“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
~ Albert Einstein

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  Well, dinosaurs laid eggs.  (Unless you are Sarah Palin, it is pretty accepted that dinosaurs came first.)  The chicken or egg dilemma is really an example of a circular argument of cause and consequence.  Not taken literally, it presents a good example.  Today, we seem to have a psychological problem with identifying cause and consequence.

I saw an advert for American Solutions, and I clicked it.  American Solutions is a tax exempt organization created by Newt Gingrich.  If anyone does not know who Newt Gingrich is, go look it up.  He’s been in the US Government since the end of the 1970s, and is a Tea Party supporting Republican.  He has written several publications.  His latest is To Save America:  Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine.

According to America’s Solutions, we are at “The End of Obama’s ‘Recovery Summer’.“  The entry is pretty concise.  It relabels “Labor Day” as “Unemployment Day.”  It states that the lack of jobs is due to uncertainty to tax increases and healthcare costs.

Several problems arise in this.  I am going to begin in the end, and then go back to the end after I do the beginning in the middle.  Now that I have explained that well, let us continue. . .

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Tags: Albert Einstein, American Solutions, conservative, Economics, Insanity, Jobs, Neoconservatives, New Right, Newt Gingrich, Plutocracy, President Obama, sarah palin, supply-side, supply-side economics, trickle down, unemployment
Category Economics |

First Amendment Solutions

I was reading the Huffington Post this morning.  I usually skip the celebrity gossip stories and most of the pieces on TV shows and entertainment.  There were a few interesting stories to note.  Sharon Angle claims Unemployment Insurance ‘Really Doesn’t Benefit Anyone’.  A puppy saved a boy from a bee swarm.  And Glenn Beck admitted to lying (which is really like reporting that the sun is hot).  I read the entry on how Unemployment Rate Rises In August For First Time In 4 Months As Labor Force Expands.  And then I went to the comments.

Every time there is a story on the Huffington Post about the downturn in the economy, increase in unemployment, a stupid bill, political corruption… any of these types of stories… the comments section is flooded with an immediate deluge of anti-Obama, anti-Democratic comments.  I noticed in an unofficial capacity that this phenomena has been increasing over the past few months.

I can’t help but wonder “why”?  I mean, trolls are trolls.  You cannot avoid trolling on any website.  And I’m sure plenty of right-leaning sites get their fair share of leftist trolls.  I have even seen a troll or two on the racist websites, like Stormfront.  But when the trolls out-number the regular subscribers, what is going on?

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Tags: brown shirts, economy, fascist, first amendment, Glenn Beck, Huffington Post, joblessness, New Right, propaganda, sarah palin, stimulus, Sturmabteilung
Category Neo-Conservative |

Comment To A Racist Right Wingnut:

I may be a masochist. Today I went to Laurence Auster’s website, A View From The Right. I know that I really should know better, but I am just a glutton for punishment. What kept me on the site was his feelings towards Glenn Beck. It seems Mr. Auster could, quite possibly, dislike Glenn Beck more than I do.

Anyway, I was reading his entries, and he had one that was entitled, “Black woman throws acid in face of white woman.”  (Do we italicize online articles or put them in quotes?  I don’t know the protocol.)  I really wanted to respond to his entry, but he only accepts email comments and selectively adds comments at his discretion.  I figured, since he has already tried to dismiss me as a “knee-jerk liberal blogger,” that I would be better suited addressing my concerns here.

So, there’s an article on MSNBC.com about the “Acid attacker,” in which a woman in Oregon had acid thrown on her face.  It was an especially heinous crime because the girl who received the acid was particularly pretty.

Mr. Auster only added this as a preface to the article on his site:

The assailant was a stranger and the attack was unprovoked. MSNBC does not mention the race of the assailant until the last sentence of the article.

When you read the article, this is indeed correct.  The last line of the article states:

Police said the assailant was described as a black woman between 25 and 35, who wore a green shirt and khaki shorts, The Columbian reported. She had medium-length black hair that was pulled back.

[If you are wondering, The Columbian is the newspaper name.  It is not an olive skinned man with an impeccable suit and shoes that sits at the end of the bar with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip and manages to observe, through his Latin mistique, all types of things that other people tend to miss.]

They described her race as part of her physical description.  Where is the problem with this?  Well, my problem with this is simple:  The same people who claim minorities are always “pulling the race card” tend to have the same things to say in these situations.  How can we win?  Do you want us to judge people as individuals, or be predisposed of racial judgments?

Mr. Auster contends that he is not a racist.  He was rather upset that I compared him to Stormfront.  (The Nazi website.)  But, my comment to Mr. Auster is this:

Mr. Auster,
Why are you bothered that MSNBC did not mention the woman’s race until the end of the article and why do you feel the need to headline race in the topic?  Is it not possible that the acid attacker was just a mentally deranged person?  Do you really want a world without preferences to race?  Or do you just want people to stop challenging white preference?

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Tags: America, black, Glenn Beck, Islam, lawrence auster, Muslim, racism, White
Category Racism |

contemporary selective amnesia

I was watching Cradle Will Rock last night.  Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, that is not exactly what I intend to discuss today.  I was thinking about many of the topics of the film and how they relate to contemporary issues.  Some issues are historical and not directly relevant.  Other issues are associative.  But then I started thinking about the period itself.  The movie takes place in the 1930′s.  More specifically, I was thinking about how Lukács describes history and class consciousness in his work titled History and Class Consciousness.

It seems to me that, as a society, we ignore issues that are uncomfortable, or even contradictory, to the way we wish to view society today.  Even more specifically, I’m talking about the House Un-American Activities Committee, Fascism in Europe and the build-up to WWII.  It would be easy to describe the selective amnesia over specific parts in this area of history as reactionary. But I think it really lies deeper than that.

Sure, there is a nostalgia of the past.  Every society suffers from some type of reactionary nostalgia.  When looking at the history of China, you see this occur at the end of each dynastic cycle.  When the empire begins to degrade, everyone recalls the “good ole days” of the “Mighty Empire.”  And there is definitely something to be stated about the all-too-human existential crisis of chasing the past.

What I feel is troubling is the way in which our selective memory of the past is shaped by those in power.  It appears, to me, that there is something to be said for the way the power structure shapes our recall of past events.

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Tags: anti-communist, Bolsheviks, Cold War, communists, Glenn Beck, Hitler, House UnAmerican Activities Commitee, Industrial Revolution, International Workers of the World, Mussolini, Red Scare, Restoring Honor, Revolution, sarah palin, socialists
Category Neo-Conservative |