  According to a celebrity psychologist often on TV, studies suggest that people who seek fame are different from the rest of us and more likely to be the sorts of people who do dumb stuff.   A rather paradoxical statement.

So, in order to have a heart, I have to hold celebrities to lower standards than I hold cashiers, bus drivers, pilots, and pretty much everyone else.   Idiots are only people who annoy us and are not famous.  Your non-famous neighbor who drinks too much and leaves beer bottles all over the yard, he's an idiot.  No reason to cut him some slack because he has trouble saying no to yet another beer.  The plain jane who gets piercings and skips school to take drugs -- she's an idiot rather than a girl having trouble dealing with her banal middle-class existence.  The bitter woman at the counter who gives us a hassle at the end of a long line at the airport -- idiot.  We're certainly not going to consider she's been suffering from low grade depression since she was a teenager and forgive her her rudeness.  Nope, idiots all the way through.

I'd like to see the people who think I'm callous for calling Amy Winehouse an idiot apply their sanctimonious standards to all the annoying and idiotic non-famous people they come across.  Perhaps there are no idiots at all, only the misunderstood.  Instead of the finger, give that idiot who cuts you in line a hug next time.  He needs it.  He's just more fragile than the rest of us waiting our turns.

 

I'll Clean My Room After We've Eliminated Third World Poverty.

I like to read the comments on articles in the NYTs.  And I've noticed a good number of the commentators like to use a particularly dopey argument.  It has to do with: until A happens, B doesn't exist for me. 

No subject, be it ticks on dogs to John Edwards to the perfect cocktail, can be debated without making reference to Bush's two illegal wars.  Nothing anyone does can be deemed inappropriate or illegal until we have prosecuted Bush's (no one bothers with the "President" title) two illegal wars.  We can't go after lying cheating idiotic democrat politicians until we've gone after the greedy bankers who destroyed our economy on Bush's watch who started two illegal wars. 

Republican politicians, however, are still fair game because family values are one of their issues.  Strange this using of different sets of standards by which to judge people.  It certainly makes it easier to defend one's positions.  Maybe the greedy bankers were only using a different set of standards, too.  One which favored them.  Who are we to judge?

There are idiots out there who still defend John Edwards.  They think he's being persecuted for caring too much for the little guy.  You are a little guy mentally if you think he cares one tiny bit about you.  These are the same people who think President Obama can heal with a glance.  I've read again and again people who write that they trust President Obama to always make the right choice.  No need for that part of the brain which weighs facts and makes judgements.  They can fill that flabby area instead with pro-union slogans. 

This A first, then B is the same argument used by opponents of school reform.  They argue we need to first fix our broken society before we can fix our schools. Pol Pot made a similar argument. I'll take stabs at reforming our schools within our current system of justice over their idea of perfect social justice any day.  Fewer dead people. 

Now for some entertainment!

Teachers For Justice  a scary site more concerned with Honduras and LGBTQIA/Queer issues in education than with providing a good education to poor children.  You can bet these people like a good drum circle.  

Rethinking Schools  Another favorite "social justice on the backs of brown children" site of mine.   Get some popcorn.  The site is that entertaining.  Teaching Budget Cuts to Third Graders is an actual article in the latest issue. I wanted to mock the article, but I couldn't.  It is a mockery already.  Please, think about reading it and being changed for the better. 

Was It Legal?

Some people are asking whether the killing of Osama bin Laden was legal.  It gets me to thinking, legal by whose laws?  Ours?  Pakistan's?  The International Community's?  God's?  The Universe's? 

We certainly have political reasons to call our actions legal.  We want to have right on our side.  We want to justify our actions to ourselves and to the world and say, "Look, everything we did was perfectly legal.  It's right here in this giant document.  No, keep turning.  Page 13563.  Never mind."

The question of legality is not the correct one.  The question should be, Was it justified?  We can write it up as legal later if we determine what we did was justified.   Without considering Justice, laws are a sterile set of rules followed for no other reason than following them is considered good.  Without considering Justice, our question on the legality of killing Osama Bin Laden becomes only a question of did we file the proper paperwork.

Was it legal implies the law trumps everything.

But laws are only codes written and enforced by people to impose certain standards.  Laws are not in and of themselves "good."  They can impose an objective measure for behavior and provide equal justice -- certainly good.  But they can also be used to dispossess people of their property and lives as happened under Nazism.

A nation's number one reason for existing is to promote and to maintain its particular way of life as determined by any number of factors.  In our case, by our particular history and by our citizens.  If our nation is worth anything, it is worth defending.

A legal system that does not allow us to defend ourselves is fatally flawed.  Our president and government are given the responsibility to defend our nation.  We are within our rights to do this in whatever way we can justify within our particular American moral philosophy.  Without this acknowledgment that we have the right to act unilaterally in our best interests, we give our destiny over to others. 

So, was it legal?  In the sense that our country has the right to act in its own self-interest, yes.  Was it justified?  That is the harder question, and the correct one.

Some people think there is something more important to defend than our sovereignty.  What that something is explains the question, "Was it legal?"

 

Wanted: First Rank Conspiracy Theorists

Since those nutty, wonderful, sublime Truthers, nobody has a good conspiracy.  Dang, I love myself a good conspiracy. 

The implications of Obama being born in Kenya and then smuggled into Hawaii are underwhelming.  No corporate killings, no assassination plots, no world domination.  Just a woman with incredible foresight.  Who in their right mind would bother themselves with this theory??  

Before the other side congratulates themselves on their incredible reasonableness, let's remember the equally fatuous conspiracy concerning Sarah Palin's son.  A bunch of idiots are convinced that Sarah Palin did not give birth to Trig.  At first, I thought Andrew Sullivan's McCarthyish screeds demanding to see the birth certificate before the last election was brilliant performance art.  Unfortunately, no.

More important than accepting the obvious because the other alternatives require a suspension of thinking, we take Palin's word for it because the implications that arise from a cover-up are too dull for a good movie.  Same goes for the movie about two-week-old Obama's wild flight from Kenya to preserve his chances for becoming President.  Maybe he and his mother have to run to make a connecting flight. Do they make it?

President Obama was born in Hawaii and Sarah Palin is Trig's mother.  To doubt either is wishful thinking that the people we don't like are somehow illegitimate.  Get hobbies.